Mary Anne Piacentini, President and CEO, Coastal Prairie Conservancy oversees the operations and programs of the agency, is its chief spokesperson, establishes community partnerships and relationships with stakeholders, interfaces with elected and appointed officials, and develops and maintains relationships with outside groups and individuals whose interests and activities align with or affect the agency’s operations and programs.  
She currently serves as Immediate Past Chair of the Board of Directors of the Partnership for Gulf Coast Land Conservation; is co-lead of the Nature and Nature-based Solutions Communications Campaign, founder and coordinator of the Houston Conservation Action Network, and is a member of the Harris County Community Flood Resilience Task Force and the Coalition for Environment, Equity, and Resilience. She is member of Land Trust Alliance Leadership Council and serves on its Energy and Climate Working Group and its Federal Funding Working Group. 
In 2024 she was awarded the Wild Partner Award from Houston, Wilderness. In 2018 she received the Flo Hannah Prairie Career Achievement Excellence Award from the Coastal Prairie Partnership and Native Prairies Association of Texas as well as the Bayou Preservation Association’s Terry Hershey Bayou Stewardship Award. She received the AIA Houston’s Civic Vision Award in 2016 and was one of inaugural winners of Audubon Texas’s Terry Hershey Texas Women in Conservation award in 2014.  In 2005, she received the Army and Sarah Emmott Conservation Award from the Citizens' Environmental Coalition.  
She received a Master of City Planning from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design and a Bachelor of Arts in political science from the University of New Hampshire.