Keynote Speakers
Bloomberg Public Innovation Fellow
Carol Coletta
Opening Keynote
April 22, 2025
9:30 am
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.
Founder, Tiger Management Consulting Group
Juanita Hardy
Keynote Speaker
The Value Proposition: Effective Artist and Developer Collaborations
April 22, 2025
11:00 am
Juanita Hardy has a passion for fostering healthy, thriving, and equitable places to live, work, learn and play through her work with individuals and businesses. In 2006, she founded Tiger Management Consulting Group LLC, an executive coaching and business consulting services firm, following a 31-year career with IBM. Hardy has over 45 years of business experience,
including over a decade in the real estate industry, and over 35 years in the arts as a nonprofit leader, trustee, and patron of the arts.
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From 2016, Hardy served as Senior Visiting Fellow for Creative Placemaking for Urban Land Institute. In this role, she provided research and guidance to real estate professionals on leveraging creative placemaking on real estate development projects to grow project value and enhance social and economic benefits. Ms. Hardy is a member of ULI and serves as a vice-chair of its Placemaking Council.
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Tiger Management’s client portfolio comprises for profit and non-profit organizations, including Right Management, a global human capital development firm, where, since 2006, she is an executive coach for mid-career and senior business professionals. Hardy was the Executive Director of CulturalDC (2013-2015), a Washington, DC based nonprofit that provided space for artists and creative placemaking services for real estate developers. Hardy held leadership positions with IBM, helping to transform the businesses of IBM Fortune 500 clients, spanning IBM’s software development, systems engineering, and management consulting lines of business, until her retirement in 2005.
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Hardy was recognized as a Minority Business Leader by the Washington Business Journal in 2010 and an art advocate and collector by The Phillips Collection in 2022. She is an accomplished author and global public speaker – in the US, Europe and Asia Pacific. Her articles and essays have appeared in magazines and journals in the US and abroad, more recently, eight
articles on creative placemaking for Urban Land Magazine (2016-2025), two ULI Publications (2020 and 2022), and a 2023 essay for Volume 3 of The Place Economy published by Hoyne Communications based in Australia.