Hania Taduran

Hania Taduran is the founder of Breaking Barriers, an organization dedicated to advancing mental health support for athletes through education, peer connection, and advocacy. A former Division I beach volleyball athlete on a No. 12 nationally ranked NCAA team (FIU Beach Volleyball), Hania competed at a high level and has firsthand experience with the pressures of being a student-athlete and their impact on mental health. She brings both lived experience and clinical training to her work, allowing her to bridge the gap between performance culture and mental health care in a way that resonates deeply with athletes and the systems that support them.

Hania holds a bachelor’s degree in psychology and is currently completing her licensure in Marriage and Family Therapy at Pepperdine University. Her clinical interests center on grief, identity, trauma, perfectionism, and the psychological toll of high-performance environments particularly how these experiences show up in athletes through burnout, anxiety, emotional shutdown, and reluctance to seek help.

Mental health advocacy is deeply personal for Hania. After losing her father to suicide at a young age, sports became both a coping mechanism and a core part of her identity. While competing at the Division I level, she witnessed firsthand how athletic culture often rewards silence, minimizes emotional pain, and frames vulnerability as weakness. These experiences shaped the mission behind Breaking Barriers and continue to inform her approach to advocacy, clinical work, and storytelling.

In addition to Breaking Barriers, Hania has experience in healthcare and tech startups, where she focuses on building partnerships, scalable programs, and systems that support both mental health access and sustainable organizational growth. She works at the intersection of clinical psychology, performance, and innovation, with a strong emphasis on turning awareness into action and helping organizations create environments where help-seeking actually feels safe. Hania aims to normalize honest conversations around grief, identity, and mental health in sport. Her work is driven by the belief that amplifying vulnerable stories not only breaks stigma, but helps athletes feel less alone and that meaningful change happens when personal experience, clinical insight, and systemic reform come together.