About Maya Bernstein

Maya Bernstein is a facilitator, leadership educator, and designer of gatherings; she is also a poet and lay musician.

 

She co-founded and led the Executive Certificate in Facilitation at Georgetown University's School of Continuing Studies from 2015-2025, and since 2017 has worked as the Director of Leadership Education at Yeshivat Maharat, a women’s Rabbinical School. Maya is the founding lead consultant for Camp Stone’s Klineman Leadership Initiative Fellowship, an international fellowship for young adults, and is an Associate at the Kansas Leadership Center. 

 

Maya designs and facilitates gatherings and leadership trainings globally for nonprofits and foundations, currently leading the Covenant Foundation’s Dialogue Across Difference series. From 2005 until 2015, Maya co-founded UpStart Labs, which accelerates growth, nurtures ideas, and advances new experiences for the Jewish community. Her writing on leadership, facilitation, and innovation has appeared widely, including in the Harvard Business Review and the Stanford Social Innovation Review. 

 

Her first collection of poetry, There Is No Place Without You, was published in 2022 by Ben Yehuda Press, and her second collection, House Woman: Who Can Find Her? is forthcoming from Ben Yehuda Press in 2027. She’s released two albums of original tunes to traditional texts, Shiviti and The Whole Soul, produced by Noah Solomon. 

 

Maya volunteers as a choir director at SAR Academy, and served for three years as a board member at Yetzirah: A Hearth for Jewish Poetry. She is a graduate of Columbia College and Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, received an MFA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College in 2024, and is a 2012 Covenant Foundation Pomegranate Prize recipient. She lives with her family in NY.