Inclusive Learning Session: Intercultural Competence

Mollie Teitelbaum (she/her) is an Associate Director on the Learning team at Seramount. She is a DEI Strategist and Instructional Designer who integrates research and storytelling to bring transformational culture change to organizations. She currently serves as an Associate Director on the Learning team at Seramount, where she has developed dozens of new trainings on a wide range of DEI and career development topics. Mollie has created content and facilitated trainings for Seramount conferences and partner events for clients across a wide variety of industries, with audiences ranging from the entry level through the C-suite.

Mollie began her career as a researcher and speaker on topics that lie at the intersection of philosophy and psychology, with a focus on building accountability, mitigating bias, and leveraging habit science. Her skills center on translating cutting-edge research into education and trainings for adult learners.

Mollie has wide experience applying her research and storytelling skills to craft blogs, white papers, e-courses, and insight papers for organizations in mental health care and DEI spaces and has also given a TEDx talk on mitigating harmful social biases.

To mitigate bias, she has leveraged social media to disseminate original as well as curated resources, which have been adopted by educational and corporate institutions. Her popular 2020 Mindful magazine article, “5 Mindful Habits to Fight Bias Every Day,” draws largely from her graduate research grounded in scientific literatures on mindfulness, emotional management, and behavior change. Additional publications include a thought piece in Psychology Today and a co-authored philosophical article in Springer.

Mollie is a graduate of Binghamton University and received her MA in Bioethics at the NYU College of Global Public Health. Mollie resides in Brooklyn, where she enjoys queer community-building, bouldering at her neighborhood climbing gym, and supporting local artists and musicians. Her proudest role is as an auntie to her seven nieces and nephews.

Dr. Shyama Venkateswar is currently the Senior Director, Learning, at Seramount, where she heads up the development and design of tailored DEI curriculum and workshops based on client needs to tackle complex workplace culture and talent challenges.

In 2021, she was appointed to the NYC Commission on Gender Equity by the Mayor of New York. She has more than 20 years of experience in addressing social and policy issues, and has built her career in the higher-education and nonprofit space.

Most recently, Shyama served as director of the Public Policy Program at Roosevelt House and as a faculty member at Hunter College, City University of New York, a position that she held for eight years. There, she led the expansion and governance of the program, crafted new and innovative curriculum, taught the Capstone curriculum, and played an instrumental role in implementing initiatives for student and faculty development, with a focus on providing opportunities for first-generation learners, immigrants, undocumented and other underrepresented students through comprehensive mentoring programs.

Before arriving at Hunter College Public Policy Program, Shyama was director of Research and Programs at the National Council for Research on Women (now merged with the International Center for Research on Women). In this role, she helped provide the vision and strategic direction of the council’s policy agenda on economic security and women’s leadership, and received grants from foundations and corporate philanthropy. Shyama has also served as the founding director of Mercy Corps’ Action Center to End World Hunger, and as director of the Asian Social Issues Program at the Asia Society.

Shyama is a graduate of Smith College and received her Ph.D. from Columbia University in political science.