Spring Lecture Series 2026: Janet Marie Smith

Janet Marie Smith
Executive Vice President for Planning and Development; Los Angeles Dodgers

Janet Marie Smith is the Executive Vice President for Planning & Development for the Los Angeles Dodgers. She and Fran Weld are Co-Founders of Canopy Team, a woman-led company devoted to the design and management of sports projects and their surrounding developments.
 
Trained as architect and urban planner, she is well known for her work on Oriole Park at Camden Yards in Baltimore, the transformation of the Atlanta Olympic Stadium to Turner Field, the renovation of Fenway Park in Boston and the creation of Polar Park, home of the Worcester Red Sox. She has held positions with the Baltimore Orioles, Atlanta Braves, Boston Red Sox to oversee these respective projects. Smith has worked on development projects including Battery Park City in New York and the redevelopment of former industrial buildings on Baltimore’s waterfront, as well as renovation plans for the Rose Bowl stadium in Pasadena, CA.
 
Smith has twice been the Edward P. Bass Visiting Professor at Yale University School of Architecture, most recently in the Fall of 2025.  She was named one of the 125 Most Influential People in Sports by Sports Business Journal in December 2025 and will be honored by Women in Sports and Entertainment as one of three Women of the Year on March 2026. Smith is in the Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame and the Worcester Red Sox Hall of Fame.  A native of Jackson, MS, Smith holds a bachelor’s degree in architecture from Mississippi State University and a master’s degree in urban planning from City College of New York.
 
“The three most important things that have happened in baseball since the Second World War were Jackie Robinson taking the field for Brooklyn in 1947, free agency arriving in 1975, and Oriole Park at Camden Yards opening in 1992… The last was an act of heroic nostalgia, but, then, baseball fans are disposed to live with cricks in their necks from looking backwards. Which is why Major League Baseball owes a debt to a willowy woman from Mississippi. To those who said, ‘You can’t turn back the clock,’ Janet Marie Smith responded with ‘Well, we’ll just see about that.’” - George Will, A Nice Little Place on the North Side (2014)