Congratulations to our 2026 Hero of the Year — Marian Liou!
Marian Liou is a founder, community advocate, and attorney who specializes in supporting diverse communities through arts and culture, urban planning, and community engagement. Her cross-sector experience brings together community members and community-based organizations with artists, cultural workers, advocates and activists, planners, local government, and other partners to nurture and sustain communities that are inclusive, just, and whole.
As the founder and executive director of We Love BuHi (Buford Highway), Marian established efforts to preserve and strengthen Buford Highway’s multicultural immigrant communities in metro Atlanta through storytelling, cultural preservation, and design.
Marian then led the arts and culture program at the Atlanta Regional Commission (ARC), metro Atlanta’s regional planning agency. At ARC, she guided the transformation of the agency’s community engagement practices and initiated an arts and culture-led, cross-sector approach to planning by centering artists and cultural workers as co-designers of social change.
As the Director of Arts and Culture at Smart Growth America, Marian leads the organization’s broad efforts to support communities, particularly those that have been most harmed by infrastructure systems, in integrating arts and culture in equitable development and planning. In connection with this work, along with several collaborators, she is interested in nurturing a national network of emerging suburban Asian American Pacific Islander leaders to advance collective thriving through cultural organizing and power-building.
Marian is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Hambidge Center for Creative Arts and Sciences and has served previously on the boards of Canopy Atlanta and Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Atlanta.
Marian is a graduate of Stanford University and Columbia University School of Law.
Read Marian’s recent piece on Substack to learn about supporting preservation in suburban Asian American communities.
Check out each individual Heroes of the Quarter here and nominate someone in your community!
Congratulations to our 2025 Hero of the Year, Hanna Stark!
Hanna Stark is the Director of Policy and Communications at the Preservation Alliance for Greater Philadelphia, where she advocates for policies that protect historic spaces while encouraging sustainable development. Hanna enjoys translating complex preservation policy initiatives into accessible and actionable advocacy strategies at the federal, state, and local levels.
Congratulations to our 2024 Hero of the Year, Joseph Quinata!
Congratulations to our 2023 Hero of the Year, Meghan Elliott!
Meghan Elliott has dedicated her career to historic building redevelopment. In 2011, she founded New History, a Minneapolis-based consulting practice that works to make historic sites and buildings socially, physically, and financially relevant and viable. Nearly 300 projects later, Meghan has become a resource and leading advocate for building reuse across Minnesota. Meghan co-founded RevitalizeMN in 2020 to advocate for the extension of Minnesota’s State Historic Tax Credit and continues in that work. But Meghan’s real distinction in 2022 was the successful completion of one of Minnesota’s most challenging redevelopment projects, and her first as a developer: the long-vacant historic St. Louis County Jail in Duluth. The building, renamed and reimagined as ‘Leijona’, has revitalized downtown Duluth’s historic civic district, restored one of the true architectural landmarks of Greater Minnesota, and created 33 units of mixed-income housing where there once were 99 detention cells.