Molly Lester

Margaret (Molly) Lester is Managing Director of CPCRS and the Associate Director of the Urban Heritage Project, based in the Weitzman School of Design's Department of Historic Preservation. Molly is the manager for cultural landscape research, survey/documentation, and community engagement projects conducted with the National Park Service and other partners. She is also a lecturer with the Department of Historic Preservation, co-teaching the core studio course for second-year graduate students.

Molly has been researching architect Minerva Parker Nichols for over a decade. As part of that project, she was a guest curator for the exhibit "Minerva Parker Nichols: The Search for a Forgotten Architect," produced by the Architectural Archives of the University of Pennsylvania and funded by the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, and she co-authored the associated exhibit book of the same title (distributed by Yale University Press, 2024). She was also a 2019/2020 Fellow for the James Marston Fitch Foundation for her research on Minerva.

Molly is the author of Building Ghosts: Past Lives and Lost Places in a Changing City (Temple University Press, 2024), which grew out of her work as a 2020/2021 grantee of the Sachs Program for Arts Innovation. She is also a 2024 Cokie Roberts Women's History Fellow based on her research on the "She-She-She" camps of the New Deal.

Molly joined PennPraxis in 2017 after three years of working as a preservation planning consultant. Previously, she worked as a program director for Partners for Sacred Places, overseeing a national consulting and grantmaking program for historic congregations. She has also worked as an architectural historian and historic tax credit consultant for Heritage Consulting Group, advising on the rehabilitation of historic properties around the country.

Molly is the founder of the InKind Baking Project and a former co-chair of the Young Friends of the Preservation Alliance. She holds a Master of Science in Historic Preservation from the University of Pennsylvania and a Bachelor of Architectural History from the University of Virginia.