Ariana Abadian-Heifetz

About Ariana Abadian-Heifetz

I believe sustainable change is a collaborative adaptive process that is co-created by communities. I am a passionate experiential educator who centers participant experiences, emotions, and insights, in the learning process, seeking to both nurture and disquiet hidden beliefs and assumptions. I bring with me a social-emotional learning (SEL) expertise, and I am a facilitator on adaptive leadership, organizational development, change management, and identity-based discrimination.Over the past decade I have deployed a variety of approaches to support the growth and agency of educators, parents, and mission-driven executives in India and the US. As the Head of Social-Emotional Learning for the Heritage Xperiential Learning School, I held the community through a systemic change process, led teacher professional development and coaching, and designed learning materials. I created a novel approach to SEL called The Human Framework and co-authored a high-school curriculum that explored the themes of religious diversity and interfaith dialogue, gender and discrimination, and caste and human rights. My work has been featured in Teacher Plus Magazine and The New Indian Express, and I have also published pieces on these topics in India Today, Deccan Chronicle, and Daily Pioneer. Based on my prior work leading trainings for young women on adaptive leadership, menstrual health, and discriminatory social myths across Uttar Pradesh, I authored an acclaimed graphic novel, Spreading Your Wings, to inspire body-positive mindset shifts around menstruation and gender norms. I continue to be a visiting faculty for I am a Teacher and a Senior Advisor on SEL for the Delhi Public School Gurugram. I have trained in transformative listening techniques, embodied practices, and have studied how to foster generative identity development through experiential pedagogies. I am an avid poet, potter, and dancer, and draw insight from navigating my own liminal identities as an Iranian-Zoroastrian and American-Ashkenazi-Jew. I am driven by the question of how to break cycles of harm and trauma at personal and collective levels through redefining identities and changing our relationships to authority, vulnerability, and personal hungers.

Experience

1. Board Member

   The Pad Project

   Apr 2024 — Present

   Supporting the mission for increasing access to menstrual products, advocating for menstrual equity, and combatting period stigma

Education

• Harvard Kennedy School

  Course Coach, Leadership on the Line

  2022

• Carleton College

  BA, Political Science & International Relations

  2008 — 2012

• NYU Gallatin

  Master of Arts - MA, Identity Development & the Science of Human Connection

  2020 — 2022