Maria-Christina Spießberger is a senior expert in the EAF team and works as a coach and trainer for career planning, performance skills, communication and equal opportunities in business and science. Her solution- and resource-oriented trainings and workshops are interactive, creative and adapted to the needs of participants to create an inclusive framework for development and reflection. She is project manager of the career-building program “Sign Up!” to promote the careers of female postdocs from the Max Planck Society, accompanies mentoring and peer coaching programs and trains managers and other employees on gender communication, assertiveness and appearance. In the field of diversity, her focus is on critical whiteness, anti-racism and gender equality.

Her CV is circular and colorful. Supported by a Fulbright scholarship, she went to New York after her studies in jazz singing at the Kunst-Universität Graz and completed a Master’s in jazz performance at the Manhattan School of Music. After graduation, she as a freelance voice and performance coach in New York and Berlin for many years, earned a teaching credential from the Berlin Senate for performance skills and early music education when working as a lecturer at the Social College of the bbw Academy. She then decided to train as a business coach (Dr. Bock Coaching Akademie), which was followed by further training as a team/group coach (Inhesa Institute). Since then, she has combined her skills when necessary. She’s active as a coach in the Berlin Start Up School and the Kompetenzzentrum Berliner Handwerkerinnen (DGB) and continues to run a podcast and blog through her coaching platform D’Accord Coaching.

As a first-generation academic, she is a mentor at ArbeiterKind.de e.V., an association that supports young adults of the first generation in starting their studies and careers.