Donna Drew Sawyer is the Chief Executive Officer of the Baltimore Office of Promotion & The Arts (BOPA), the city’s official arts council, events center and film office.  She first joined BOPA in March of 2017 as the Chief of External.  Sawyer previously held senior administrator positions in the arts and non-profits including the Smithsonian's Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Arts and Science Council of Charlotte-Mecklenburg, the Chrysler Museum of Art and, the Sesame Workshop. Sawyer served on the Norfolk, Virginia Arts Commission and helped launch the Virginia, Waterfront Arts Festival as the founding director of the Wilder Performing Arts Center. She was also an assistant professor of Communications and Journalism at Norfolk State University.

Sawyer has served on art panels for the National Endowment for the Arts and on the YWCA Board of Directors. Additionally, she is an award-winning author, her novel, Provenance, won the 2017 Maryland Writers’ Association Award for Historical Fiction and was a finalist for the same award at the New York’s Harlem Book Festival.

Prior to her work in the arts and non-profit sector, Sawyer held senior marketing and promotion positions with Young & Rubicam Advertising and AT&T International.

Sawyer earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the New York Institute of Technology and an M.B.A. from Texas Southern University. She and her husband, Bowie State University professor and author, Dr. Granville M. Sawyer, Jr., live in Baltimore City. They have two grown daughters. 

Donna Drew Sawyer was selected as the Chief Executive Office of the Baltimore Office of Promotion & The Arts in July of 2018