Biography

Noa Zanolli is a Swiss educator, cultural anthropologist and mediator. The focus of her work has been in international development, peacebuilding and in teaching and training about conflict resolution at the workplace, in schools, and in communities. She has worked internationally in research and administration, in governmental and nonprofit organizations, in higher education and business.

She held positions in the Swiss Government, Agency for Development and Cooperation, as well as in the International Department of the Swiss Red Cross and was the Director of Education and Research at the Iowa Peace Institute, USA (operational between 1986-2003). She was a lecturer at the Universities of Zurich and Bern in Switzerland, an Affiliate Assistant Professor at Iowa State University and a member of the faculty of William Penn University, College for Working Adults in Iowa, USA. There she taught several conflict resolution and negotiation classes.

Until 2015 she worked as an independent consultant and trainer in Europe, the U.S. and in Africa. In her teaching function at Iowa State University she directed a training program for conflict management in East and West Africa; worked in the time frame 2002-2004 as a conflict advisor on behalf of OXFAM UK for nine months in Rwanda and in 2007 was a consultant for a privately initiated peace initiative in the Niger Delta (see: https://www.imtd.org/niger-delta-peace-forum).

She has written extensively and presented lectures and seminars internationally with a focus on conflict resolution in education. A further focus from 1999 to 2005 was training about mobbing and bullying at the workplace and in schools (www.mobbing-usa.com).  She conducted numerous trainings about Creating Emotionally Safe and Healthy Workplaces. She has also been retained as an expert witness in several mobbing cases. She continues to respond to targets of mobbing requesting advice or referrals.

She is a member of the editorial board of the quarterly journal perspective mediation. She continues to work as a consultant and a mediator specializing in elder mediation (altersmediation-bern.ch) and focuses on her publications (see books and articles).