Kerry Walk

President, Marymount Manhattan College
New York, NY

Kerry Walk, Ph.D., is the eighth president of Marymount Manhattan College (MMC), a diverse and inclusive independent college located on New York’s Upper East Side and widely recognized for melding the liberal arts and sciences with creative practice. With more than twenty-five years of experience as a higher education leader, President Walk is a champion of the educational philosophy known as authentic learning, which promotes student success through experiences and opportunities that deliberately connect to students’ lives and professional aspirations, as well as to the challenges facing local and global communities.

Since taking office on July 1, 2015, President Walk has promoted authentic learning at MMC by deepening the College’s roots in the city. Most significantly, she has opened a residence hall in the vibrant Cooper Square neighborhood of the East Village; launched a signature initiative, CityEdge, which provides students with New York City-immersive coursework, paid internships, and distinctive career preparation programs; and founded the Geraldine A. Ferraro Institute for Precollege and Advanced Study, which offers programs for high school students and adult learners. She also established a grant-funded prison education initiative, BRIDGE, to strengthen connections between MMC’s main campus students and incarcerated students in the College’s degree programs at correctional facilities for women in Westchester County. Most recently, President Walk secured the largest gift in the College’s history, to construct a transdisciplinary visual arts center, anticipated to be an educational, community, and cultural hub when it opens in summer 2022.

Prior to MMC, Dr. Walk served as provost and then interim president of Otis College of Art and Design, in Los Angeles, where she advanced the institution through successful enrollment and fundraising efforts, a transformative campus expansion project, and a new strategic plan. She has held academic leadership positions at Harvard, Princeton, and Pitzer College, one of The Claremont Colleges. She earned her B.A. in English with honors from Wellesley College, and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in English Literature from the University of California, Berkeley, with specializations in Shakespeare and Victorian literature.

President Walk lives in New York with her wife, the educator and theoretical linguist Maggie Browning, an emeritus faculty member at Princeton.