About this speaker
Dr. Wendi Williams is a scholar, thinker, auntie, truth-teller, and educator.
Trained as a counseling psychologist, Wendi bridge practical wisdom with scholarly aplomb to make knowledge creation of and about Black women and girls accessible to them. She has 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.
Her 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.
Wendi is also a Black woman who leads and who studies the ways Black women have led over time.
Drawing from the leadership legacy of Black women’s global and U.S.- based resilience, her 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.
Wendi offers her 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.
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.
