Areen Shahbari

Areen Shahbari has over 15 years of corporate, business training, and consulting experience, working with local and international companies, governments, and NGOs. She is the CEO of Shahbari Training & Consultancy, an instructor at Harvard University Extension School and Harvard Professional Development Programs, and an entrepreneurship and leadership trainer at Babson Executive Education and Stanford University Center for Professional Development. Shahabri speaks at regional and global conferences and has led training programs in the United States, Chile, Jordan, Palestine, Morocco, Turkey, Mexico, Bahrain, and Qatar. Her teaching, training, and consultancy focus on innovation, strategy, marketing, leadership, and the intersection between psychology and business.

In 2013, Shahbari founded Cactus International, a global company that promotes women’s entrepreneurship and leadership, focusing initially on the Middle East and North Africa regions. Through Cactus, Shahbari trained hundreds of women on how to launch and grow scalable and sustainable businesses. Prior to her teaching and entrepreneurial career, Shahbari worked for ten years in the media industry as a journalist, a TV programming director, a TV producer, and a TV host of six TV shows, where she interviewed numerous experts on topics ranging from politics, law, psychology, gender, diversity and inclusion, and business.

Shahbari is a highly rated instructor and received multiple Excellence in Teaching awards and letters of commendation for her distinguished teaching performance from Harvard University Extension School and Simmons University School of Business, where she held a lecturer position between 2015 and 2019. She holds a BA in psychology and communication and an MBA in entrepreneurship from Simmons University School of Business, where she was a Fulbright scholar and received the Beta Gamma Sigma award for academic distinction.