Lou Ann Dietz

President and Founding Director 

Lou Ann is an Educator specializing in helping conservation teams in Brazil achieve lasting impact.

Since serving together with her husband James Dietz as Peace Corps volunteers in Brazil in the 1970s, Lou Ann has focused her career on developing conservation in that country.  She received an Education Specialist (Ed.S.) degree in Educational Systems Development from Michigan State University in 1981 and has over 40 years of pioneering field experience in Brazil (16 years as World Wildlife Fund Senior Program Officer for Brazil), integrating applications of both social and biological sciences to develop solutions to complex conservation problems.  She has a proven track record as a successful manager of field projects, grant portfolios, and large-scale trans-border biodiversity conservation strategies, through the full cycle of situation analysis, design, funding, implementation, evaluation, sharing lessons, and adaptation.  She is known and respected as a compassionate professional with the ability to empower and mobilize communities, organizations, teams (international, national, community, government, non-government), and individuals, toward achievement of common conservation goals. She has published many articles, book chapters, and educational materials on her conservation work, particularly in the design and evaluation of conservation programs targeting human behavior change.

Lou Ann began working for conservation of golden lion tamarins (GLTs) in Brazil in 1983 with a team of Smithsonian National Zoo biologists, Brazilian managers, and local community leaders in Rio de Janeiro state.  She developed a targeted community environmental education program which resulted in documented behavior changes and made the golden lion tamarin (GLT) a national symbol for conservation.  In 1992, she helped found the Associação Mico-Leão Dourado (AMLD), a Brazilian NGO, and continues, as an elected member of its Board of Directors, to guide the organization toward achievement of its goal of a viable population of golden lion tamarins in its Atlantic Coastal Forest habitat.  

She lives with her husband James Dietz and Labrador retriever Bandit in a restored log cabin on a conservation easement in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia.