About Me
The facilitator other facilitators call when things get complicated.
For over two and a half decades, Nadia Chaney has been the person organizations, leaders, communities and facilitators turn to when standard approaches aren’t enough. She’s the one who gets called when conflicts seem intractable, when teams are stuck despite everyone’s best efforts, when something genuinely transformative needs to happen.Her client roster reads like a who’s who of change-makers: senior NGOs, philanthropists and government officials changing the ways they collaborate for large scale shift, activist networks healing internal fractures, indigenous organizations working with settlers to change school cultures, corporate leaders reimagining how they operate, and AI technologists grappling with the ethics of their innovations. What do they all have in common? They needed someone who could handle complexity without losing sight of humanity.
What makes Nadia different isn’t just her experience, it’s her unusual combination of capabilities. She’s simultaneously a systems strategist and a multimedia artist, a conflict mediator and a science fiction writer, a pattern recognition expert, a poet, and an experience designer.
This isn’t diversification for its own sake; it’s integration that creates rare insight. While others might see contradictions, Nadia sees the whole picture. Her artistic practice sharpens her ability to sense what’s emerging in groups. Her systems thinking gives structure to intuitive insights. Her decades of community work taught her that transformation requires both fierce clarity and deep compassion. And everything she attempts is rooted in a deep, ecological connection to lineage, body and place.
Facilitation that actually works when the stakes are high. Based in Ottawa, working globally, Nadia brings threshold practices to wherever complexity lives.
Testimonials
I have no hesitation in saying the
Nadia Chaney is one of the top
international facilitators. I have seen
the incredible ripple effects her work
has had on communities globally.
She is a sharp critical thinker, an
excellent trainer, a caring soul and a
vibrant creative facilitator.
Ella Cooper
Filmmaker, Founder of Black Women in Film,
Creative facilitator, Toronto, ON
My workshops with Nadia were inspiring and transformative,
both for me as a facilitator as well as personally. Nadia took our
group to a place which not only exceeded my expectations, but
also stretched my imagination in terms of what is possible in a
group setting. We went deep, we pushed our edges, and then
we went even deeper. She was able to take the tension in the
room and use it to move us to a space I never thought was
possible. I simply cannot sing her praises enough
Natasha Duchene
Art Therapist, Yellowknife, NWT
Training & Education
My formal education includes a Master’s degree with the Imaginative Education Research Group (CIRCE) from Simon Fraser University (2010), an advanced diploma in Expressive Art Therapy for Groups from the European Graduate School (2019), and a diploma in Dialogue and Negotiation from Simon Fraser University (2007). But honestly, my real education has come from the field—over 2,250 workshops facilitated across the globe since 2002, working in contexts ranging from youth detention centers to international organizations, from community conflicts to corporate transformations.
I was closely mentored and apprenticed for fifteen years with two incredibly innovative social artist-facilitators, Peggy Taylor and Charlie Murphy. I’ve been mentored by world-class artists including Ruth Zaporah in Action Theatre, Chris Abani in creative writing, Hanif Fazal in group dynamics, Linda Rabin in continuum dance, Victor Porter in popular theatre, Geri deStephano-Webre in subtle energetics and John Turner in clown performance.
Some of my most powerful learning has been with co-facilitators who have walked with me for many years, these include but are not limited to: Sara Kendall (physician), Ruby Singh (musician), Vanessa Richards (social artist), Suchetha Bhat (and everyone at Dream a Dream), Khari Wendall McClelland (social artist), Melanie Schambach (community muralist), Andrew Kushnir (verbatim theatre), Michelle Peek (Art Not Shame), Ella Cooper (Black Women Film), Tammy Lea Meyer (psychospiritual facilitator), Sense Turner (social artist) and many, many others.
Beyond formal training, I’ve spent 26 years learning through trial and fire—those moments when conventional methods failed and I had to find new pathways through complexity. Every resistant participant, every heated conflict, every impossible-seeming group dynamic became my teacher in the art of holding space for genuine transformation.
Why I Do What I Do
I do this work because I’ve experienced the profound magic that becomes possible when you learn to cook with group tension and complexity instead of fearing it. Twenty-six years ago, I started facilitating without even knowing the word “facilitation,” driven by a fierce belief that people needed spaces to express themselves authentically, to grapple with difficult truths, to transform together. What began as entertainment nights and community forums evolved into a lifelong inquiry into what it really means to hold space for human beings in all their beautiful, messy complexity.
Here’s what I’ve come to know in my bones: facilitation is one of the most important art forms in our world right now. We desperately need people who can help groups move through conflict toward understanding, who can create conditions where marginalized voices are heard and honored, who can hold space for the kind of conversations that actually shift things. But too many facilitators get stuck in surface-level techniques that work fine when groups are calm but fall apart the moment things get knotty. They end up blaming their participants, burning out, or abandoning the depth of impact they originally dreamed of creating.
created Toolsi and Knotty Groups because I believe every facilitator deserves access to the kind of wisdom that usually stays locked away in expensive retreats or exclusive circles. I’ve spent 25 years learning how to find the hidden resources in any group, how to transform resistance into gold, how to interrupt with grace, how to see conflict as a doorway rather than a disaster. This isn’t theoretical knowledge—it’s been tested in youth detention centers, in communities torn by conflict, in international organizations navigating cultural divides, in classrooms and boardrooms and living rooms across the globe.
But more than that, I do this work because facilitation is where my callings converge. When I help a facilitator discover their unique style, when I watch someone transform their fear of conflict into curiosity, when I see groups achieve breakthroughs that seemed impossible, that’s what lights me up. Every facilitator I support ripples out to touch hundreds of lives through the groups they lead. And in a world that desperately needs spaces for genuine human connection and transformation, that feels like the most meaningful work I could possibly do.
My Journey as an Artist & Facilitator
My artistic journey has always been about refusing to choose just one way of making meaning. I’m an interdisciplinarian: poet, visual artist, musician, animator, social practice artist (and whatever else comes barrelling into my life) because life itself is interdisciplinary, and the most urgent questions we face can’t be contained in a single medium. I started on stages in my early twenties, performing spoken word poetry at open mics and community forums, opening for artists like Michael Franti and D’bi Young Anitafrika, eventually winning poetry slams (including the Words Matter Slam at the iconic Nuyorican cafe in NYC) and getting published in literary journals across North America (I even won best literary publication at Montreal’s notorious Expozine festival!).
Then, I found myself creating hip hop bhangra fusion music with BPM/Banyen Roots and hip hop music for young people as a founding member of the Metaphor Crew, touring across Canada and weaving lyrics that bridged my Indian-Canadian identity. We did over 300 shows!
In 2014 I was called to automatic drawing and painting, creating over 300 pieces (I like to do things in impossibly big batches… it’s my learning style) in the first two years that eventually became the foundation for “Indivisible”l,” an interdisciplinary performance at MAI in Montreal that combined dance, animation, and improvised poetry. I even started painting art manicures—over a hundred tiny portraits and landscapes on fingernails—because art should be everywhere, accessible, intimate, playful. My mixed-genre chapbook “Reading Practice for Rust and Holograms” won the Expozine Award for Best Literary Publication, and I’ve had work featured everywhere from the Chicago Quarterly Review to the National Film Board of Canada.
But here’s what matters most: my artistic practice has never been separate from my facilitation work—they’re the same impulse expressed through different channels. Whether I’m hosting “The Psi Co Sly Sho” which happened in 2001 (a weekly community forum with drum-and-bass and projection art), or creating “The Time Zone Research Lab” from 2019-2021 (a 100-week international arts-based inquiry into temporality), or writing commissioned poetry for a dance performance by Roger Sinha, I’m always asking the same question: How do we create spaces where transformation becomes possible? How do we honor the beautiful complexity of being human? And, more personally, can we survive the terrifying beauty of who we really are?
My art is messy and multimedia because humans are messy and multimedia. It crosses borders because I’ve always lived between cultures. It refuses conventional categories because the most interesting work happens at the edges where disciplines blur into each other. Everything I create—whether it’s a performance, a painting, a poem, or a facilitated experience—is an invitation to dive deeper, feel more fully, and discover that the boundaries we think separate us are far more permeable than we imagined.