Fundamental aspects of nonperturbative QCD dynamics which are not obvious from its classical Lagrangian, such as the emergence of a mass scale and confinement, the existence of a zero mass bound state, the appearance of universal Regge trajectories and the breaking of chiral symmetry are incorporated from the onset in an effective theory based on superconformal quantum mechanics and its embedding in a higher dimensional gravitational theory. In addition, superconformal quantum mechanics gives remarkable connections between the light meson and nucleon spectra. This new approach to hadron physics is also suitable to describe nonperturbative QCD observables based on structure functions, such as GPDs, which are not amenable to a first-principle computation. The formalism is also successful in the description of form factors, the nonperturbative behavior of the strong coupling and diffractive processes. We also discuss in this article how the framework can be extended rather successfully to the heavy-light hadron sector. Show Partial Abstract