Scholar | Healer | Interfaith Leader
Dr. Sousan Abadian is an internationally recognized speaker, educator, and healing practitioner whose work sits at the intersection of leadership, cultural transformation, and spiritual renewal. Currently serving as Executive Director of the Interfaith Council of Metropolitan Washington, she has spent over two decades bringing people together across lines of faith, culture, and difference to support personal and collective healing.
A seasoned interfaith healer, Dr. Abadian designs and facilitates sacred spaces where participants can access inner sovereignty, ancestral wisdom, and deeper connection with the natural world. Her experiential circles and workshops—often grounded in story, ceremony, and somatic insight—have served global cohorts of psychotherapists, peacebuilders, faith leaders, and changemakers. Her trauma-informed and spiritually rooted approach draws from multiple wisdom traditions and decades of study, service, and embodied practice.
Dr. Abadian earned her Ph.D. in Political Economy and Government from Harvard University, along with advanced degrees in International Development and the Anthropology of Social Change. Her pioneering doctoral research on healing collective trauma in Indigenous communities was described by Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen as “highly original.” A former Fulbright Scholar, she recently consulted with First Nations communities in Canada to help integrate Indigenous wisdom into educational curricula.
She is also a lifelong student and teacher of spiritual traditions. While Zoroastrian by heritage and recognized for her contributions to the renewal of that tradition, her path has been deeply ecumenical. Dr. Abadian has also practiced within Sufi, Jewish, and Christian contemplative streams, and has long cultivated interfaith understanding as both a spiritual commitment and a leadership practice. Her work is rooted in a belief that healing ourselves and healing the world are inseparable—and that every tradition holds sacred tools for our collective renewal.
Dr. Abadian is the author of Generative Cultural Renewal: An Effective Resource in Ending Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting & Other Harmful Practices and the unpublished memoir Free Me to Love, an intimate account of her own healing journey. After three decades in the Boston area, she now lives in Washington, D.C., continuing to cultivate work rooted in wholeness, justice, and reverence for the sacred in all things.