Baker Artist Portfolios

Marian April Glebes is an artist, researcher, and preservation planner based in the historic Jones Falls River Valley of Baltimore, MD. She received her BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in 2004, her MFA from University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC) in 2009, and her MCP in City and Regional Planning and MSHP in Historic Preservation from the University of Pennsylvania’s Weitzman School of Design in 2024.  For her research at UPenn, Glebes was the innaugural recepient of the Aaron Wunch Award for Public History of the Built Environment (2025) and contributed to Yonderlands with Billy Flemming at the McHarg Center for Urbanism and Ecology (2021-2022). She was the innaugural Artist-in-Residence at the Baltimore Museum of Art Joseph Center for Education (2015-2016), and a three time National Endowment for the Arts Our Town Creative Placemaking awardee for her collaborative work in the public realm (2011, 2016, 2018). In the last decade, Glebes has taught part-time at the Maryland Institute College of Art’s General Fine Arts Department, provided technical assistance and policy solutions to artists, architects, and property owners on artist run spaces through her work at the Baltimore Arts Realty Corporation and the Neighborhood Design Center, and contributed to research and design for heritage preservation projects as part of the Preservation Planning team at Quinn Evans, AIA’s 2024 Firm of the Year. She is currently working as a cultural and preservation planning consultant, serving as Chair of the Lower Jones Falls River and Inner Harbour Team for the Jones Falls River Valley watershed’s 2025-2027 Strategic Planning initative, and stewarding The Mobile Community Brick Factory & Monument - a public art process that supports social and spatial change in order to build a new kind of community-driven monumental public space using personalized, hand-made bricks. Glebes is the 2025-2026 Rubys Alumni Grant awardee from the Robert W Deutsch Foundation for this project, which also received a 2025 Public Art Across Maryland grant from the Maryland State Arts Council. Cultural landscapes and place-based inquiry underpin her interdisciplinary practice - she asks how we make a place, and how a place makes us.