She directed a feature film about a nurse who spent years arguing with doctors. She chairs the board that runs a Maryland village. Her husband stopped running the Federal Reserve in May.
Elissa Leonard sat in the audience at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston on 31 May, holding up a camera, while Caroline Kennedy presented her husband with the Profile in Courage Award. Jerome Powell had left the chairmanship of the Federal Reserve nine days earlier.
Leonard is a film producer and director. She directed, produced and co-wrote Sally Pacholok, a 2015 feature about an emergency room nurse, and won two New York Emmy awards earlier in her career for a public television science series. Since 2013 she has served on the board that governs Chevy Chase Village in Maryland, and she chairs it now.
She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard in 1979 with a joint degree in visual and environmental studies and government. Her date of birth has never appeared in a record that can be checked, though the graduation year puts her in her late sixties. By the mid-1980s she was producing and writing for Innovation, a weekly science series that WNET in New York made for PBS. The two Emmys came out of that work. She also wrote and produced for Powerhouse, a series from the Educational Film Center.
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Married at the cathedral, 1985
She married Jerome Hayden Powell on 14 September 1985, in the Bethlehem Chapel at Washington National Cathedral. A Unitarian minister, the Rev Arthur Jellis, took the service, assisted by the groom’s uncle, the Rev Ralph Austin Powell, a Catholic priest. Powell’s sister Patricia was matron of honour. His brother Matthew was best man.
Powell was 32 and an associate at Dillon, Read and Company in New York. Leonard’s father, George Hill Leonard, was a writer who had retired as a heart disease control administrator at the Public Health Service. The family lived in Rockville, Maryland.
The New York Times ran the announcement the following morning and recorded that the bride would keep her name professionally. Every credit she has taken since reads Elissa Leonard. Most accounts online date the wedding to the 15th, which is the day the notice was published rather than the day it happened. The couple reach 41 years in September.
A film about a missed diagnosis
Sally Pacholok is the work she is most associated with. It follows an emergency room nurse of the same name who spent years pressing doctors about vitamin B12 deficiency, which the film argues was going undetected in patients who were then treated for dementia. Annet Mahendru, from the FX series The Americans, played the lead. The real Sally Pacholok appears in the film as an extra.
Speaking to the film site LRM Online before the premiere, Leonard described interviewing doctors who had watched elderly patients improve once the deficiency was treated. The film took best feature at the DC Independent Film Festival. The Washington culture site Brightest Young Things was less impressed and wrote that the direction was flat for a first feature.
The books on B12 deficiency that surface under her name in search results are not hers. The nurse wrote those.
What she has produced
| Year | Title | Role |
|---|---|---|
| 2015 | Sally Pacholok | Director, producer, co-writer |
| 2018 | Ladies in Black | Executive producer |
| In development | Sadie Q | Producer |
On Ladies in Black, Bruce Beresford’s adaptation of the Madeleine St John novel, she was one of around ten executive producers on a film Sony distributed. Sadie Q is listed in development with Patrick Prentice, who co-wrote Sally Pacholok with her.
Several film databases, and Google’s own information panel, credit her as a producer on the 2025 documentary Monk in Pieces. She had no part in it. Billy Shebar, David C. Roberts and Susan Margolin made that film, and the credit belongs to a different woman with the same name.
The dog park vote
Her other public role is local and unglamorous. She joined the Board of Managers of Chevy Chase Village in 2013 and now chairs it, which in 2019 meant presiding over an argument about dogs.
The village had spent $134,000 turning a plot on Brookville Road into a fenced run where dogs could go off the lead. Neighbours complained about the barking. The village put up signs asking owners to keep their animals quiet, then paid $1,300 for a professional assessment of how the dogs were behaving in the space. Bethesda Magazine followed the meetings through that summer and autumn.
Supporters turned up in white caps printed with “Sit. Stay. Save the Chevy Chase Dog Park.” More than a hundred residents were in the room when the board voted five to two to close it. Some of them booed.
She also sits on the boards of Levine Music and the Chevy Chase Historical Society, and is a trustee of the Washington Drama Society.
After the Fed
Powell’s term as chair ended on 22 May 2026, when Kevin Warsh was sworn in as his successor. He remains on the Board of Governors, where his own term runs to 2028.
He says little in public about the marriage. In a conversation with David Rubenstein in July 2024 he named their three children, Sam, Lucy and Susie, and mentioned three grandsons, the eldest of them three years old at the time.
What she posts
Leonard has had an account on X since November 2008. It goes quiet for months. The bio still describes Sally Pacholok in the present tense, a “feisty nurse” taking on the medical establishment over a misdiagnosis she uncovers.
What she puts on it is almost entirely other people’s medical research, most of it on the same deficiency the film was about. Late last October she shared a study on infants born deficient because their mothers were. Two days later, a case report on an elderly woman who had been treated for the wrong illness entirely.
She has just over 400 followers.
