Maya Bernstein

Maya Bernstein has been the Director of Leadership Education at Yeshivat Maharat since 2017. She served on faculty at Georgetown University's School of Continuing Studies from 2015-2025, where she was the co-founder and co-director of the Executive Certificate in Facilitation, and is currently on faculty at the University of Virginia, where the program has moved. She is the lead consultant for Camp Stone’s KLI Fellowship, designs and facilitates gatherings and leadership trainings globally for nonprofits and foundations, and is the co-author of a Jewish Leadership Curriculum commissioned by the Masa Leadership Center and the Offices of Rabbi Jonathan Sacks. 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 creative writing has been published in Beloit, On the Seawall, the Ekphrastic Review, Lilith Magazine, Pensive: A Global Journal of Spirituality and the Arts, Psaltery & Lyre, Tablet Magazine and elsewhere. Her albums of original tunes to traditional texts, Shiviti and The Whole Soul, produced by Noah Solomon, are available wherever music is streamed. She is a graduate of Columbia College and Harvard’s School of Education, received an MFA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College in 2024, is a 2012 Covenant Foundation Pomegranate Prize Recipient, and lives with her family in Yonkers, NY.