Stellene Volandes ’93: Human of New York City
tellene Volandes ’93 always knew she was meant to have a life and career in the Big Apple: “Growing up, I went to the theater all the time and loved to go shopping in Manhattan. For my sixth birthday, I famously asked my parents for tickets to Evita on Broadway. From early on, I had my eyes on New York City.” Indeed, Volandes, who was raised in a tight-knit Greek family in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, spent a large part of her time at Vassar on the early-morning Metro North train to New York City, traveling to one of the many internships she completed during her time as a student there—including stints at Ralph Lauren Home, Hermès, New York Magazine, and Elle Decor.
This early experience clearly served her well. In February 2025, she came full circle and was named Editorial and Brand Director of Elle Decor. This, along with her role, since 2016, as Editor in Chief of Town & Country, where she has been credited with bringing new life and younger readers to the 179-year-old magazine.
Volandes is still passionate about theater—she is now on the board of Lincoln Center Theater—but after one drama class at Vassar, she says, “I knew I wasn’t destined for a life onstage.” Instead, two professors in the English Department, Patricia Wallace and Mark Amodio, stoked an already existing passion for English literature.
“I’d always loved reading and writing, and they were such dynamic teachers,” says Volandes. “I loved the way they connected whatever we were reading with so many elements of culture beyond what was on the page. Learning how to make those connections has had a huge impact on me and my career. In my job as an editor, I find it’s where I use my Vassar education the most. To do my job well, it’s important to be able to find the broader connections in a story so that it really reverberates with readers. Vassar nurtures that kind of broad thinking.”
No surprise, then, that her first job out of college was as an editorial assistant at Vogue. “I got a foot in the door at Condé Nast because a Vassar alum [Sarah Slavin ’59] worked in human resources there.” Volandes stayed at the magazine for nearly three years before leaving to get a master’s in English and comparative literature at Columbia University. “After that, I taught English at LaGuardia High School in New York City, but as much as I loved it, I decided it wasn’t what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.” So when her former boss at Vogue, Richard David Story, offered her a job as an associate editor at Departures magazine, Volandes pivoted back into print journalism.
She stayed at Departures for nearly a decade, getting what she considers to be her magazine education. “I did a bit of everything. I loved learning to make magazines and figuring out how to pitch a story, not just to my colleagues but to readers who think they are not interested in a subject. My goal is to get them to care about it.”
This skill is even more important now, when print journalism and magazines are competing with everything on people’s screens. “When it comes to what I do, I don’t think of print versus digital,” says Volandes. “For me, the challenge of media right now is how to do everything, whether print, digital, or social. That can be difficult in terms of bandwidth and staffing. But the truth is, a good story is a good story is a good story, whether it’s in print or on your phone. Whatever the platform, you have to make sure that you’re positioning the story so that someone wants to read it. That’s the most fundamental part of the job.”
Volandes’s nose for a good story is part of why she has made her way to the very top of the masthead, while still finding time to write two books on jewelry published by Rizzoli, with a third book idea still germinating. All this is coupled with her still newish directorship at Elle Decor and nights at the theater, at restaurants, and with friends—the active social and cultural life of New York City that was in her dreams. “I love what I do so much that balancing it all comes quite naturally to me,” says Volandes. “That’s where the drive comes from. I’m incredibly lucky and eternally grateful to have made a career doing something I love that encompasses all the things I love. I chose a profession where I’d be around like-minded people, much the same way I chose Vassar. My time there really set up so much of what my life is about now.”