Ariana Abadian-Heifetz

Engagement manager

Ariana believes sustainable change is a collaborative adaptive process that is co-created by communities. She is 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. Ariana brings with her an expertise in social-emotional learning (SEL) and gender-based violence. She is a facilitator on adaptive leadership, organizational development, change management, and identity-based discrimination.

Over the past decade she has 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, Ariana held the community through a systemic change process, led teacher professional development and coaching, and designed learning materials. She created a novel approach to SEL called The Human Framework and co-authored a curriculum that explored the themes of religious diversity and interfaith dialogue, gender and discrimination, and caste and human rights. Her work has been featured in Teacher Plus Magazine and The New Indian Express, and she has also published pieces on these topics in India Today, Deccan Chronicle, and Daily Pioneer. Based on her prior work leading trainings for young women on adaptive leadership, menstrual health, and discriminatory social myths across Uttar Pradesh, she authored an acclaimed graphic novel, Spreading Your Wings, to inspire body-positive mindset shifts around menstruation and gender norms. She continues to be a visiting faculty for I am a Teacher and a Senior Advisor on SEL for the Delhi Public School Gurugram.

Ariana holds a Master’s Degree from NYU in Identity Development. She has trained in transformative listening techniques, coaching, embodied practices, and has studied how to foster generative identity development through experiential pedagogies. She is an avid poet, potter, and dancer, and draws insight from navigating her own liminal identities as an Iranian-Zoroastrian and American-Ashkenazi-Jew. Ariana is driven by the question of how to break cycles of constraint at personal and collective levels through redefining identities and changing our relationships to authority, vulnerability, and personal hungers.