Wendi Williams Is the New Provost at Fielding Graduate University in Santa Barbara, California

Wendi Williams is the new senior vice president and provost at Fielding Graduate University in Santa Barbara, California. The university enrolls more than 1,100 students offering master’s and doctoral degree programs in psychology and leadership studies. Women make up 78 percent of the student body.

Dr. Williams is the former dean of the School of Education at Mills College in Oakland, California. Earlier, she was the associate dean of academic affairs at the Bank Street College, Graduate School of Education in New York City. Prior to these roles, she provided academic leadership as program coordinator and department chair for counseling and school psychology at Long Island University in Brooklyn, New York.

In a career spanning two decades, Dr. Williams’ work delves into the contours of Black women’s and girls’ inner lives. Applying critical lenses of liberation psychology and Womanist, Black, and Intersectional feminist theoretical frames with an equity-centered systems power analysis, she develops and implements educational, wellness, and leadership intervention programming with individuals, groups, and organizations. Dr. Williams is the editor of WE Matter!: Intersectional Anti-Racist Feminist Interventions with Black Girls and Women (Routledge, 2021).

Dr. Williams completed her undergraduate studies at the University of California, Davis, where she majored in psychology and minored in African and African American studies. She earned a master’s degree in psychology at Pepperdine University in Malibu, California, and a doctorate in counseling psychology, with an emphasis on multicultural psychology and family systems from Georgia State University.