Macarena Tamayo-Calabrese (Rena Calabrese) is the President and CEO of Naper Settlement. She is a lawyer with over 25 years of experience in private practice, not-for-profit and association management. In her position as President and CEO of Naper Settlement she oversees a thriving 13 acre living history museum campus, with focus on experiential life-long learning  and discovery for all people. During her tenure the institution has surpassed all-time records in membership, attendance, annual revenue and has raised over $12 million for two capital projects, including first time seven figure gifts by private donors. Under her tenure the museum has become a national leader in informal education and recently won the coveted American Association of State and Local History Museums 2023 Leadership in History Award, the Excellence Award for Treasures member Magazine from the Illinois Association of Museums and is a finalist in the Best Entertainment/Live Music Venue Award. As a private practitioner she focused on immigration law and litigated removals, adjustment of status appeals, and asylum matters. She has been a member of the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA) and has served on the Liaison Committee with the USCIS District Director in Chicago, sat on AILA’s Liaison Committee for the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Chief Counsel and was Chair-elect for the Illinois State Bar Association’s (ISBA) International and Immigration Law Section, and served as a speaker for various continuing legal education programs for the ISBA. Ms. Tamayo-Calabrese was named by the President of the American Bar Association (ABA) to its Commission on Immigration’s Advisory Committee and by the Chair of the ABA Commission on Women to the board of its magazine, Perspectives. Ms. Tamayo Calabrese has written a weekly column called “Talking About Immigration” for La Raza, the largest Spanish-speaking publication in the United States. She was also featured weekly on a radio show in the Chicago-land area.

On the international and association management front, Ms. Calabrese was the highest-ranking Latina for the American Bar Association (ABA), where among other positions she served as Director of the International Liaison Office and later the Latin America and Caribbean Law Initiative. In that capacity she was responsible for all ABA rule of law projects and initiatives in Latin America and the Caribbean. She developed and implemented programs to train judges, lawyers and government officials in developing democracies on a variety of subjects including, commercial and criminal law, trafficking in persons, dispute resolution, CAFTA and arbitration. Additionally, Ms. Tamayo-Calabrese has led trainings of high court justices, private lawyers and government officials in Africa and China, and served as Director of a multi-million-dollar Mediation in Mexico project funded by the United States.

Ms. Tamayo-Calabrese is a proud Latina immigrant, advocate for women, who served as the Executive Director of the National Association of Women Lawyers. As such, she was one of only six Latinex to head a national association and served as a special guest-speaker for the Leadership Council on Legal Diversity. She authored two book editions of Dear Sisters Dear Daughters: Strategies for Success from Multicultural Women Attorneys and is a featured author for Today’s Inspired Latina Vol. 5 and Today’s Inspired Leader Vol II. In 2019 she was named an Influential Women in Business. She has served as Chair of the Diversity Committee for the Chicago Bar Association and Board Member of the Cancer Society, Chicago Chapter.

Ms. Tamayo-Calabrese is a graduate of Hofstra School of Law in New York and attended DePaul College of Law in Chicago as a visiting student where she met her husband, Michael. They have three daughters and own a law firm.