ABOUT SIOBAHN HOTALING
Siobahn Hotaling is interested in many fields: UX design and research, psychology, music, poetry, and human rights. She currently works as a UX design manager and UX experience lead for a large fintech organization; on the side, she consults for several other companies in the realm of bias training programs, life skills workshops, and mentoring frameworks.
After weathering a number of stressful and life-changing challenges personally, Siobahn Hotaling has also become committed to learning as much as she can about PTSD, stress, and resilience. She is especially interested in how to help afflicted individuals resolve past trauma as well as ongoing stress through therapeutic methods and mindfulness techniques.
Siobahn is perhaps most deeply passionate about equality and justice in the world. She has always sought to understand what causes individuals and groups to be prejudiced towards certain groups; this drive led her to delve into researching the mechanisms of bias and the programs that seek to eliminate it. What she found was that most programs just don’t work – because they don’t get to the heart of each individual’s bias challenge. She devoted her final year at Harvard to developing a new type of approach to bias – one where the individual’s emotions when presented with bias are addressed first and foremost – and codified it into the Implicit Bias Program. You can read more about Siobahn’s implicit bias program, her final capstone project for her Master’s degree, here:
Another passion of Siobahn’s – though it has ebbed and flowed over the years – is creativity. She’s been a songwriter, a poet, and an essayist; she has produced two albums and written thousands of pages of verse and prose. She is currently working on a few things now that may or may not see the light of day. For the past work of Siobahn Hotaling, you can check out her music on her archival website via the link below:
In her free time, Siobahn Hotaling sings as a member of the Stonewall Chorale, New York City’s gay and lesbian chorus and the oldest LGBT choir in the United States. She also plays softball with the Prospect Park Women’s Softball League and tennis with the Metropolitan Tennis Group (NY’s gay tennis league).
Siobahn currently lives in Brooklyn, NY with her wife, dog, cat, and way too many pairs of black shoes.