Director, Valhalla Foundation
Dariana leads a portfolio of Valhalla’s K-12 education investments focused on scaling proven, high-performing school models and building evidence on new school designs, including those that use AI to deepen learning. She partners with grantees, funders, and field leaders to drive collective impact and strengthen the field’s use of data, evaluation, and continuous improvement.
Dariana has spent more than 20 years working at every level of the K-12 system, in schools, in the nation’s largest school district, and at national nonprofits, building deep relationships across the education ecosystem along the way. Most recently, as a Partner at Transcend, she set the vision for and led the organization’s partnership strategy, building an ecosystem of partnerships with nonprofit organizations, state education agencies, system leaders, and the broader field in pursuit of the organization’s vision to reimagine school so that all students have access to extraordinary learning experiences. Before that, as Director of School Development and National Support at Internationals Network for Public Schools, she partnered with districts across the country to reimagine how schools serve multilingual learners. As Director of School Design at the New York City Department of Education, she helped scale the P-TECH model across the school district and supported the launch of innovative elementary and middle schools.
Dariana is an immigrant from the Dominican Republic and a graduate of New York City public schools, and that experience has shaped her continued commitment to expanding access to excellent schools. She holds an MPA from NYU’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service and a BA from Brooklyn College.