Carol Coletta

Carol Coletta has spent a lifetime championing public life, the joy it creates and the community it forges. She is a Bloomberg Fellow with the Bloomberg Center for Public Innovation at Johns Hopkins University where she is exploring how public space can foster cross-class connections to achieve a more opportunity-rich and unified community. Most recently, she was President and CEO of Memphis River Parks Partnership, a public-private partnership responsible for five miles of public property on the Mississippi River. She led the development of a new riverfront concept plan with extensive public engagement, the renaming and redesign of two parks with former confederate associations, and the design and construction of Tom Lee Park, winning international acclaim for its designers Studio Gang and SCAPE and much local love after overcoming opposition by a vocal minority arguing the site should be left unchanged for a 7-day annual festival. She was a Senior Fellow at Kresge Foundation where she led the foundation's investment in Reimagining the Civic Commons, a multi-funder, national effort to demonstrate that transformative public spaces can connect people of all backgrounds, cultivate trust, create more resilient communities, and generate greater value in neighborhoods nearby. She served as vice president of Community and National Initiatives for the Knight Foundation; led the start-up of ArtPlace to accelerate creative placemaking through the U.S.; was president/CEO of CEOs for Cities, a national network of urban leaders; and led the Mayors' Institute on City Design, a collaboration of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, National Endowment for the Arts, and American Architectural Foundation. As host and producer of the public radio show, “Smart City,” she interviewed more than 900 urban experts. While at Knight and Kresge, she became an early podcaster with her show, “Talking about Cities.”

In 2024, she was awarded the LaGasse Medal by the American Society of Landscape Architects for her work on Tom Lee Park. Coletta was named one of the top 100 urbanists, past and present, by Planetizen in 2017 and 2023. She was one of only 21 women on the web site’s most recent list of 100.

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