The Hannah Grimes Center for Entrepreneurship on Thursday announced the departure of its founder and longtime executive director.

According to a news release from its board of directors, Mary Ann Kristiansen, who founded the Keene-based business incubator in 2006, left the role effective Oct. 25. The board also announced that Julianna Dodson has taken over as executive director.

“On behalf of the board of directors, we extend our best wishes to Mary Ann and express our gratitude for her dedication and hard work in shaping The Hannah Grimes Center into what it is today,” said Deirdre Fitzgerald, the board’s president, in the release. “The parties will not be sharing details but wish each other well.”

Since moving to the Monadnock Region in 1991, Kristiansen has been a driving force for growing the local business ecosystem. She opened the Hannah Grimes Marketplace on Main Street in 1997 to provide a space for people to sell their products and develop their business skills with support. More than 1,000 local artisans have called the marketplace home, with currently more than 200 vendors in the space, according to its website.

She expanded the educational side of the marketplace’s operations in 2006 to open the Hannah Grimes Center for Entrepreneurship. Since then, the business incubator center on Roxbury Street has grown from offering a small year-long business program to a full-fledged slate of resources geared toward helping people start and grow nonprofits and businesses.

Kristiansen, along with Terrence Williams, then-COO and president of The Keene Sentinel, founded Radically Rural, an annual summit about rural life. The initiative was created to amplify the impact of rural innovation by connecting leaders and advocates from rural communities across the country.

Dodson joined the center in 2021 as the director of Radically Rural.

Since then, Dodson has expanded the annual conference to year-round programming and has grown its reach, with attendees from 49 states, D.C., and Canada. In 2022, Dodson added deputy executive director of the Hannah Grimes Center to her responsibilities, overseeing human resources, finance, operations and programming, according to the news release.

“The feelings I’m having are really just deep gratitude,” Dodson said Friday morning in reference to her new role. “This organization is such a treasure in our community. It is such a gift to all of us, and so to be the one to steward it through this next phase ... it hit me even harder than I expected it to.”

Dodson said she deeply admires the work Kristiansen has done for the past two decades.

“I have so much gratitude for Mary Ann, for giving so much of her life to (Hannah Grimes) for 27 years,” she said. “A lot of it was invisible. She deserves to be in the history books, and I hope someday someone will write her in there.”

As she looks to the future, Dodson said via email that the Hannah Grimes Center’s board of directors and staff will “continue to do the work we know and love and that has become indispensable to our community, while continuing to keep ideas central and imagining new ways to design our future.”

“Hannah Grimes could not have existed without the investment of our community,” she said. This means continuing the recent initiatives currently underway at the center, she noted, and she will continue to be involved with planning Radically Rural.

Dodson added that the center will soon announce its new program director for its biotech incubator program and remains dedicated to the center’s ongoing work with cultivating biotech businesses through building capital access infrastructure and other resources in the region.

— JAMES RINKER/KEENE SENTINEL