When Umbreen Bhatti ’00 enrolled at Barnard in 1996, a women-centered hub blending activism, mentorship, and experiential learning did not exist on campus.
After Bhatti’s return to her alma mater in 2019, as the Constance Hess Williams ’66 Director of the Athena Center for Leadership — a decade after the center’s founding — the Athena Center was relaunched as an unstoppable force in producing leaders prepared to drive meaningful change.
“Athena lets me be back around amazing students,” said Bhatti. “During my time at the College, there were few gathering spaces on campus, which is visually different and more architecturally communal now. All of Barnard’s centers today are a huge part of shaping students.”
The center — which recently celebrated the Athena Film Festival’s 15th anniversary and is singularly designed to equip students with a holistic model of leadership development anchored in community — is one that “does not exist anyplace else,” said Bhatti.
Host to the popular Athena Fellows Program, SPARK event series, and myriad communities of practice, the center offers students a space to ask: What is the world I dream of, and what can I do to make it a reality? And how might I do that with others?
Bhatti — whose experience in social advocacy includes leading the innovation lab at KQED, practicing disability law, and serving as a board member on various nonprofit organizations supporting women in the arts — calls on her time as a Barnard native to cultivate student leaders who work to realize their vision of a better future.
“When I was a Centennial Scholar, I was given resources to pursue and build what I thought was interesting. So I built,” said Bhatti. “Similarly, our approach at Athena is to think about what we can build together.”
In the Q&A that follows, Bhatti (who, during her student years, co-founded the McIntosh Activities Council’s (McAC) beloved tradition Midnight Breakfast and facilitated the College’s Greek Games revival in 2000) shares her enthusiasm for community building at Barnard — where, partly thanks to her, women’s leadership thrives.
How has the Athena Film Festival changed over 15 years at Barnard?
I rejoined Barnard in time for the 10th anniversary of the Athena Film Festival, another celebratory year. A lot has changed as we have grown, from having a showcase on campus and a set of year-round programming that advances the kind of storytelling we want to see. This includes women-centered stories that challenged the way we thought about leadership. Being able to visually depict and imagine leadership is important; over the course of the last six years, the Athena Center shifted into seriously investing in the storytellers through support pathways such as artist labs, various grants for filmmakers, and targeted interventions that build up talent.
The Athena Center for Leadership is a place of relationships and co-creation — it’s where the serendipity and magic happens.
What characterizes your leadership at Barnard?
A core belief of mine is that everything is connected and we require different ways to change the world. My work at Athena is to inspire the thought that we need to do a lot to build the world we want to live in — with the reminder that society’s challenges cannot be solved by a single person or through a single try. The Athena Center makes its own contributions, via the film festival, providing funding for students to tackle interdisciplinary projects, or teaching 500 high school students every year through the summer Pre-College Program.
These connected initiatives are meant to ask students to build something that helps them not only to envision a better world but to use a variety of methods to get us closer to it. Many young people have an idea of what leadership looks like, but Athena positions students to see themselves as the leaders and to actionably practice being those leaders. The Athena Center for Leadership is a place of relationships and co-creation — it’s where the serendipity and magic happens.
What excited you about returning to your alma mater as the director of the Athena Center?
The Athena Center didn’t exist when I was here, and I wish it had, so I was excited to return and lead it into its next chapter. I had an amazing experience during my time [as a student], but campus is different and so is the way we think about teaching students. Engaging in the kind of co-curricular work offered at Barnard ensures that students will exhibit innovation capacities, such as learning multiple ways to solve a single problem. We’re helping students be together, move forward together, and figure out what they have — or don’t have — in common.
Part of the reason I returned is that Barnard’s students already show up as leaders. While here, they have a distinct advantage being privy to spaces like the Athena Center to nurture their leadership while intentionally engaging with different questions, topics, and communities. Building on the first 10 years of Athena’s success was informed by an ever-evolving world. The center creates an environment where students can experiment and make mistakes safely before entering that world.
Athena Leads
What kind of messaging do you want to see around “women in leadership”?
The story of women’s leadership has always been one of scarcity. It’s focused on the obstacles standing in the way of women becoming leaders, especially as women of color. The typical story narrows on trailblazers, barriers, pushing through challenges, or succeeding despite. I could never reconcile this with the incredible abundance I felt at Barnard.
Here, that abundance is the story. This is Barnard, the best women's college, a core part of an amazing research university, and in one of the greatest cities in the world. My role is to ask students, Now what? Where do you want to go from here? What change will you lead?
And also to tell them, I'll help — and so will everyone else in the Barnard community.
I want our students to know just how many people are in their corner, cheering them on, helping them get back up when they fall, and more.
How has the student experience changed?
I was blown away by how diverse Barnard when I returned in 2019. For example, our student body is now more than half students of color. I was also struck by the way we think about diversity — for example, we now have the Center for Accessibility Resources & Disability Services (CARDS). It serves a significant portion of the community, including neurodivergent students. In other words, we — as an institution — are recognizing, appreciating, and honoring the diversity in the ways our brains work.
Students’ aspirations have also changed. They’re inspired to solve problems in nontraditional leadership roles, which is why I want students to interact with each other. At the Athena Center, we want them to start thinking that if they see a problem in the world, they will need business solutions, policy solutions, the visions of artists — many creative things to get there and solve it.
If you could turn back time, what would you tell your student-self?
That you are magic.
