Jennifer B. Litchman, MA
Chief External Relations Officer and Senior Vice President
Jennifer Litchman is the chief external relations officer and senior vice president at the University of Maryland, Baltimore (UMB). She received a bachelor of arts degree from the University of South Carolina, a master’s degree in public communication from American University, and certificates from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and Harvard University’s Kennedy School.
After six years on Capitol Hill working for the National Republican Congressional Committee and then in the U.S. House of Representatives, Litchman left government service for The Business Roundtable, a nonprofit public policy organization of CEOs of the Fortune 200, where she was public information manager. A highlight of her time at the Roundtable was planning and implementing a national media launch for a public service advertising campaign featuring Major League Baseball stars at Camden Yards with former Baltimore Oriole Cal Ripken and then-President Bill Clinton.
Litchman came to UMB in 1999 as director of public affairs at the School of Medicine and established the Office of Public Affairs. In 2002, she was promoted to assistant dean with responsibility for public relations and marketing, crisis communications, media relations, advertising, publications, photographic arts, special projects and events, community relations, and web content and social media.
Litchman was named special assistant to the UMB president in January 2011. In that role, she functioned as chief of staff and principal executive on the president’s initiatives, such as core values and anchor institution initiatives, and advised the president on reputation enhancement, outreach, and communications strategies. She was promoted to interim chief communications officer (CCO) and vice president (VP) in August of the same year.
She assumed the role of CCO and VP in August 2012. In that job, Litchman was responsible for internal and external communications, strategic planning and crisis communications, branding and marketing, media relations, social media, web development, publications and editorial, alumni communications, and protocol and special events for the University. The Office of Government Affairs began reporting to her in June 2015, followed by the Office of Community Engagement in November 2015. In 2018, she was named senior vice president for external relations.
In 2014, Litchman founded the Council for the Arts & Culture to enhance the quality of life on campus and in the West Baltimore community by promoting the use of UMB’s public spaces for the visual and performing arts, as well as to raise awareness of the links between the arts and sciences. Litchman chairs the council with honorary chair Yumi Hogan, former first lady of Maryland. That same year, she founded and still chairs UMBrella (UMB Roundtable on Empowerment in Leadership and Leveraging Aspirations), an organization that works to engage a community that supports the success of women, advance women into leadership roles at UMB, and champion women at all levels of the organization through coaching, mentoring, networking, programming, and scholarships.
She is a two-time Emmy-nominated executive producer for the documentary series “From West Baltimore,” with its episodes premiering each fall on Maryland Public Television. The “From West Baltimore” series chronicles the lives of five children from West Baltimore who took advantage of opportunities presented to them to rise above their circumstances, graduate from high school, and advance to post-secondary education through UMB’s National Institutes of Health-funded CURE Scholars Program, which provides STEM experiences from sixth grade through 12th grade.
Litchman lives in Annapolis with her husband, Jonathan, and their two children, Jack and Jiselle “MeMe,” a pug named Theo, and a pandemic cat named Kitten. Originally from Ames, Iowa, she and her 10 best childhood friends are the subjects of the nonfiction book “The Girls from Ames,” which spent over six months on The New York Times bestseller list, reaching a high of No. 3.
She is a member of the Board of Directors of Baltimore’s Everyman Theatre and the YumiCARES Foundation, and a member of the Women’s Leadership Advisory Board of Ronald McDonald House Charities of Baltimore. Litchman is a member of the Leadership Maryland Class of 2017 and was named one of Baltimore magazine’s Women Who Move Maryland in 2018 and one of Maryland’s “Top 100 Women” by The Daily Record on 2016 and 2022.