Anna M. Yeakley, PhD, MSW

Anna M. Yeakley, PhD, MSW, currently serves as a national trainer and consultant in intergroup dialogue, facilitation, inclusive teaching practices, and strategies for responding to conflict. Anna has over 25 years of intergroup dialogue facilitation, training, program administration, and research experience, and has helped to develop new intergroup dialogue programs at 11 college campuses across the country. One of the largest programs she helped to develop was at UCLA, where she was the Director of the Intergroup Relations Program and a faculty instructor for the intergroup dialogue and facilitation training courses in the UCLA School of Education.  

Anna has led online dialogue facilitation trainings for higher education faculty, staff, and administrators, as well as K-12 teachers and community practitioners from across the country since 2019 and provided dialogue facilitation training to officers and enlisted from the United States Air Force from 2021-2022.  

Anna was trained in intergroup dialogue as a Social Work and Social Psychology doctoral student at the University of Michigan. Much of her passion comes from her personal experience growing up in a bi-cultural, bilingual, immigrant family, and being a college student caught in the middle of the inter-ethnic tensions that took place during the Los Angeles Riots/Uprising in 1992. Anna’s educational background includes Social Work (PhD, MSW, University of Michigan), Social Psychology (PhD, MA, University of Michigan), and Electrical Engineering (BS, Caltech).