Doctoral Candidate
University of Washington, Seattle
Joanna La Torre, PhD(c), LCSW, MSW is an award-winning leader and teacher, a community embedded scholar, and doctoral candidate training with the Indigenous Wellness Research Institute. In January 2025, the Asian American Psychological Association Division on Filipinx Americans presented Ms. La Torre with the Filipinx American Leadership and the inaugural Valen Contreras Memorial Kaisahán awards, recognizing her decades long work with Pilipinx communities, cultures, health, healing, and wellbeing. Joanna’s teaching philosophy and pedagogy were also recognized by the the Group for the Advancement of Doctoral Education in Social Work, when she received the 2024 Student Award for Teaching in Social Work.
Ms. La Torre examines Pilipinx epistemologies as critical sites of decoloniality and intervention on lived consequences of coloniality / modernity such as chronic mental / health disparities. Her focus on indigenist and decolonial Pilipinxs interrupts co-constitutive gendered racial mechanisms of extraction that create conditions of health inequity. Jo has earned federal awards including the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s Minority Fellowship Program, National Institute of Drug Abuse’s INSPIRE: Indigenous Substance Use and Addictions Prevention Fellowship, and Title IV-E funding. Her research fills a gap in research on Pilipinx Americans who not only endured centuries of colonization and diaspora but have been largely omitted from scientific inquiry, despite their status as the third largest Asian American subpopulation, making up over 4.2 million people. Ms. La Torre’s future research aims at working with young people to restore intergenerational knowledge transmission.
Disclosure information not submitted.