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Ovita F. Williams, PhD (she/her/hers)

Senior Lecturer in Discipline - Exec Dir, CSSW Action Lab for Social Justice
Columbia University School of Social Work
New York, NY, United States

Dr. Ovita Williams is Executive Director of the Action Lab for Social Justice and Senior Lecturer of Discipline at Columbia School of Social Work. Dr. Williams develops and facilitates interactive workshops for social workers, managers, and various practitioners at organizations on facilitating challenging dialogues around race, class, gender, sexual orientation and intersecting identities. At Columbia, Dr. Williams has worked with students, alumni, faculty and administrators on the development of the course Decolonizing Social Work through a power, race, oppression, privilege framework. The course centers dismantling anti-Black racism and white supremacy culture.

During her clinical practice as a social worker, Dr. Williams worked with survivors of intimate partner violence at the Kings County District Attorney’s Office. Prior to this position, Dr. Williams was a child and family therapist at the Children’s Aid Society. She is currently involved in racial equity facilitation and committed to social justice and ending gender-based violence. Dr. Williams has facilitated the Seminar in Field Instruction (SIFI) and expanded content around holding courageous conversations in supervision.

She is coauthor of Learning to Teach, Teaching to Learn: A guide for social work field education (2019) and contributed a chapter to The enduring, invisible, and ubiquitous centrality of whiteness, (2022), Ed. Dr. Kenneth Hardy.

A graduate of Vassar College (’90) and Columbia University (’93), Dr. Williams received her doctorate from the City University of New York Graduate Center, Silberman School of Social Welfare in New York City.

Dr. Williams was born in Guyana, South America and calls Brooklyn, NY home.

Disclosure information not submitted.

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