Bio

Mary Anne Piacentini, President and CEO, Coastal Prairie Conservancy, is responsible for coordinating the Conservancy’s land protection programs and conservation assistance to private landowners, establishing community partnerships and relationships with diverse stakeholders, and overseeing the operations and programs of the agency. She currently serves as Vice Chairman of the Board of the Partnership for Gulf Coast Land Conservation, on the steering Committee of the Coalition for Environmental, Equity, and Resilience, and as an at-large member of the Harris County Community Flood Resilience Task Force. In 2018 she was awarded the Flo Hannah Prairie Career Achievement Excellence Award from the Coastal Prairie Partnership and Native Prairies Association of Texas as well as the Bayou Preservation Association’s Terry Hershey Bayou Stewardship Award. She received the AIA Houston’s Civic Vision Award in 2016 and was one of inaugural winners of Audubon Texas’s Terry Hershey Texas Women in Conservation award in 2014. Previous employment included the directorships of Friends of Herman Park, The Massachusetts Cultural Council, and the Cultural Arts Council of Houston. She also served as Senior Policy Planner for the City of Houston's Office of the Mayor, Community Development Division. She received a Master of City Planning from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design and a Bachelor of Arts in political science from the University of New Hampshire. Ms. Piacentini lives in Houston with her husband, Drexel Turner, an adjunct associate professor of architecture at the University of Houston's College of Architecture. They have three children.