OUR FACILITATORS

Adriana Medina López Portillo, PhD

Denver, Colorado, U.S.A.

• Intercultural communication
• Curriculum design and facilitation
• Emotional intelligence
• Personal development
• Conflict management

PL work
Adriana Medina López Portillo, PhD, has facilitated Personal Leadership since 2011. She teaches seminars and one-day workshops. She introduced PL to the Division of Student Affairs at the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC) where she works, and the Division then offered Personal Leadership seminars for the staff for three consecutive years. Adriana also introduced PL to the Division of International Services at the National Institutes of Health.

Other work
Adriana is currently an Associate Professor of Intercultural Communication and Spanish in the Department of Modern Languages, Linguistics and Intercultural Communication at UMBC. She just finished leading a three-year-long cultural competence initiative there for the Division of Student Affairs.

Adriana has been a teacher since 1988. She is also an accomplished intercultural trainer with a focus on intercultural communication, diversity, and conflict management styles. She designs and leads workshops for higher education, not-for-profit, governmental, and corporate clients in the United States and abroad. Her preferred facilitating methodology is experiential learning, for which high levels of audience participation are expected. In her facilitation, she skillfully balances the right amounts of challenge and support for learning to occur. One of the main foci of her work is helping people develop skills for self-awareness, cultural self-awareness, managing ambiguity, and becoming aware of their perceptions through attending to judgment, emotions, and physical sensations.

Among her favorite appointments were being a trainer on The Scholar Ship, which was a transnational academic program housed on a passenger ship, and offering pre-departure and on-site orientations for the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia. She has also worked with The Johns Hopkins Carey Business School on two programs for their international Master’s students, providing sessions on resilience and the orientation for their Summer Intensive program. Currently, she is working with universities in Myanmar to implement the first class in intercultural communication in the country.

She has published on study abroad and intercultural competence, among other topics.

Personal background
Adriana was born and raised in Mexico City. She arrived in Baltimore in 2007 to do her graduate studies, and moved with her family to Denver, Colorado, in 2015 to be close to extended family.

Academic
She completed both her degrees at UMBC: a Master’s in Intercultural Communication, and a PhD in Language, Literacy and Culture with a focus on intercultural communication.

Other interests
Adriana, her husband and her son love the mountains and enjoy family time. She loves painting and taking walks in nature.