Board of Directors

Board Member
Anne M. Kress
President
Northern Virginia Community College

Anne M. Kress is the sixth president of Northern Virginia Community College, a role she began in January 2020. She has more than 25 years of experience in higher education, having served as a tenured faculty member in English, department chair, associate vice president, provost, and president at community colleges in Florida, New York, and now, Virginia. She is excited to have joined NOVA and looks forward to working with partners across the region to continue Northern Virginia’s economic growth and impact. At NOVA, Kress will focus on the role the college plays in assuring meaningful access to educational and economic opportunity; connecting students to transformational, high quality programs; building innovative industry and community partnerships; and increasing philanthropic support of student success.

In her work as president of Monroe Community College (Rochester, NY), Kress successfully completed a $50M capital campaign; launched a nationally-recognized economic and workforce development center that attracted over $20M in funding; established a comprehensive suite of student support services to address food, housing, transportation, child care needs, and financial emergencies; created the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and hired the college’s first Chief Diversity Officer; started and sustained the community’s only two early college high schools; and led well over $100M of construction projects.

Kress serves on the board of the American Association of Community Colleges and on work groups affiliated with the American Council of Education, Association of Community College Trustees, and Opportunity America. Kress is an immediate past director/trustee of the New York Power Authority and Canal Corporation, SUNY Research Foundation, Upstate New York Regional Advisory Board of the New York Federal Reserve, and was co-chair of New York Governor Cuomo’s Regional Economic Development Council.

She balances a commitment to liberal arts and workforce education with dedication to college affordability and student support. Kress was a member of the Higher Education Group of 50, a task force convened by the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators to develop policy recommendations for the reauthorization of the federal Higher Education Act, and co-chaired the 64-campus State University of New York’s Student Food Insecurity Task Force. She is immediate past-chair of the Community College Humanities Council and has also collaborated on two separate research studies related to the impact of Industry 4.0 on community colleges: Aspen Institute/Harvard and Community College Research Center/MIT. She has been an invited member of sponsored study tours of the German and Swiss apprenticeship systems and an adjunct professor at the University of Rochester’s Warner School of Education.

Kress earned two bachelor’s degrees, in Finance and English; a master’s degree in English; and a doctorate in Higher Education Administration, all from the University of Florida. She has been honored by her alma mater, the New York State Senate, YWCA, American Association of University Women, the Rochester Women’s Council, the Rochester Business Journal, the Rochester Technology and Manufacturing Association, and Phi Theta Kappa, among others. Kress is married to Ned Davis, and they have two teenage children.