Ancilla Schmidhauser

The well-known storyteller, trainer and facilitator, sparring partner and author supports people and organizations in the process of discovering and shaping their own story potential to empower others and change the world.

Dorian Iten

Dorian draws, paints, sculpts, and teaches. He hosts weekly feedback sessions where artists from around the world gather to draw and  develop their skills. A pioneer in the field of online art education, Dorian most recently served as a program director at Barcelona Academy of Art in Spain.

2004, Dorian has founded KUNSTpause, now an established annual exhibition for young artists in Switzerland. 

His link to Beyond Storytelling lies in his contributions to the Story Camp 2022. A highly sensitive and thoughtful person, he brings an open, creative, and healing energy to the groups and individuals he works with.

Astrid Kirchhoff

Astrid Kirchhoff is a systemic narrative organizational developer. She loves opening up spaces for thinking, resonance and the future when it comes to understanding complex systems.

For Hummingbirds.biz, she helps companies and organizations create a place for collaboration and co-creation where people fill the space in listening and telling their everyday stories. This multi-perspective approach helps to rediscover existing knowledge and negotiate possible scopes of action with each other.

Her expertise stems from her role as a brand strategist in international network agencies, her time as owner of an agency for branding and communication and her experience as a systemic-narrative organizational developer and facilitator in a 100% agile managed company.

Sen Zhan

Sen is the host and producer of the podcast Beyond Asian: Stories of the Third Culture, where she helps her guests retrace the events of the past to empower the present, spanning themes of transcultural identity, intergenerational trauma, and the diverse understandings of belonging and home. 

A lifelong storyteller, Sen believes that when we share our histories, we retrieve the lost threads that lead us back to ourselves. Through retracing our memories, we draw the throughlines of meaning that lead us from the past to the present and draw us forward to the future. 

Intertwined with the narrative explorations of her podcast, Sen brings in creative writing and poetry to share inspiration in the smallest of moments - a glance, a certain posture of the body, a micro-scene on a street corner. 

Sen was born in China, raised in Canada, and currently lives in an intentional community in Berlin. She loves thinking and experimenting with the future of human connection.