LaShawn Faith Washington

Dr. LaShawn Faith Washington is a tenure-track assistant professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy at The University of Texas at Austin. She joined the UT faculty in August 2025, and prior to her appointment, Dr. Washington was an assistant professor of qualitative research at the University of Oklahoma in the Department of Educational Psychology. She earned her Ph.D. in Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis with an emphasis in Higher Education from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A Dallas, Texas native, Dr. Washington is a proud first-generation non-traditional student, community college graduate, and a two-time alumna of UT Austin receiving an M.Ed. in Curriculum and Instruction-Cultural Studies in Education, and a bachelor's degree in Government with honors.

Her overarching Black feminist research explores the historical and contemporary inequities in higher education and how issues of race and gender intersect in ways that impact the experiences, relationships, and trajectories of Black women in academia. In 2024 she was selected as a semi-finalist for dissertation of the year by the American Educational Research Association (AERA) Division J, and her most recent scholarship was published in The Journal of Higher Education, The International Journal of Qualitative Research, Teachers College Record, in the Review of Higher Education.