Dr. Bennett has been active in the intercultural field since 1967. He served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Micronesia from 1968-1970. He holds a PhD in intercultural communication and sociology from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis; an MA in psycholinguistics from San Francisco State University; and a BA from Stanford University.

Dr. Bennett is executive director of The Intercultural Development Research Institute, which sponsors innovative research in the area of intercultural competence. He creates and conducts programs in domestic and international diversity for corporations and other organizations. In addition to his work at Tuck, Dr. Bennett teaches at Smith College, the Boeing Leadership Center, and Eni Corporate University in Italy.

Dr. Bennett is well known for his Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity and the Intercultural Development Inventory, which are used internationally to guide intercultural training design and to assess intercultural competence. He has received the highest awards for excellence from the Society for Intercultural Education, Training and Research (SIETAR) and from NAFSA: Association of International Educators. Earlier in his life, he was a Westinghouse Talent Search winner for his work in science.

For 15 years, Dr. Bennett was a faculty member at Portland State University, where he created a graduate program in intercultural communication.

He is now an adjunct professor at University of the Pacific in Stockton, California, and an adjunct faculty member at the University of Milano-Bicocca in Italy. He coauthored (with Edward Stewart) the revised edition of American Cultural Patterns: A Cross-Cultural Perspective (Intercultural Press, 1991). Dr. Bennett is also a reviewer for the International Journal of Intercultural Relations, the editor of Basic Concepts of Intercultural Communication: Selected Readings (Intercultural Press, 1998), which contains a number of his chapters and articles, and is co-editor and contributor for the third edition of The Handbook of Intercultural Training (Sage, 2004).

In 1986, Dr. Bennett co-founded The Intercultural Communication Institute (ICI), a private, nonprofit educational foundation designed to foster an awareness and appreciation of cultural difference in both the international and domestic arenas. ICI offers an MA in intercultural relations (in conjunction with the University of the Pacific) and conducts the annual Summer Institute for Intercultural Communication, which draws more than 700 participants from the U.S. and abroad to three weeks of intensive seminars with 50 prestigious faculty.