Who is Dr. Wendi?
I am a scholar, thinker, auntie, truth-teller, and educator.
Trained as a counseling psychologist, I bridge practical wisdom with scholarly aplomb to make knowledge creation of and about Black women and girls accessible to them. I have committed decades of my work grounded in the experiences of everyday folx, ensuring that the sense we make of their lives in the halls of academia aligns with who they know and understand of themselves.
My professional work and intention lie at the intersection of education and psychology, ensuring that our institutions, practitioners, policymakers, and advocates, have the capacity to care for the actual human being in front of them, rather than caricatures informed by the talons of racism, (hetero)sexism, and ableism that have long justified colonial capture and extraction of human beings for capital gain.
I am also a Black woman who leads and who studies the ways Black women have led over time. I am immensely curious about the ways Black women carve out pathways for their leadership and how necessary Black women’s positionalities are for expanded articulations of leadership of ALL people. In my work I continuously ask…
What lessons can be gleaned from the life experiences of Black women in life, love, and relationship to inform their liberatory leadership praxis?
There is theory and poetry in our liberatory moves and my work in this time is to elevate that and make it visible to deepen the leadership canon and offer another way.
I am a bit of an expert
Drawing from the leadership legacy of Black women’s global and U.S.- based resilience my current work articulates leadership pathways for women and girls across diverse contexts and backgrounds and has informed the promotion of health and well-being among youth, their families, and the educational and mental health practitioners who work with them.
I offer my expertise on issues of race, gender, and class in academic and popular media. My work has been featured in Ebony.com and NowThis News and published in scholarly journals in the educational and psychology disciplines.
BEYOND: Back To School w/ Dr. Wendi Williams, 2022
KRON News Bay Area, Dean of Mills School of Education Discusses New Affordable Housing Program for Oakland Teachers, KRON, 2018
Now This News, Mental Health Expert Discusses Impact of Seeing Acts of Racism Go Viral, 2020
About Dr. Wendi
Psychologist, advocate, and educator, Dr. Wendi Williams applies her work at the intersection of education and psychology to her scholarship and leadership praxis. Dr. 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.