OUR FACILITATORS

Thorunn Bjarnadottir, MA

Minneapolis, Minnesota, U.S.A.

• Intercultural trainer
• Cross-cultural facilitation
• Global leadership development
• Cultural competency development within higher education
• Facilitation of Intercultural Development Inventory and Cultural Detective. Intercultural Development Inventory and Cultural Detective.

PL work
Thorunn Bjarnadottir, MA, is an experienced cross-cultural trainer with over 20 years’ experience in higher education. Intercultural leadership development is her passion. She never tires of teaching people to leverage cultural differences as it truly creates original and creative outcomes.

She is the Director of Intercultural Education at the University of Minnesota, International Student and Scholar Services. In that capacity, she is extensively involved in efforts to make the University’s students ready to work in a more interconnected global world.

Personal Leadership serves as the conceptual framework for those efforts. Using PL as the basis, she has offered a sought-after cross-cultural leadership development retreat to the University’s international students for the past 11 years. Her interactive pre-departure study abroad presentations also rely on the PL framework. And she offers Personal Leadership development to University of Minnesota staff.

Other work
Thorunn is an experienced trainer who has worked with people all over the world to develop their cultural competency. She has designed many cross-cultural leadership development programs, some as short as an hour and a half, some as long as four weeks.

Thorunn is a co-author of the Icelandic version of the training tool Cultural Detective™. She has used this tool extensively within the University of Minnesota to help staff and faculty understand and work better with people from all over the world. She is a Certified Administrator of the Intercultural Development Inventory, with almost a decade of experience providing IDI coaching feedback.

Personal background
A native of Iceland, Thorunn has lived and worked in Iceland, Switzerland and in the U.S. At the University of Minnesota, and through her work with PL, she has taught people from all over the world. You name the country, and she has had someone from there in her workshops.

She speaks four languages: Icelandic, English, German, and Danish.

Academic
Thorunn holds an MA in international Education from the University of Minnesota.

Other interests
Thorunn is an avid reader of all sorts of books, and a movie buff. Her favorite outdoor activity is finding and enjoying hot springs. She is married to a man from the Ivory Coast and they are raising their son in Minnesota.