The Story Collider is thrilled to welcome Dr. Leslie Berntsen as its inaugural Director of Education and Research. In this role, she will oversee The Story Collider’s workshop programming, train and supervise a team of instructors, and foster interdisciplinary research collaborations focused on the impact of personal narratives. 

Leslie is a once-and-former psychology professor specializing in inclusive pedagogy, teaching social issues, and popular science communication, and has served as a Los Angeles-based producer with The Story Collider since 2021. 

Her classroom teaching has been nationally recognized with four awards from the Society for the Teaching of Psychology and the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues. She is also the fourth person in 40+ years and the first person of color to win two STP Excellence in Teaching awards dedicated to different career stages. Leslie’s writing has been featured in The Chronicle of Higher Education and The Huffington Post, and you can also find the earliest drafts of her forthcoming op-eds on Twitter – which she will stubbornly continue to use until the last server crashes. 

Her high school debate team once named her “Most Likely to Color-Code Her Plans to Grassroots Resistance” and she has – with no effort required – been living up to it ever since.

Other New Additions to Story Collider

• Recently, The Story Collider has also welcomed several new additions to its producer team in New York, Seattle, and more. Learn more about our team here.

• Story Collider producer Nakeysha Roberts Washington has taken on a new role as a producer of the Story Collider podcast, bringing the curatorial expertise she demonstrates as owner and creative director of Genre: Urban Arts.

• Dr. Ana Maria Porras, biomedical engineering professor and co-founder and senior advisor of the Latinx in Biomedical Engineering community, joined our Board of Directors in March. Ana Maria was the inspiration behind Story Collider’s Spanish-language programming, which began in 2020.

Pictured to the left: Producer Nakeysha Roberts Washington, Board Member Ana Maria Porras, and new additions to our freelance producer team from the past year.