Heidi Basch-Harod is a nonprofit leader, writer, educator, and advocate for girls’ and women’s rights. Since 2012, she has served as Executive Director of Women’s Voices Now, a Los Angeles-based organization that uses film to drive social change that advances girls’ and women’s rights globally, and which holds special consultative status to the United Nations Economic and Social Council (UNECOSOC).

For more than two decades, Heidi has worked directly with youth, leading empowerment workshops for girls ages 12 to 24, and as a Holocaust educator, committed to raising awareness about antisemitism and other forms of hatred.

Heidi’s background includes work in international human rights with the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission, the Tibetan Nuns Project, and the Palestine-Israel Journal. A scholar of Middle Eastern and North African history, with a special focus on women’s movements in the region, she was a Junior Researcher at the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies at Tel Aviv University from 2012-2023. Her master’s thesis, The Kurdish Women of Turkey: Building a Nation, Struggling for Gender Parity, was published in 2017 (Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies).

As a film producer, Heidi has contributed to several award-winning films, including Honor Diaries, In Search of America, Inshallah, and Daughters of Abraham. As a producer of the Girls’ Voices Now series with HereMedia, she received a Daytime Emmy in 2021, and a Children’s and Family Entertainment Emmy nomination in 2024.

Her work has been recognized by the Roddenberry Foundation and through leadership programs including, the Annenberg Alchemy Fundamentals and Rautenberg New Leaders Project, of the Los Angeles Jewish Federation.

Heidi is also a featured expert with the Women’s Media Center’s SheSource platform, and has served as a juror for international film festivals in the U.S., Europe, and Central Asia. Her writing has appeared in outlets including: Newsweek, Open Democracy, Times of Israel, and several others, in print and online.

In the aftermath of October 7, Heidi reallocated her energies to include advocating for Jewish communities, locally and globally. This has taken the form of co-founding the South Bay Jewish Advisory Group, with the mission to educate and empower teachers, administrators, parents, and community leaders to identify, respond to, and prevent antisemitism in our schools. She also serves on the Board of Directors of 360Perspectives, which works with communities and schools to build empathy and connections through personal narratives and educational initiatives. Through these platforms, their online and in-person events, initiatives, and campaigns, she strives to do her part in addressing the alarming, rising levels of anti-Jewish hatred across the globe. Heidi also joined the Abraham Women’s Alliance that seeks to foster peace building, women’s empowerment, and inter-religious harmony in North Africa & the Middle East. In this capacity she speaks on panels and networks with women who share a vision to advance inclusion, human dignity, and inter-faith collaboration in the work place and civil society.  

She holds a B.A. in Political Science from UC Berkeley, an M.A. in Public Policy from New England College, and an M.A. in Middle Eastern and African History from Tel Aviv University where she graduated magna cum laude. She is comfortable communicating in English, Spanish, French, Italian, and Hebrew.