Dr. Wendy Ashley

Wendy Ashley, Psy.D., LCSW, is a clinical social worker, professor, author, and nationally recognized educator whose work explores the intersections of race, identity, trauma, power, privilege, and healing. With over three decades of clinical experience, she brings together scholarship, clinical practice, and lived realities to challenge traditional approaches to mental health and help clinicians develop more culturally responsive, antiracist, and critically conscious practices.

Dr. Ashley is the author of "Merging Clinical Social Work Practice and Antiracist Positioning," "Antiracist Clinical Practice in Action," "What Are You Mixed With? Navigating Anti-Blackness, White Supremacy and Light-Skinned Privilege," and "Transformative Supervision Handbook (with Dr. Allen Lipscomb)". Across her writing, teaching, training, and clinical work, she examines how racism, anti-Blackness, colorism, identity, and systemic oppression shape psychological well-being, relationships, professional practice, and therapeutic interactions.

A Licensed Clinical Social Worker since 1998, Dr. Ashley has extensive experience in trauma-informed and relational clinical practice and is trained in EMDR and PACT. She has provided education, consultation, and professional training to clinicians, educators, organizations, leadership, and community-based professionals nationally and internationally.

Dr. Ashley is a Professor of Social Work at California State University, Northridge, where she has held numerous leadership roles, including serving as Department Chair. Her scholarship and professional work are grounded in a central conviction: effective clinical practice requires more than cultural awareness. It requires clinicians to understand themselves, recognize power and positionality, confront oppression—including within the helping professions—and develop the capacity to engage difficult conversations with curiosity, accountability, humility, and courage.

Through her books and other work, Dr. Ashley invites readers to move beyond simply *knowing* about antiracism and toward actively practicing it—in therapy, the classroom, organizations, relationships, and everyday life.