Office of the President
Kerry Walk, Ph.D., is the eighth president of Marymount Manhattan College.
President Walk is a champion of student learning and success, with more than 25 years of experience as a higher education leader. Since taking office on July 1, 2015, she has pursued a vision of MMC as a national liberal arts college focused on creativity and the arts, committed to social justice, and embedded in the rich educational and professional landscape of one of the world’s greatest cities.
Major accomplishments include the construction of the Judith Mara Carson Center for Visual Arts, funded by a historic $25 million gift, the largest in MMC’s history; launching the College’s signature initiative, CityEdge, a grant-funded program that promotes the “City as Our Campus” educational model and forges pathways for students from college to career; appointing the College’s first Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Officer; building the BRIDGE prison education initiative with $1.7 million in grants from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; founding the MMC Summer Academy for Pre-College Students as well as the Center for Health, Human Development, and Creativity; and overseeing two strategic plans.
Before joining MMC, President 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. Prior to Otis, she held academic leadership positions at Harvard University, Princeton University, and Pitzer College (one of The Claremont Colleges). At Princeton, she built and directed the acclaimed transdisciplinary Princeton Writing Program, and at Pitzer she spearheaded successful strategic planning and reaccreditation efforts.
President Walk is an elected member of the Board of Trustees of The Commission on Independent Colleges and Universities in New York (CICU). 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.