About
Dr. Jae L. Pettigrew is a Community Psychologist, writer, researcher, speaker, and consultant whose work explores the relationship between people, communities, culture, and the institutions that shape human experience.
Raised in Chicago's historic Bronzeville community and now based in Houston, Texas, Jae has spent much of her life observing, questioning, and writing about the forces that influence who people become. Her work explores identity, spirituality, belonging, faith, leadership, psychological well-being, and the ways individuals and communities learn to survive, adapt, create meaning, and define themselves within the environments they inherit.
At the center of her work is a longstanding curiosity about the human experience. She is especially interested in what people do with what happens to them, particularly how they heal, make meaning, and move forward. How do families, communities, cultures, histories, relationships, and institutions shape the stories people tell themselves? What do people carry forward from the environments that formed them? Which adaptations protect us in one season but constrain us in another? And what becomes possible when people understand those influences well enough to make conscious choices about who they want to become?
Those questions have followed Jae throughout her life and eventually led her to the field of Community Psychology. Her doctoral research examined religious leadership and a culture of perfectionism, exploring the psychological experiences of religious leaders through questions of burnout, stress, loneliness, empathy, depression, trust, leadership expectations, and organizational culture. That research grew from a broader interest in what happens when human beings encounter institutions that carry powerful expectations about who they should be, how they should behave, and what parts of themselves they are permitted to reveal.
Her scholarly interests continue to bring Community Psychology into conversation with Black American history, culture, spirituality, religious institutions, and lived experience. She is particularly interested in the space between what institutions say they are designed to provide and what people actually experience within them, as well as the ways communities respond when formal systems do not fully meet their psychological, relational, cultural, or spiritual needs.
Jae's work is not confined to traditional academic spaces. Through public speaking, essays, commentary, consulting, and developing nonfiction projects, she translates psychological ideas into conversations about everyday life. Her approach invites people to examine familiar experiences from a different vantage point, connecting individual behavior to the relationships, histories, communities, cultural narratives, and systems surrounding it.
Long before becoming a psychologist, however, Jae was a poet.
She published her first collection, Through Her Eyes, in 2009, followed by Tranzparent in 2016 and Metamorphosis in 2019. Poetry became one of her earliest ways of making sense of experience. Before she had the language of psychology, research, or theory, she had questions, observation, reflection, and the written word.
Those early creative works explored many of the same themes that would later emerge in her scholarship: identity, relationships, pain, transformation, spirituality, self-awareness, resilience, and the complicated process of becoming. Writing allowed her to examine how experience changes the way people understand themselves and the world around them.
That foundation continues to shape her voice today. Jae does not view scholarship and lived experience as competing ways of understanding people. She believes some of the most meaningful conversations occur when research, history, culture, personal experience, and community knowledge are placed in conversation with one another. Her work seeks to make psychological thought rigorous without making it inaccessible and personal without abandoning intellectual depth.
Her educational journey reflects that same interdisciplinary curiosity. Jae earned a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration with a concentration in Marketing Management, a Master of Arts in Psychology, and a Doctor of Philosophy in Community Psychology. She is presently pursuing a Master of Business Administration, further expanding the questions she brings to leadership, organizational life, strategy, decision-making, and the systems people create to work and live together.
She is also the founder of PettiObjective LLC and the PettiObjective Foundation, ventures that grew from her longstanding interest in self-awareness, personal development, community, and the well-being of women. Her work across psychology, writing, entrepreneurship, nonprofit leadership, consulting, and community engagement has allowed her to encounter people in very different spaces while continually returning to many of the same human questions.
Whether she is writing, teaching, consulting, speaking, researching, or sitting in conversation with others, Jae is ultimately interested in understanding the person within the larger story surrounding them.
Across her scholarly, creative, and public work, one question remains especially important: How do the environments we inherit shape who we become, and what becomes possible when we understand those forces well enough to choose differently?
For Jae, psychology is not simply the study of individuals. It is the study of people in context: within families, communities, cultures, relationships, organizations, histories, and systems. Understanding the human experience requires looking backward, looking inward, and looking outward at the worlds that teach us who we are supposed to be and the choices we make about who we will become.
