I work with organizations, educators, and civic leaders who are thinking seriously about the future: of learning, of participation, and of how we imagine and build more connected and resilient communities. My work sits at the intersection of civic engagement, media and culture, cross-cultural dialogue, and research-informed impact design. Across all my projects, I help teams move from big questions to grounded strategies, whether through research, workshops, public speaking, or longer-term advisory partnerships.
My approach is shaped by both scholarship and practice. I am an Associate Research Professor of Communication at the University of Southern California and Director at the Civic Paths Group, where my work has focused on participatory cultures, media literacies, and civic life in a networked world. I hold advanced degrees from UCLA, MIT, and the London School of Economics, and I have spent over a decade leading interdisciplinary research initiatives that bridge academic inquiry with real-world application, often in collaboration with partners such as the MacArthur Foundation, Connected Learning Alliance, National Writing Project, Facing History & Ourselves, and Salzburg Global Seminar.
In parallel, I regularly collaborate with nonprofits, educational institutions, foundations, and civic organizations on the design and evaluation of learning and engagement initiatives. This includes developing research frameworks, facilitating workshops and retreats, delivering keynotes, and supporting organizations as they think through questions of impact, scale, and sustainability. Recent collaborations have included work with school districts, national education nonprofits, city governments, and media organizations, including initiatives with partners such as the City of Los Angeles, Western Kentucky University, Google Jigsaw, and Prospect Studios. I am especially interested in helping teams navigate complexity across cultures, sectors, and institutional boundaries, all the while remaining attentive to local context and lived experience. As such, my work increasingly brings me into conversation with private-sector and philanthropic partners who are exploring how learning, culture, and civic responsibility intersect with innovation and long-term value.
A significant part of my work also involves fundraising and partnership strategy. I have helped secure and steward multi-year, multi-million-dollar grants and collaborations, and I frequently support organizations in articulating their vision, aligning it with funder priorities, and developing coherent funding strategies. I see fundraising not as a separate task, but as a form of storytelling and strategic alignment, one that requires clarity of purpose, credible evidence of impact, and the ability to imagine compelling futures.
As a Czech-Nepali child of the final years of the Cold War, my early life was shaped by travel restrictions. Perhaps as a response, I have built a life that crosses many borders instead of being confined by them. I have called Brussels, Kathmandu, London, Kandy, Ahmedabad, Berlin, Prague, and now Los Angeles home, and I relish any chance to draw on my mixed-race, cross-cultural background. Becoming a parent has added another dimension to this work. As the mother of a multilingual, cross-cultural child, I reflect daily on what it means to raise children who belong to multiple worlds.
Through all these experiences, my philosophy has stayed constant: to listen for the connections, to build trust, and to create spaces for cross-cultural dialogue. I see these as the foundations for participation, community building, and, eventually, the networks that sustain meaningful impact. I am a skilled facilitator who thrives in dynamic, diverse environments. I want to support spaces where ideas can grow, partnerships can deepen, and people can see themselves as part of something larger. Looking back, I trace this orientation to my K-12 education at Lincoln School, an international school in Kathmandu, where I first learned to listen, to build bridges, and to imagine better futures with people who were different from me. Those early lessons still anchor everything I do.