After graduation, Adelzadeh began work as Environmental Director of North Folk Mono Rancheria. In that role, she protected Tribal natural and cultural resources. She worked with the Federal Bureau of Land Management as a training coordinator for team-taught workshops on community-based collaborative resource management and community volunteerism. The workshops focused on improving intergroup relations, civic engagement, and collaboration among resource-dependent communities, environmentalists, and public land managers throughout the West. In that role, she liaised between the federal government and nine tribes in western Arizona.

From 2008 to 2012, Adelzadeh was the Land Conservation Specialist for Pacific Forest & Watershed Lands Stewardship Council. Starting in 2012, Adelzadeh was the program director for the Blue Ridge-Berryessa partnership in Northern California. She also was the project advisor for the Maidu Summit Consortium and Conservancy supporting works to restore Maidu traditional ecological knowledge and create a cultural park in California.

Adelzadeh has also worked as a community organizer for an environmental and social justice organization in Nevada, where she focused on bringing federal land management agencies, private mining interests, and Native Americans together to shape government policy regarding the impact of mining on ancestral Indian lands and sacred sites. Adelzadeh’s career goal is to help restore ecosystems while preserving Native American values and customs associated with the land. She hopes to achieve this by facilitating collaboration between Native American communities and government agencies charged with managing public lands and through the reintegration of traditional ecological knowledge in land management practices.

Adelzadeh is a member of the Navajo Nation and a Senior Program Officer at First Nations Development Institute. She was a First Nations Development Institute consultant for a year before becoming the Senior Program Officer in February 2019. She is responsible for stewardship initiatives by providing technical assistance and supporting the development of conservation strategies to protect traditional values and recover control of and access to ancestral land and natural resources.           

She currently serves on the advisory board for the Doris Duke Conservation Scholars Program at the University of California- Santa Cruz.  he Doris Duke Conservation Scholars Program at UC Santa Cruz received a $100,000 grant from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation to host a gathering of Native American Conservation Scholars in 2019, with the help of Mary Adelzadeh, a member of the program’s advisory board and program’s faculty director Erika Zavaleta. A member of the Navajo Nation and alumna of a graduate-level Doris Duke Conservation Fellowship program, Adelzadeh aims to create a network of Native American Conservation Scholars to help connect, amplify, and support Native voices in conservation.