Rosa Zubizarreta

As founder of DiaPraxis, Rosa supports leaders and groups to work creatively with divergent perspectives. Her calling is developing our societal capacity to transform friction into useful energy and greater insight. Author of From Conflict to Creative Collaboration, a manual on Dynamic Facilitation, she teaches this collaborative sense-making process internationally.

In addition to consulting and coaching work with organizations, Rosa enjoys engaging in participatory research. She recently completed a Ph.D. at Fielding Graduate University, with a dissertation on the facilitation of collaborative meaning-making in the Citizens' Councils in Austria. For the academic year 2023-2024, she was a Democracy Visiting Fellow at the Ash Center of the Harvard Kennedy School. In September of 2024, she will be starting a 9-month fellowship at the Research Institute for Sustainability in Potsdam, Germany.

Rosa has been actively collaborating with Tom Atlee since 1998. He was the one who, in the year 2000, first introduced her to Dynamic Facilitation. In 2002, Rosa worked with Tom to midwife his book The Tao of Democracy while she was also completing an M.A. in Psychology in the Organization Development program at Sonoma State University.

Rosa’s academic and professional background also includes an M.S.W., as well as an M.A. in Multicultural and International Education. At various times in her life, she has worked as a translator, teacher, curriculum materials developer, and clinical social work practitioner. All of these experiences inform her practice as an organizational consultant and group facilitator: the “red thread” that runs through them all is the power of narratives for helping people develop greater understanding of themselves and others..

With a life-long passion for social change, Rosa explores the intersection of group facilitation and social transformation in her occasional blog The Listening Arts.