La-Tarri Canty-Bess serves as the Assistant Vice President for Campus Initiatives in the Division of Community and Campus Life at Dartmouth College. Grounded in interdisciplinary frameworks of restorative practices, organizational change, and inclusion, her work advances institutional structures that position belonging, mattering, and becoming as central to academic excellence. In this role, she collaborates across schools and administrative divisions to cultivate strategic partnerships, align values with practice, and translate theory into sustainable institutional action.

Prior to her current appointment, Canty-Bess served as Associate Dean for Community Life and Inclusivity at Dartmouth, where she provided strategic leadership and oversight for the Office of Pluralism and Leadership, the Native American Program, and the William Jewett Tucker Center for Spiritual and Ethical Living. Drawing on restorative and systems-oriented approaches to institutional culture, she led the development and facilitation of campus-wide diversity, equity, and inclusion professional development initiatives. These efforts, now situated within the Division of Community and Campus Life, reflect an ongoing commitment to embedding equity, repair, and relational accountability into the organizational life of the institution.

Before joining Dartmouth, Canty-Bess spent more than a decade at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in senior student affairs leadership roles. As Associate Dean for Intercultural Engagement and Director of the SPXCE Intercultural Center, she contributed to strategic planning grounded in organizational change and intersectional approaches to identity, power, and belonging. As MIT's inaugural Director of Multicultural Programs, she helped establish foundational student services, leadership development initiatives, and equity-centered programming across the Institute.

A lifelong learner, Canty-Bess holds a Doctorate in Education from Northeastern University, where her scholarship engaged questions of institutional culture, leadership, and equity in higher education. She earned a Master’s degree in Social Science, with concentrations in Higher Education Administration and Diversity, from Binghamton University, and a Bachelor’s degree in English from the State University of New York at Oneonta, following an Associate’s degree in Elementary Education from the City University of New York. She is currently pursuing a Master of Divinity at Duke University, strengthening her inquiry into values-based leadership, moral responsibility, spiritual development and community-centered practice.