Carol Coletta has spent a lifetime championing public life, the joy it creates and the community it forges. She is a Bloomberg Public Innovation Fellow with the Bloomberg Center for Public Innovation at Johns Hopkins University where she is exploring how public space can foster social connections to achieve more opportunity-rich and unified communities.

This year, she was awarded the Urban Land Institute Prize for Visionaries in Urban Development.  In 2024, she received the LaGasse Medal by the American Society of Landscape Architects for her work on Tom Lee Park while she led Memphis River Parks Partnership.  The park has won numerous national and international awards including World Urban Parks 2025 International Large Urban Park Award Honor Award, Urban Design; 2025 Urban Land Institute Americas Awards for Excellence Winner; and 2025 AIA New York Design Award.

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Ms. Coletta is co-hosting a new podcast, “Closer,” a show about the strategies that make cities social – and why that’s the smartest investment in the urban toolkit.

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She served in senior leadership roles at Kresge Foundation, Knight Foundation, the Mayors’ Institute on City Design.  She also led CEOs for Cities and the start-up of ArtPlace.  Coletta was named one of the top 100 urbanists, past and present, by Planetizen in 2017 and 2023.  As host and producer of the syndicated public radio show, “Smart City,” she interviewed more than a thousand urban experts.