About Me

​Alexandra Cenatus serves as the Director of Programs at Maryland Humanities, where she works to make the humanities accessible and engaging. At Maryland Humanities, Cenatus creates community-centered programs through multifaceted strategies: sparking imagination to envision what's possible, centering community voices to honor lived experiences and wisdom, fostering engagement to meet communities where they are, and rethinking and reshaping what community programming can be. She was named one of the Maryland Daily Record's 2025 Leading Women Under 40 because of this work. This year, in partnership with MD250, she designed the Civics Moonshot program, which brings young Marylanders into the story of this state. She is also a Ph.D. student at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Her doctoral research explores how Haiti's social transformation affects culinary traditions and eating practices within Haitian communities. She recently published an article entitled The Cultivation of Haitian Diasporic Consciousness in the United States in État des lieux des migrations haïtiennes, a collective edition that focuses on Haitian migration under the direction of Dr. Sabine Lamour and Dr. Alfred Pierre. In 2023, she authored a toolkit for WeaveTales equipping organizations or companies with actionable frameworks to foster engagement and belonging for their immigrants or refugees employees. In 2021, she published the Haitian American Dream Timeline, a digital humanities initiative that chronicles the historical trajectory of Haitian immigration to the United States, alongside collaborators Margarita Vargas-Betancourt and Ivanna Moreno. Cenatus extends her research and programming expertise through service on the Maryland 250 Commission, the Baltimore 250 Commission, Create Baltimore, and as a board member of the Haitian Studies Association..​