Diane Ariza Bio
Southern Connecticut State University

Dr. Diane Ariza has over twenty-five years of administrative and leadership experience, recruitment and enrollment management, teaching, and institutional planning in reinforcing the values of academic excellence, equity, inclusion, belonging, and multicultural and global diversity in higher education. She holds a doctorate of philosophy in Sociology from Western Michigan University (WMU) with a concentration in ethnic and race relations, as well as a master of arts in Anthropology from WMU. Her bachelor’s degree is in history and Spanish from Stetson University, Florida. 

Currently, Dr. Ariza is the inaugural Vice President for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at Southern Connecticut State University and teaches in the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program.   More recently, she served as the Inaugural Vice President for Community and Belonging at Nazareth College, Rochester N.Y. Prior to her work at Naz, she was AVP in Academic Affairs and Inaugural Chief Diversity Officer at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, CT. 

In all three positions, she serves as the university’s executive level diversity, inclusion, and belonging strategist.   She also has extensive experience teaching in ethnic studies, immigration, and youth identity. She has published on Black and Latino student experience on a predominantly white campus as well as on the Caribbean Youth Diaspora in Florida and second generation Latinx communities and challenges they face in education, identity, and adaptation. Her current research focuses on growing and assessing internationalization and multicultural cultural efforts in higher education. Other research and teaching interests include comparative global studies in immigration, Caribbean migration identity, health disparities, and race and ethnic relations, to name a few.