Mariah Murrell serves as Director of Cultural Stewardship at Eric Toliver Studios, bringing a relationship-centered approach to leadership shaped by years of experience across healthcare, community engagement, business development, and direct service.

A cousin of Founder and CEO Eric D. Toliver, Mariah is part of both the family legacy and the founding leadership entrusted with helping shape the culture of Eric Toliver Studios and Black Renaissance Network. In her role, she helps ensure that as the company grows, the humanity at the center of its work is never lost—that people are seen, relationships are respected, communities are engaged with intention, and culture is treated as something to steward rather than simply represent.

That responsibility is a natural extension of the work Mariah has built her professional life around.

Her career in healthcare began after graduating from high school in 2018 and has since taken her through an unusually diverse range of experiences. She has worked in caregiving, customer service, data entry, laboratory services, care management, and business development, developing an understanding of people and organizations from both sides of the relationship: those providing the service and those depending upon it.

Today, Mariah works in business development and care management with Caring Senior Service, where she cultivates partnerships throughout the healthcare continuum while helping connect older adults and their families with personalized in-home care. Her work involves building relationships with hospitals, physicians, rehabilitation centers, hospice and home-health organizations, senior living communities, case managers, and community partners.

Behind those partnerships, however, are real people.

As a Care Manager, Mariah works closely with clients, families, caregivers, and interdisciplinary healthcare teams. Her responsibilities span care coordination, caregiver support, staffing collaboration, scheduling oversight, service planning, and quality assurance. That proximity to individuals and families navigating consequential moments has reinforced a philosophy she carries across every area of her professional life: trust is not a transaction. It is built through consistency, communication, responsiveness, and integrity.

At Eric Toliver Studios, that philosophy becomes cultural stewardship.

Mariah helps bring a people-first perspective to the stories, partnerships, programs, and creative communities surrounding ETS and its production division, Black Renaissance Network. Her role recognizes that meaningful representation requires more than putting different faces on screen or invoking the language of inclusion. It requires listening. It requires context. It requires relationships with the communities whose experiences inform the work.

Her professional journey has never followed a single conventional lane—and that range is one of her strengths.

While initially studying toward nursing, Mariah also pursued cosmetology training at Paul Mitchell, expanding her interests into beauty and personal expression. She continues developing her healthcare education while pursuing professional credentials and future nursing studies. Together, those experiences reflect a woman comfortable existing at the intersection of care, creativity, service, business, and culture.

Away from professional responsibilities, Mariah embraces the softer side of life: self-care, beauty and makeup, time with friends, a good cocktail, and life with her beloved cockapoo, Coco, who may or may not believe she is actually in charge.

Whether she is building a healthcare partnership, supporting a family, developing her education, connecting with her community, or helping guide the cultural conscience of a growing creative company, Mariah approaches people as people first.

At Eric Toliver Studios, she carries that principle into every room she enters—helping build a culture where representation has substance, relationships have integrity, differences are treated with dignity, and the people behind the stories matter just as much as the stories themselves.