Committed to the craft of facilitation, Priya’s expertise lies in framing conversation, and listening and tracking for language and how it begins to shift and shape perceptions in a group. Her speciality is facilitating meaningful conversations that activate a group's sense of possibility and identity. She works with groups as small as 6 or as large as 5,000, physically and virtually. For the like-minded facilitation nerds out there, Priya is trained in multiple modalities including Multi-Stakeholder Dialogue, Track 2 Dialogue, inter-group dialogue, and an array of collective processes.

Facilitation is a multifaceted field with many different rabbit holes to explore. It’s a craft you continue to practice and build upon over time. The key is to find a need in your community and a methodology you’re excited by. Master it, and become a life-long student to strengthen it.

Priya spent her undergraduate years studying Political and Social Thought at the University of Virginia with an area of focus on Race and Ethnicity, Identity, and Immigration. Her undergraduate Honors Thesis was on the topic of Racial Incidents and Responses on 10 College Campuses in the United States. While not formally trained as a DEI trainer, Priya holds a robust history of studying these topics at an academic level.

Afterward, in addition to pursuing an MBA, she studied public policy, economics, development studies, governance and participation at the Harvard Kennedy School, where she graduated with a Masters in Public Administration.

As a child of two civil servants, business lingo was a foreign language. The MBA program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology introduced Priya to a world she was not necessarily a part of, but one she deeply wanted to understand as a system of power and a way of thinking she had not previously known.

There she studied organizational design, systems thinking, and collective intelligence. Her thesis advisor was Dr. Thomas Malone, the founding director of the Center for Collective Intelligence.

After receiving her MBA with a focus on organizational design and collective intelligence, she applied her multiple academic worlds to her facilitation. Priya has gone on to advise organizations in moments of crisis and transition on how to diagnose the need and find high-integrity, human processes to find their way through.

Priya is an enthusiastic student of improv — studying at Boston Improv, The Pit, and more recently on Zoom with teachers under the lineage of Keith Johnstone.

Some of the smartest practices and group-building exercises come from the theater. They are powerful group methodologies that play with a healthy balance of the individual and the group — locating techniques and moments of choice of when and how a group comes together while allowing individuals to still have a voice.

Plus, it’s just fun.

How we played as children can deeply inform our work today. In childhood, Priya was always attracted to physical group games, activities, and experiences — happiest choreographing dances with friends in her parent’s basement, playing fast-pitch softball and basketball, and performing in marching band. And in later years, she completed a 200-hour Yoga Dance teacher training.

Movement and the body has been an important counterpart of Priya’s language-based and dialogic training. These experiences hold lessons of how to be both a strong leader and a strong follower, how to pay attention and be in your body, how to use your body, and how to read other bodies in the room. Connection and meaning-making aren’t just lingual, the group is also a deeply physical being.