As President and CEO of Visit Cincy (formerly known as the Cincinnati USA Convention & Visitors Bureau), Julie Calvert leads the region’s destination marketing and management organization. Her strategic vision and collaborative approach help maximize the size and impact of Cincinnati’s visitor economy and expand the region’s travel, tourism, and convention industries.
Prior to her appointment as CEO, Calvert served as Executive Director of Source Cincinnati (Cincinnati Experience), where she led the charge to connect the region with national media and elevate the “Cincinnati Story” into the global spotlight. In that role, she created a coalition of like-minded, visionary funders. She built and engaged a board of directors and tapped our best regional resources and outside experts to establish Source as the region’s only organization focused solely on global reputation management.
Calvert has spent her career developing and executing strategies that drive awareness, build reputation, mobilize resources, and spark economic vitality in the region. She started as a media reporter and editor, worked as a senior advisor at one of Cincinnati’s top communications firms and served as Vice President of Communications and Strategic Development for the CVB from 2001-2016. While there, she was the driving force behind the CVB’s national marketing, communications and reputation-building strategies and was
instrumental in the Bureau’s record-setting results in attracting and hosting some of the world’s most high-profile conventions.
With a profound appreciation of our region’s rich diversity, Calvert has a track record of finding ways to celebrate the varied voices, backgrounds and viewpoints that make up our Cincinnati tapestry. She helped build the CVB’s Supplier Diversity Program and multicultural marketing channel. And she made diversity a key part of Source Cincinnati’s strategic vision, from the people it engages to the stories it tells about the region. In 2019, she was honored with the APEX award from Black Meetings & Tourism.
In 2015, Calvert spearheaded civic communications efforts for the 2015 Major League Baseball All-Star Game hosted in Cincinnati, raising the city’s national profile during one of the signature events in all professional sports. Calvert is consistently included in the Cincinnati 300, a compilation of the city’s top 300 business leaders, along with a spot in the Power 100, a list of the 100 most influential business, political and community leaders in the Cincinnati region.
In 2020, amidst the Coronavirus pandemic, Calvert was tapped to chair the Ohio Governor’s Statewide Task Force on Travel and Tourism to craft safe reopening strategies and protocols for the industry.
She serves on board of Destinations International, the Hamilton County Commission on Women and Girls, the Board of the Cincinnati Music Festival, a former Cabinet Member for the ArtsWave Annual Community Campaign and has volunteered in leadership roles with several other regional non-profit organizations.
Calvert earned a bachelor’s degree from Miami University and resides in Anderson Township with her husband Chris and two sons.