Wendy Simmons is a Senior Analyst at the Archive focusing on the roles that external actors play in the security and economic affairs of African countries. She has a B.A. from the University of Wisconsin, Madison where she also earned has an MA in Library Science from the University of Wisconsin. She wrote her doctoral dissertation in Information Science on Rural Information Services in Zimbabwe at the University of Maryland.
She traveled overland in Africa from Morocco to Kenya and from Tanzania to South Africa and back in the 1970s. She lived in three countries in the SADC region, as a librarian and trainer at the Universidade Eduardo Mondlane in Mozambique, and with local NGOs while doing dissertation research in Zimbabwe. She taught at the University of Botswana on a fellowship with the American Library Association before joining the Foreign Service. She joined the U.S. Information Agency as a regional library specialist, working with embassy staff to provide information services and programs on U.S. culture and society for citizens of each country. She served in South Africa and in Nigeria, traveling throughout Southern and Coastal West Africa, and from Washington for Central Africa. Her assignments also included Brazil for the Andean region and Thailand for mainland Southeast Asia. She has traveled extensively on the African continent, working with universities, archives, journalists and NGOs to develop partnerships for cultural and educ.a.tional exchanges. She was also director for the worldwide program which includes over 600 American Corner partnerships with local institutions.
Her love of FOIA began when she was an Indexer for the Archive 1988-1990, including primary Indexer for the Iran-Contra project. After retiring from the Foreign Service, she spent the last nine years at the State Department as a part-time reviewer for State Deparment’s FOIA litigation processing operations.