Rachel Graham

52, CEO, Baltimore Office of Promotion & The Arts

Her job demands both a passion for the arts and a love of analytics, a mix that taxed her recent forebears. As the new CEO of the Baltimore Office of Promotion & the Arts, Rachel Graham moves easily in both worlds.

“I am the intersection of creativity and intellectualism,” Graham said. Equal parts aesthete and Mr. Spock, she took over BOPA last spring in an effort, in part, to end lingering squabbles between it and city officials. A cultural maven as well as a professed “policy wonk,” Graham says her goal is to expand economic development via the arts and restore public trust in the 40-year agency, which produces such events as the Baltimore Book Festival, Artscape, the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Parade and the Baltimore Farmers’ Market.

Within two years, Graham said, “I want us to have moved past the point where every conversation about BOPA dredges up what BOPA was so that we can celebrate what BOPA is. I want us to be able to say that, as arts council for the city, we can use that leverage to attract visitors who come and invest in the city — and that we’ve forged partnerships to help Baltimore achieve the greatness that it is destined to achieve.”

— Mike Klingaman