MEET DR. WENDIÂ
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She is not what you expect. She is exactly what you need.
Psychologist. Scholar. Executive Coach. President of the American Psychological Association. Founder of The Well. And someone who knows, from the inside, what it costs to lead at the highest level without a place to be replenished.
There is a phrase Dr. Wendi Williams lives by that tells you almost everything you need to know about her:
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I do not worry about being liked, because I am profoundly loved.
-Dr. Wendi Williams
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That sentence is a philosophy and a practice. It is the kind of groundedness that only comes from doing serious inner work, the kind she now helps other leaders do. It is also, quietly, an invitation. Because the leaders who find their way to The Well are often ones who have spent years being everything to everyone, and have slowly, almost imperceptibly, lost track of what it feels like to simply be themselves.
Dr. Wendi knows that terrain. She has walked it. And she built The Well so that no leader has to walk it alone.
HOW SHE GOT HERE
A life built at the intersection of psychology, leadership, and the fierce belief that people are worth fighting for.
Dr. Wendi Williams came to psychology the way most people come to their deepest work, through experience before theory. Long before she held a doctorate, she was in the field, working directly with young people through Big Brothers Big Sisters of Greater Los Angeles and the Planned Parenthood Sibling Leadership Program, a program designed to disrupt cycles of early risk by working with the siblings of teenage parents. She learned early what psychological science would later confirm: that the conditions people live and lead in shape everything, and that genuine transformation requires meeting people where they actually are.
That conviction took her to Georgia State University in Atlanta, where she completed her doctoral training in psychology. Her research followed two threads that have remained central to everything she has built since. The first was positive youth development, rooted in her early fieldwork and animated by the belief that young people are not problems to be managed but leaders to be cultivated. The second was the psychology of Black women's work experiences, examining with rigor and care the dynamics, costs, and extraordinary resilience that characterize the professional lives of Black women navigating institutions not always designed to hold them.
Both lines of research, it turns out, were preparation for The Well.
THE WORK BEFORE THE WELLÂ
She has led from the inside of institutions — and she knows exactly what they can cost.
Dr. Wendi's career has taken her into some of the most demanding leadership contexts in American academic and professional life, as Department Chair, Associate Dean, Dean, Provost, and Board leader across institutions navigating complexity, crisis, and transformation.
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. 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, the hard-won institutional knowledge and the commitment to personal renewal, is what makes The Well different from any other leadership development offering.
A HISTORIC MOMENT
Leading the world's largest organization of psychologists from the woman who once just needed to get the citation format right.
There is something Dr. Wendi finds quietly extraordinary about her current role. The American Psychological Association shaped her before she ever set foot in a doctoral program because APA formatting determined whether she earned an A on a paper. Before she understood what the association was, it was this large, formidable presence in her academic life. That the same institution is now hers to steward puts her in genuine awe.
In 2026, Dr. Wendi Williams became President of the American Psychological Association, the largest professional organization of psychologists in the world, with 190,000 members, a $130 million budget, a governance structure comprising over 180 council members, 30 boards and committees, 50 state and provincial associations, and nearly 60 divisions. She chairs its 15-person board and provides oversight to the organization's CEO during one of the most consequential and complex moments in the association's history.
She came to the role with three initiatives she had planned with intention. The first, 100 Psychologists Rising, expands the field's vision of what a psychologist can do, beyond traditional career paths, to improve lives and change the world. The second, Work and Wellness, applies psychological science to understand the factors that shape wellbeing at work; grounded in the study of Black women's work dynamics and the historical, cultural, and structural forces that have always shaped their professional lives. This initiative is the intellectual and scholarly foundation of The Well. The third, Youth Mental Health and Summit, centers young people as the authorities on what undermines their own mental health and challenges the field of psychology to listen and respond.
In office, she led the association through a governance crisis, a senior leadership transition, and a United States House of Representatives investigation.
She did not seek the APA presidency to accumulate a title. She sought it because she believed the field of psychology, her field, needed to be bolder, broader, and more honest about what it means to advance human wellbeing in a world defined by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity.
That belief is also why she built The Well.
THE SCHOLARSHIP
She does not just teach the framework. She built it.
Dr. Wendi's scholarly work is the intellectual foundation beneath everything The Well offers. Her book Black Women at Work: On Refusal and Recovery examines the work experiences of Black women with the rigor of a researcher and the honesty of someone who has lived the terrain she is studying. WE Matter! Intersectional Anti-Racist Feminist Interventions with Black Girls and Women extends that work into practice — offering frameworks for those who work alongside Black girls and women in clinical, educational, and organizational settings. She also served as associate editor of The APA Handbook of the Psychology of Women — a foundational resource in the field.
Her research has been recognized with Presidential Citations from the APA in 2024 and from Division 35 of APA in 2015. She has been honored for her mentorship and her teaching — including the Newton Teaching Award at Long Island University — which tells you something important: that the most meaningful recognitions of her career have come not from publishing alone, but from how her work has changed the people in the room with her.
Black Women at Work
On Refusal and RecoveryÂ
Bloomsbury 2023
The Majestic Place
The Freedom Possible in Black Women's LeadershipÂ
Bloomsbury 2025Â
WE Matter!:Â Â Â Â Â Intersectional Anti-Racist Feminist Interventions with Black Girls and Women
Routledge 2022
Why The Well ExistsÂ
At some point, the leader who teaches others to renew has to practice what she preaches.
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.
The Well is the answer to that recognition. It is what Dr. Wendi wished had existed for her — and what she is determined to build for the leaders who are living now what she was navigating then. A place grounded in the conviction that
...rest and renewal are not the opposite of serious leadership. They are its most essential infrastructure.
What She BelievesÂ
What most leadership development gets wrong — and what The Well gets right.
 Dr. Wendi believes that most leadership development programs make a fundamental error: they treat leaders as engines to be optimized rather than human beings to be sustained. They offer frameworks for doing more, leading better, producing greater results — without ever asking the question that matters most: at what cost, and for how long?
She believes that the leaders who come to The Well are not broken. They are not failing. They are whole people who have been operating in conditions that demanded they give more than any whole person can indefinitely give. What they need is not to be fixed. What they need is to be seen, supported, and restored, so they can return to their work with the clarity, conviction, and capacity that brought them to leadership in the first place.
She also believes, with the precision of a researcher and the conviction of someone who has lived it, that the experience of Black women in leadership holds specific, transferable wisdom for all leaders. The ability to navigate complex systems with integrity. To lead through uncertainty without losing sight of the mission. To sustain vision when institutions are failing around you. These are not niche skills. They are the skills the world most needs from its leaders right now.
And she believes, in the words of Alice Walker, that the one way most people give away their power is to believe they have none.
The work of The Well is, in part, the work of returning that belief to the leaders who have forgotten it.
WHO SHE IS WHEN SHE ISÂ NOT LEADINGÂ
She fills her own well. Deliberately, regularly, and with great intention.
Dr. Wendi lives in the Metro Atlanta area, a return to the city where her doctoral journey began, and works with leaders across the country and around the world. She does not just teach renewal as a leadership principle. She practices it as a daily discipline.
Her own well is filled through meditation and prayer, through writing, and through time in nature — particularly long hikes that take her beneath a canopy of trees, where she looks up and finds the sky in glimpses. That image, the sky visible through the branches, partial and beautiful and always there even when the path feels dense, is one of the quieter metaphors for the work of The Well.
She is a proud aunt and godmother to the children in her family and community. She believes that all children are ours — that how we lead, how we live, and how we sustain ourselves is ultimately in service of the world we are building for the young people watching us. That belief gives her work its longest horizon.
And if you ever meet Dr. Wendi in person, the people who know her well will tell you: she is funny. Genuinely, unexpectedly, delightfully funny. The jokester who lives alongside the scholar surprises people every time, and that, too, is part of what makes a session with her feel like a place where your whole self is welcome.
Lives in:
Metro Atlanta, GAÂ
Rest Practice:
Meditation/Prayer Nature Long HikesÂ
Also Known As:
Proud Auntie, Godmother and Unexpected JokesterÂ
You are whole and perfect, just as you are.
 Rosie Phillips Davis
Until we are all free, none of us are free.
- Fannie Lou Hamer Â
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