Dr. Miriam Heller Stern is Director of the School of Education and Associate Professor of Education at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, where she has also served as Vice Provost for Educational Strategy. She is the founding director of Beit HaYotzer/the Creativity Braintrust, an initiative that engages professional artists in advancing and enhancing creative thinking, teaching, and leadership among educators and learners everywhere. In 2024, Dr. Stern is also a scholar-in-residence at the Covenant Foundation where she is developing her work on Jewish creativity, the arts and education. With over two decades of experience preparing educators in graduate degree programs in teaching and leadership, Dr. Stern is passionate about empowering educational leaders and teachers to engage in their work intentionally, skillfully and creatively. Dedicated to enriching the quality, ingenuity and efficacy of Jewish education, Dr. Stern is a highly sought-after strategic thought partner, advisor, mentor and coach by Jewish educational leaders, organizations, institutions and initiatives across the United States and Israel. She serves on the boards of theatre dybbuk and Shalhevet High School; the global strategic advisory committee of UnitED; the editorial board of the Journal of Jewish Education; and the research awards committee of the Network for Research in Jewish Education. She is an honorary board member of the Association for Reform Jewish Educators. In recent years she has served on task forces and strategic working groups for organizations including Prizmah: the Center for Jewish Day Schools, M²: the Institute for Experiential Jewish Education and Hillel International, and research advisory committees for Rosov Consulting and the Jewish Education Project. A historian of education reform by training, Stern returned as a visiting scholar in 2024 to the Stanford Graduate School of Education, where she earned her MA (2002) and PhD (2007) as a Wexner Graduate Fellow. She was an inaugural Senior Fellow of the Mandel Center for Studies in Jewish Education at Brandeis University from 2022-2023. Her areas of expertise include ideologies of educational policy and planning, teaching through the arts, mentoring, preparing educators and mentors, understanding learners, designing educative learning, and practices of educational leadership. Her current research and writing are on reclaiming and centering Jewish creativity as a focus of Jewish education design.