Mira Azarm

Mira Azarm is a Lecturer in the Academy for Innovation & Entrepreneurship (AIE). In her role as Innovation Instigator and Learning Experience Catalyst, she provokes learners into becoming creative problem-solvers. She specializes in teaching how to build at low resolution, collaborate radically, lean into wild ideas, and most of all, engage across disciplines and perspectives in meaningful ways. In addition to teaching, she designs artifacts to communicate concepts and tools; co-creates programs, classes, curriculum, and workshops; and prototypes ways to weave innovation into the cultural thread of the institutions she works in. 

She played a lead role in developing AIE’s Innovation Fellows program, a space for UMD staff and graduate students from any unit or department to learn design and innovation mindsets, tools, and processes. She's been co-leading the Innovation Studio at the National Orchestral Institute+Festival for 10+ years, bringing design tools and mindsets to classically trained musicians culminating in audience-facing performance experiments through chamber music. She’s recently presented and facilitated sessions at VentureWell’s 13th Annual Deshpande Symposium (2024), Elon University’s Design Forge (2025), and AIGA’s National Design Conference (2025).

Before joining AIE, she was a president of AIGA DC and a President’s Council Chair for AIGA, the professional association for design. She earned a M.A. in Social Design from the Maryland Institute College of Art, and served as a Robert W. Deutsch Foundation Social Design Fellow. She taught emerging business leaders in the combined MA/MBA in Design Leadership program at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) for several years, and traveled the world as a Design Coach for the World Bank in an initiative aimed at creating climate innovation centers for local, “green” entrepreneurs using human-centered design methods. 

In 2024, Mira joined the Odyssey Works Master Class in Vesoul, France, to collaboratively design a 72-hour transformative experience for one person. Continuing her work with Odyssey Works, in 2025 she earned a certificate in Experience Design. For her months-long self-driven lived research project, The Scrappy Witches Art Academy, she designed a facilitated journey in improvisational and collective making. It was featured in an interactive exhibit called “The New Frame” in Brooklyn, New York, in November 2025. 

She’s currently taking classes in and performing long-form improv through the Washington Improv Theater, with an emphasis on scene dynamics, game, ensemble, and the Harold form. She’s brought these skills directly into her work at AIE by co-leading improv workshops at the TerrapinStrong Symposium (October 2025) and PTK Symposium (March 2026) on adapting to change, and co-designing a class for undergraduates using improv as a tool for career development (IDEA312, Spring 2026).