Wendi Williams, Ph.D.
Provost and Senior Vice President | Fielding Graduate University
Santa Barbara, CA, UNITED STATES
Psychologist, advocate, and educator, Dr.Wendi Williams applies her work at the intersection of education and psychology
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Biography
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.
As a scholar-practitioner, Dr. Williams’ research and practice inform her leadership practice in higher education contexts. Most recently, in her role as Dean of the School of Education at Mills College, and prior as Associate Dean of Academic Affairs at Bank Street College, Graduate School of Education, she utilized her role to cultivate equitable contexts for student, staff, and faculty development while attending to structural and cultural change to support important curricular and program development. Prior to these roles she provided academic leadership as program coordinator and department chair for the Counseling and School Psychology at Long Island University in Brooklyn, NY where she also served as Vice President of the University Faculty Senate and Representative of the School of Education on the university’s Union Executive Committee.
Areas of Expertise (6)
Academic & Administrative Leadership
Diversity, Equity & Inclusion
African American Studies
Intersectionality
Feminism
Multi-cultural Psychology and Family Systems
Media Appearances (1)
EP 100: Creating Pathways to Educational Access and Opportunity with Dr. Wendi Williams
Diverse Issues in Higher Education's In the Margins Podcast online
2022-12-08
Tune in as Dr. Williams shares how her experiences as a first-generation college student shaped the way she thinks about what it means to be an educator, educational administrator, and psychologist. She shares how she plans to move the ball forward on important diversity issues and craft a student experience centered on health, wellness, and academic achievement.
Articles (1)
OPINION: Donald Trump's Never Ending Legal Woes Puts NY Attorney General Letitia James and Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis In The Line Of Fire
Diverse Education
Dr. Wendi S. Williams
2022-12-07
Two Black women are leading the way to hold Donald Trump accountable—and he is using every trick in the book to discredit them. While this is the behavior people have come to expect from the former president, his actions actually reflect the tragic and historical treatment of Black women in the workplace in this country.