Our Team

Aaron Shneyer

Founder and Director

aaron(at)heartbeat.fm

Aaron Shneyer is a social entrepreneur, musician, educator, and activist. He holds over 10 years of experience in nonprofit management, program direction, development, communications, and multimedia production.

Aaron grew up in the Washington, DC area in a family of musicians and activists. He is the Founder of Heartbeat, which he launched in 2007 as a Fulbright Fellow. He is also the Managing Director of One Common Unity, a DC-based organization that breaks cycles of violence and builds healthy compassionate communities through the transformative power of the arts, music and peace education.

In 2005 he graduated from Georgetown University with a BA in Anthropology and immediately went to work  as a program leader and dialogue facilitator with various youth empowerment and civil society peacebuilding efforts. After living in Jerusalem for six years, in 2012 Aaron returned to Washington, DC, to complete a Masters degree in Social Enterprise at American University’s School of International Service, where he was also a Social Enterprise Fellow.

Aaron has performed and presented on the role of music and youth in conflict transformation at institutions across the US and Europe including Yale, Brown, Georgetown, Harvard, and other universities as well as the Institute for Cultural Diplomacy, TEDxAmerican University, and the U.S. Department of State.  Aaron writes, produces, and performs with various music ensembles, including his band, AARON+ODARA, and is the Musician in Residence at the Sixth & I Historical Synagogue in Washington, DC.

Miriam Psychas

Operations Manager

miriam(at)heartbeat.fm

Miriam is a graduate student at the University of Notre Dame pursuing a Master of Global Affairs in International Peace Studies. Her work focuses on trauma healing, peace education, and the use of the arts and embodied learning practices for conflict transformation. Most recently, she lived in Bogotá, Colombia where she worked and studied in a diversity of areas, from teacher engagement at an education company to human-centered design at a start-up and in monitoring and evaluation for a development project. She also worked as a tour manager and production assistant for one of Cuba’s top artists, the Afro-Cuban funk singer, Cimafunk. Previously, she directed Harvard College’s study abroad program in Havana. She also advocated for improved US-Cuba relations at the Center for Democracy in the Americas (CDA), a Washington DC- based non-profit.

The daughter of a Finn and an American who grew up between Gainesville, Florida and Accra, Ghana, Miriam hopes that her eclectic interests and international background will help her serve as a bridge between cultures and people. She holds a BA in Sociology and History & Literature of Latin America from Harvard College. 

Dana Herz

Music Director

Noa Yammer

Regional Director (Jerusalem)

noa(at)heartbeat.fm

Noa is an experienced educator and musician in the US and Israel who has been working with Heartbeat since 2009. After growing up in a religious home in New Jersey, Noa came to Israel at the age of 18, and moved to Israel after two years of Jewish learning. Her family joined her three years later. Upon completing her BA in Psychology in 2008, Noa spent 5 months as a volunteer in a rural village in Nepal, teaching and running theater and empowerment programs in schools in two Himalayan villages. She spent two years after that working with religious girls with eating disorders, using music and writing in her therapeutic counseling.

She currently lives in Jerusalem and is finishing her MA in Gender studies and activism at Bar Ilan University. In addition to being the Heartbeat program coordinator, she runs pluralistic groups of Jewish teenagers in a service learning program and pursues her music as a singer-songwriter, performing with her ukulele and guitar in local Jerusalem venues.