Dr. Wendi Williams
Provost and Senior Vice President, Fielding Graduate University
Psychologist, advocate, and educator, Dr. Wendi Williams applies her work at the intersection of education and psychology to her scholarship and leadership praxis. Williams completed undergraduate studies at the University of California, Davis where she majored in psychology and minored in African and African American Studies. She completed graduate study at Pepperdine University (MA in Psychology) and Georgia State University, where she earned a doctorate in counseling psychology, with an emphasis in multicultural psychology and family systems.
In a career spanning two decades, Williams’ work delves into the contours of Black women’s and girls’ inner lives, leveraging deep knowledge of their interiority as source content for the development of culturally-responsive educational and psychological interventions. Applying critical lenses of liberation psychology and Womanist, Black, and Intersectional feminist theoretical frames with an equity-centered systems power analysis, Williams develops and implements educational, wellness, and leadership intervention programming with individuals, groups, and organizations. Her work attends to the individual and organizational transformation required to foment the optimal growth and development of diverse women and girls while attending to the organizational and societal systems-level change required for sustainable equity practice.
Williams has made significant scholarly contributions in the field through authored and edited works as well as conference presentations of her research and analysis, and professional development curricula and workshops. With her recently published edited book, WE Matter!: Intersectional Anti-Racist Feminist Interventions with Black Girls and Women, and forthcoming books, Black Women at Work: On Refusal and Recovery and The Majestic Place: The Freedom Possible in Black Women’s Leadership, she keeps these conversations in the discourse. Of late, she has become more interested in “diminishing the paywall” between the work she engages for and about diverse girls’ and women’s lives and the actual communities that can benefit from this work. To this end, she engages in popular media as well as scholarly journals and books to ensure her work is accessible to members of the public and the professionals who will serve them.
Dr. Williams leverages her background and platform to lead organizations that support the optimal development of vulnerable communities, especially societal challenges that can be enriched by diverse women’s unique perspectives and approaches to leadership. Some examples include serving as co-chair of the Board for Girls Leadership, an organization that teaches girls to exercise the power of their voice through programs grounded in social-emotional learning; and serving in multiple roles, including as president of the Society for the Psychology of Women (SPW), Division 35 of the American Psychological Association (APA). She is currently their representative on the APA Council of Representatives.
In her downtime, Dr. Williams enjoys time at the ocean and hiking among the redwoods local to her Bay Area home in Oakland, CA. A true bibliophile and lover of words, she is an avid reader and occasional poet, with a deep appreciation for stories that center the inner lives and intimacies of Black, Indigenous and Folx of Color characters. Among all the titles and roles she holds, she is most honored to be “Auntie Wendi”, which allows her to dote on her nieces, nephew, and godsons coming of age in Arizona, New York, Washington D.C., and Japan. Nurturing the lives of these children while being a generous human to her family and community rank among her highest life priorities.