About Me

Alexandra Cenatus serves as the Acting Chief Executive Officer of Maryland Humanities, where she leads the organization's mission to make the humanities accessible and engaging for all Marylanders. Before stepping into this role, she served as Director of Programs for more than four years, creating 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 what community programming can be. This work earned her recognition as one of The Daily Record's 2025 Leading Women Under 40, and in 2026 she received the Professional Achievement Award from the Association of Haitian Professionals. In partnership with MD250, she designed the Civics Moonshot, a statewide initiative that brings young Marylanders into the story of their state.

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Cenatus is also a Ph.D. student at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, where her doctoral research explores how Haiti's social transformation affects culinary traditions and eating practices within Haitian communities. She recently published "The Cultivation of Haitian Diasporic Consciousness in the United States" in État des lieux des migrations haïtiennes, a collective volume on Haitian migration edited by Dr. Sabine Lamour and Dr. Alfred Pierre. In 2023, she authored a toolkit for WeaveTales that equips organizations with actionable frameworks to foster engagement and belonging among immigrant and refugee employees. In 2021, she published the Haitian American Dream Timeline, a digital humanities initiative chronicling the history of Haitian immigration to the United States, with collaborators Margarita Vargas-Betancourt and Ivanna Moreno.

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Cenatus extends her research and leadership through service on the Maryland 250 Commission, the Baltimore 250 Commission, and Create Baltimore.