Meet Dr. Wendi
Wendi
Williams,
Ph.D.
2026 President, American Psychological Association
Psychologist · Scholar · Speaker · Author
Founder of The Well
Principal, WSW Consulting Services
Dr. Wendi Williams is a psychologist, scholar, and leadership strategist whose work lives at the intersection of equity, institutional transformation, and sustainable leadership.
For more than two decades, she has accompanied leaders through the places other frameworks will not go, the moments of transition, displacement, and reckoning that demand not just strategy, but a different way of being in leadership altogether.
She is the founder of The Well, a leadership practice grounded in the conviction that leaders cannot sustain the work of transformation if they themselves are running dry. The Well draws from the intellectual and practical wisdom of Black Women's Liberatory Leadership Praxis to offer a universal blueprint for leaders committed to impact, justice, and the long arc of change.
In 2026, Dr. Williams was elected President of the American Psychological Association, the largest psychology professional organization in the world, where she is advancing her vision of a radically well psychology for a radically complex world.
THE WORK BEFORE THE WELL
She does not just teach the framework. She has lived the terrain it maps.
Dr. Wendi's career has taken her into some of the most demanding leadership contexts in American academic and professional life. As Department Chair at Long Island University, Associate Dean at Bank Street College of Education, and Dean and Full Professor at Mills College — a storied institution with a deep history of progressive educator preparation — she built her understanding of what it means to lead with vision inside complex, often constrained systems.
From 2022 to 2025, she served as Provost and Senior Vice President at Fielding Graduate University — arriving as Chief Academic Officer of an institution navigating significant vulnerability, and building a turnaround strategy that included developing international revenue-generating partnerships. She knows what it is to walk into a leadership role that requires more than the role description promised. She knows what it is to carry the weight of an institution's future while also carrying her own.
During that same period, she served as Board Co-Chair of Girls Leadership, shepherding an organization through post-founder transition, shifting funding landscapes in the wake of the racial reckoning of 2020, and the particular challenges of scaling a mission-driven organization when the board itself is being rebuilt.
She has led through pandemic, through governance crisis, through institutional denial, through rupture , and she has done it while also doing her own inner work. That combination, hard-won institutional knowledge and an unwavering commitment to personal renewal, is what makes The Well different from any other leadership development offering.
BASED IN United States
DOCTORATE Counseling Psychology
Georgia State University
FOCUS AREAS Leadership Development · Equity Practice · Organizational Transformation · Wellness
COMMUNITY The Well with Dr. Wendi
Substack · Newsletter
The Season That Led to The Well
The Well did not arrive as a business plan. It arrived as a recognition, built slowly across years of leading through institutional complexity, holding boards together, turning around struggling organizations, navigating governance crises, and showing up with full presence for the people and institutions in her care.
Dr. Wendi's APA initiative on Work and Wellness began as scholarship. It became something more personal. Studying the relationship between work and wellness — examining how Black women in particular sustain themselves through careers shaped by systems that were not designed with them in mind, she kept encountering her own story in the research.
The exhaustion. The invisible labor. The way that leaders who are gifted at holding others rarely build adequate structures for holding themselves.
A place grounded in the conviction that rest is leadership's most essential infrastructure.
The Well exists because Dr. Wendi built what she needed, and recognized that the leaders she was walking alongside needed it too. Not another leadership program. A practice. A place to return to. A well that does not run dry.
I love leading. What I could not sustain was the invisibility of the person doing it. The ask for my exertion was relentless. The attention to my humanity was not. When I named what I needed — a moment of spaciousness, a pause to reflect and return — it was read as weakness, even as I was overperforming strength. I was sandwiched between those who drew from me and those who resented what I had to offer. That is the history that created The Well. And the conviction that good leaders deserve a place to stay well while they stay in the work.
— Dr. Wendi Williams