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Headshot of Nina Simons, a White woman with short curly brown hair, a colorful beaded necklace, and a black shirt smiling at the camera
Guest Speaker

Nina Simons

Co-Founder & Chief Relationship Strategist at Bioneers
(She/Her)

Nina Simons is the co-founder and Chief Relationship Officer at Bioneers, and leads its Everywoman’s Leadership program. Bioneers is a nonprofit that uses media, convening, and connecting to lift up visionary and practical solutions for many of our most pressing social and ecological challenges, revealing a regenerative and equitable future that’s within our reach today.

Nina is a social entrepreneur who is passionate about reinventing leadership, restoring the feminine, and co-creating a healthy, peaceful, and equitable world for all. She speaks and teaches internationally at schools, conferences, and festivals, and co-facilitates transformative workshops and retreats for women that share practices for regenerative leadership through reclaiming wholeness and relational mindfulness.

Throughout her career spanning the nonprofit, social entrepreneurship, corporate, and philanthropic sectors, Nina has worked with nearly a thousand diverse women leaders across disciplines, race, class, age, orientation, and more to create conditions for mutual learning and leadership development. She produces and speaks at large-scale events to work intimately to help small, diverse groups of women leaders knit together to strengthen each other’s work pursuing intersectional healing and ecological justice.

In 2017, Nina was a recipient of the Goi Peace Award, presented annually to individuals who have made outstanding contributions toward the realization of a peaceful and harmonious world. Past honorees include Bill Gates, James Lovelock, and Deepak Chopra.

Her prior work includes President at Seeds of Change, a biodiversity organic seed company, which she helped grow into an emerging national brand in less than five years by using innovative approaches to public relations and community-based marketing. At Odwalla, as Director of Strategic Marketing, she grew consumer loyalty while guiding teams nationwide just after their IPO.

Nina studied Theater Arts and Psychology at Cornell University. In addition to writing the first and second editions of Nature, Culture, and the Sacred, Nina co-edited 2010’s Moonrise: The Power of Women Leading from the Heart (Park Street Press), which explores the flourishing, passionate forms of leadership emerging from women (and some men) on behalf of the Earth through the prism of more than 30 essays from diverse women leaders.