Joanna La Torre

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 is an interdisciplinary queer feminist scholar examining 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 and maintain conditions of persistent health inequity. Jo has also received traineeships through several federal programs including the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s Minority Fellowship Program, the National Institute of Drug Abuse’s INSPIRE: Indigenous Substance Use and Addictions Prevention Fellowship, and the Title IV-E child welfare program. Her research addresses a critical gap in research on Pilipinx American health 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 youth and young adults to restore intergenerational knowledge transmission. Ms. La Torre has organized and practiced within Pilipinx communities for over fifteen years, upon which she builds powerful interventions aimed at interrupting legacies of colonial harm.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/joanna-la-torre-lcsw/