María Carreira is the Executive Director of the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese. AATSP is the largest and oldest language-specific professional association with almost 10,000 members, and many non-member constituencies (corporate, academic, community, legislative, etc.).

Carreira, Emerita Professor, taught Spanish linguistics at California State University, Long Beach for over 30 years and co-founded the National Heritage Language Resource Center at UCLA, where she served as Co-Director for 16 years. Most recently, she has served on the ACTFL Board and co-created The Heritage Language Exchange (HLXchange.com), a site for and by teachers of heritage languages. Professor Carreira has published extensively on U.S. Spanish, immigrant languages, and on heritage language pedagogy, and is a co-author of four college-level Spanish textbooks as well as being a co-author of Voces: Latino Students on Life in the United States. Professor Carreira has a B.S. in Math and Computer Science from Loyola University of Chicago and a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Born in Cuba and immigrating first to Spain and then to the United States at the age of 11, Carreira is a heritage speaker of Spanish. Having benefited from the wisdom and support of many talented and dedicated teachers throughout her life, she has a profound belief in the power of education to transform lives. This belief, along with her research on language vitality and immigrant languages in today's interconnected world, will guides her work.