Senior Leadership Faculty

Heidi Stalla

Dr Heidi Stalla is a consulting senior leadership faculty member at KS Insight with more than two decades of experience in academic leadership, program development, and experiential education.

She currently serves as Associate Director of Academic Affairs for Yale College and previously held the role of Dean at Yale’s Pauli Murray College. Across these roles she has led complex academic teams, designed programs that integrate learning and leadership, and supported faculty and students through periods of significant institutional change.

Fast facts

Consulting Senior Leadership Faculty at KS Insight.
Associate Director of Academic Affairs for Yale College.
Former Dean of Pauli Murray College at Yale University.
Over two decades of experience in academic leadership, program development, and experiential education.
Founder of the Writing Program at NYU Abu Dhabi.
Designed experiential learning initiatives at Yale-NUS in Singapore as Assistant Professor of Humanities.
Doctorate from Oxford University; alumna of Stanford University and former NCAA Championship tennis team member.
Studied Adaptive Leadership with Ronald Heifetz at Harvard University.

Biography

Academic leadership and institutional change

Dr Heidi Stalla is a consulting senior leadership faculty member at KS Insight and brings over two decades of experience in academic leadership, program development, and experiential education. She currently serves as Associate Director of Academic Affairs for Yale College and previously held the role of Dean at Yale’s Pauli Murray College.

In these roles she has overseen academic programs, supported faculty and students, and helped steward institutional culture at one of the world’s leading universities. At KS Insight, she is teaches on the Manager to Leader program and is part of the inaugural design team for the Women Igniting Leadership Lab, focusing on advancing leadership skills through creative and adaptive approaches.

Program design and experiential learning

Dr Stalla has held leadership and faculty roles at several prestigious institutions worldwide. She founded the Writing Program at New York University’s Abu Dhabi campus and developed innovative experiential learning initiatives at Yale-NUS in Singapore, where she was Assistant Professor of Humanities.

Her work consistently integrates academic rigor with hands-on learning, creating environments where students and leaders can test ideas, reflect on practice, and build the skills needed for real-world leadership.

Scholarship and global perspective

As a scholar of Virginia Woolf and modernism, Dr Stalla has contributed to the fields of life-writing, literary criticism, and creative nonfiction. Her projects often involve transnational modernism and collaborative, cross-cultural work, including ongoing research on the modernist writer Ling Shu Hua.

She has published academic articles, creative nonfiction, and audio essays, and has been a Visiting Scholar at Oxford University’s Centre for Life-Writing, where she explored the journeys of Ling Shu Hua’s Friendship Scroll as a lens for global modernism.

Background and training

An alumna of Stanford University, where she was a member of the 1997 NCAA Championship tennis team, Dr Stalla earned her doctorate from Oxford University and further enhanced her leadership expertise through studying Adaptive Leadership with Ronald Heifetz at Harvard University.

Her global career has taken her to Jordan, Oman, Sri Lanka, Abu Dhabi, Singapore, and the UK, giving her a deep appreciation for how leadership and learning play out across cultures and institutions.