Deborah Heifetz
Deborah Heifetz is a co-founder and co-director of BraveHearts International, a social business that supports systemic change and peacebuilding by training and coaching leaders and activists in personal growth, nonviolent communication, embodiment practices, group facilitation and non-hierarchical decision-making. She is a mediator, certified Y.P.O. Forum Facilitator, Somatic Experiencing Practitioner (SEP) and Certified Movement Analyst (CMA) who holds a Ph.D. in Social Anthropology, an M.A. in Dance and a B.A. in Genetics.
Heifetz has served as a special advisor to the Crisis Management Team of the Israeli Police. She developed the concept “non-mediated peacekeeping” from her ethnographic study of gender and Israeli-Palestinian security cooperation during the Oslo years (1994-2000) and acted in Track II Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. In 2007 she co-founded the peace-building and community development NGO – HiMaT – with projects in Pakistan, and later engaged in the international grassroots movement known as the Transition Network, where she co-founded the Israeli Hub and supported as a mediator.
Dr. Heifetz spent years on faculty at Tel Aviv University where she integrated her diverse background and training to educate graduate students of International Conflict Resolution and Mediation in ‘Culture, Conflict and Community Development.’ Working in collaboration with Kibbutz Neot Semadar (Israel), she bridged academia and community development through deep personal learning. Her teaching approach incorporates years on faculty at Haifa University’s dance/movement therapy program. After moving to Cologne, Germany in 2014, she co-created Embodied Leadership Training to support leaders and emerging leaders to communicate under conflict using movement and somatic practices. She produced on-site dance performances for the Global Water Dances in Israel and Lake Orta, engaging a Flashmob to bring awareness of water issues through the art of dance. Heifetz is a Chevening Scholar (University of Manchester and University of Cambridge). She brings over 30 years experience as a peace activist, social scientist and somatic educator working at the nexus of inner and outer peace.
Deborah Heifetz moved to Lake Orta in northern Italy in 2019 with her collaboration partner and husband, Frieder Krups, to apply their respective lifetimes of knowledge, experience and activist engagement. Together with local Italian change-makers, they are supporting their newly adopted geo-region to become a prototype for human scale, community-based sustainable development that embraces creativity and the arts.