Bard’s extraordinary faculty are dedicated to the philosophy of teaching. Today and throughout Bard’s history, members of the faculty have effected change in medicine, the arts and letters, international affairs, journalism, scientific research, and education, among other endeavors. These distinguished scholars are advisers as well as instructors: Bard has no graduate teaching assistants. And the average class size of 16 in the Lower College and 12 in the Upper College allows for intimate discussions and one-on-one interaction.
David Bloom ’13 MM ’15. Photo by Bruce Kung
“What brought me to Bard, in a word, was the faculty.”
“To work with Joan Tower, George Tsontakis, and James Bagwell was an opportunity I couldn’t miss. I had long followed and admired their work, and then I found out that each of them taught here. It’s easy for musicians to focus only on music, whereas I wanted to have a broader education that would prepare me for a world that requires a more well-rounded base of knowledge and experience.”
—David Bloom ’13 MM ’15
—David Bloom ’13 MM ’15
Faculty News
Arts Mid-Hudson Bestows Community Arts Grant for Bridge Arts Project With Musical Direction by Bard Faculty Member Roland Vazquez
Vazquez will guide the ensemble in repertoire rooted in Afro-Cuban, Caribbean, and contemporary Latin jazz traditions, drawing on his expertise in the music of the African Diaspora.
Arts Mid-Hudson Bestows Community Arts Grant for Bridge Arts Project With Musical Direction by Bard Faculty Member Roland Vazquez
Roland Vazquez, artist in residence.
Vazquez will guide the ensemble in repertoire rooted in Afro-Cuban, Caribbean, and contemporary Latin jazz traditions, drawing on his expertise in the music of the African Diaspora. The project brings together professional musicians and advanced youth artists from across the Hudson Valley and will culminate in a public performance in Ulster County later in 2026, with an emphasis on expanding access to culturally specific jazz programming and creating mentorship opportunities for young musicians alongside professional artists.
The Music Program, one of the largest programs on Bard’s campus, provides a wide range of musical concentrations, from classical composition and performance to jazz, electronic music, musicology, ethnomusicology, and music theory.
Post Date: 06-29-2026
Bard Faculty Member Gwen Laster Awarded a MacDowell Fellowship
While in residence, Laster will complete work on her project, “Is My Black Still Beautiful: Reflections on a Childhood in Detroit.”
Bard Faculty Member Gwen Laster Awarded a MacDowell Fellowship
Gwen Laster, visiting artist in residence. Photo by Tom Moore Studios
Laster’s project explores the global complexities of Colorism, a discriminatory practice within one’s own ethnic group based on a person’s complexion and skin tone, through the lens of a Black girl reared during the post–civil rights movement in Detroit. The music spans various genres from contemporary classical to Motown, blues, soul, R&B, and jazz—both free and traditional. “Is My Black Still Beautiful” will premiere in New York City on July 23 at Mabou Mines,and on September 26–27 at the Philipstown Depot Theater.
The Music Program, one of the largest programs on Bard’s campus, provides a wide range of musical concentrations, from classical composition and performance to jazz, electronic music, musicology, ethnomusicology, and music theory.
Post Date: 06-26-2026
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The Zora Neale Hurston Writing Fellowship at Bard College Welcomes Four Writers for Its 2026 Summer Residency Program
The Zora Neale Hurston Writing Fellowship at Bard College Welcomes Four Writers for Its 2026 Summer Residency Program
The Zora Neale Hurston Writing Fellowship at Bard College, now in its fifth year, welcomed its cohort of four writers this summer, Chihiro Shibata, Fawziah A. Qadir, Stephanie Jenn Boggs, and Tomomi J. Emoto.Clockwise from top left: Chihiro Shibata, Fawziah A. Qadir, Tomomi J. Emoto, and Stephanie Jenn Boggs.
The Hurston Fellows are in residence for three weeks this summer. Each fellow spends their time working, writing, and researching independently on dedicated projects for the duration of the residency. Founded and directed by Associate Research Professor Donna Ford Grover, the Hurston Fellowship enables writers from all disciplines who have not had the opportunity to develop their scholarship, and supports writers who are currently employed as adjuncts or visiting professors with terminal degrees.
“The diverse academic backgrounds and voices of the participants of this program merge together into a wonderful writing community,” said Grover. “The Bard College campus is a fitting backdrop for the amazing work that happens in these three weeks.”
While in residence as a Hurston Fellow, Chihiro Shibata will work on a chapter from her dissertation on the effects of body size in wild golden-handed tamarin monkeys (Saguinus midas) in Suriname. Shibata will draw on field data from the main study group, which consists of locomotor and postural patterns, activity budgets, and sleeping site selection, to address a larger discussion on how the golden-handed tamarins adapt to being the “gorillas” among the tamarin species of the South American rain forests. Shibata is a lecturer in the anthropology department at Queens College, City University of New York.
Fawziah Qadir will spend her time during the Hurston Fellowship working on her project Refusal as Praxis: Black Mothers, Educational Malpractice, and the Politics of Opting Out, which examines Black mothers’ participation in the opt-out movement as a form of political resistance to educational malpractice in US public schools. Drawing on qualitative interviews and narrative analysis, the project reframes opting out not as parental disengagement, but as deliberate refusal—an act that exposes the limits of schooling systems built on compliance rather than care. Grounded in Critical Race Theory, Black feminist thought, interest convergence, and the capabilities approach, Qadir’s manuscript positions Black mothers as theorists whose lived experiences generate critical insights into the failures of contemporary educational reform. It also turns inward, interrogating how refusal operates as a methodological and pedagogical stance within the researcher’s own scholarly practice. Qadir is a lecturer in the Education Program at Barnard College.
As a Hurston Fellow, Stephanie Jenn Boggs will spend her time advancing her first book. Her cultural memoir seamlessly bridges her scholarly research and fieldwork in Black studies, media studies, and visual culture with ethnographical and familial accounts to explore US screen history. Boggs is the Mellon Visiting Faculty Scholar-in-Residence of Black Intellectual Thought at Xavier University of Louisiana.
Tomomi J. Emoto is currently completing a book-length ethnohistory of Tsushima Island, Japan, integrating archival research with her ethnographic fieldwork to illuminate the island’s complex borderland identities. Her scholarship is grounded in extensive, long-term ethnographic fieldwork, with theoretical focus upon historical consciousness, nationalism, cultural performance of identity, and border studies. Emoto is an adjunct assistant professor at Queens College, City University of New York.
Post Date: 06-26-2026
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Katherine Boivin Awarded New Foundation for Art History Fellowship
Katherine Boivin Awarded New Foundation for Art History Fellowship
Katherine Boivin, associate professor of art history and visual culture at Bard College, is the recipient of a 2026-27 Non-Residential Fellowship from the New Foundation for Art History (NFAH), a year-long fellowship awarded annually to mid-career scholars carrying out innovative work on the art of any era or culture. NFAH aims to identify and support early and mid-career scholars and scholarly projects which would not necessarily be sustained by other established avenues, and to provide support based not only on merit but on need in order to foster the best scholarship possible in the art history field.Katherine Boivin, associate professor of art history and visual culture.
The fellowship will contribute $50,000 in support of Boivin’s current project, Powers of Projection: Contingent Architecture and Medieval Subjectivity. The book considers everyday spaces in the medieval city, which were constructed and maintained through large-scale collaborative processes but which, through their small scale, addressed individual pedestrians. It asks how medieval people experienced these spaces and whether such fundamentally contingent architecture shaped the understanding of the self in relationship to society. The project guides readers from outside the gates of the medieval city into its very heart through a series of encounters with different projecting architectural features, including bridges, city gates, market stalls, and charnel houses.
Katherine M. Boivin is the author of Riemenschneider in Rothenburg: Sacred Space and Civic Identity in the Late Medieval City (Penn State University Press, 2021) and coeditor of Riemenschneider in Situ (Brepols, 2021) and Gothic Space: Studies in Celebration of Stephen Murray (Brill, 2026). Boivin’s work has been recognized with numerous fellowships and awards, including the Michèle Dominy Award for Teaching Excellence, a Samuel H. Kress Foundation Art History Grant, an NEH Summer Stipends Award, an ICMA Research Grant, and a Fulbright Fellowship. Her research focuses on the dynamic interactions between art, architecture, and human activity in late medieval Europe.
About the New Foundation for Art History
Founded in 2019, the New Foundation for Art History strives to serve the field in innovative ways that have been overlooked or underserved by existing institutions of its kind. The goal of the NFAH is to foster the best current research in Art History with a flexible approach to grant-making, and to lead by example towards a more equitable future of the discipline where excellence is promoted and rewarded in the broadest ways possible.
Post Date: 06-24-2026
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Human Rights Roadmap Signed by Pavlina Tcherneva Featured in the Guardian and Le Monde
Human Rights Roadmap Signed by Pavlina Tcherneva Featured in the Guardian and Le Monde
Professor of Economics and President of the Levy Economics Institute Pavlina Tcherneva was a signatory on a New Economies for Eradicating Poverty roadmap to “eradicating poverty beyond growth,” with the goal of identifying and popularizing economic alternatives that would reduce inequality without focusing on GDP. Developed with over 400 economists, trade unions, and grassroots movements, the roadmap, which was adopted at the International Labor Organization in April, outlines policy measures that countries can take to ensure economic and environmental sustainability for all. The report is based in part on a 2023 UN report on the Job Guarantee, on which Tcherneva consulted.Pavlina Tcherneva, president of the Levy Economics Institute at Bard College.
Several economists who are signatories wrote an op-ed for the Guardian that the current economic landscape is precarious and environmentally destructive. “Poverty is manufactured,” they write. “We are putting concrete options on the table [that] spell out evidence, implementation steps and real‑world examples. We call on political leaders at all levels to use them, to listen to those most affected.”
Post Date: 06-23-2026
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Bard College Partners with Ulster County on Ground‑Level Air Quality Monitoring Network
Bard College Partners with Ulster County on Ground‑Level Air Quality Monitoring Network
Bard College’s Hudson Valley Community Air Network (HVCAN) is partnering with Ulster County to install 17 new ground‑level air quality sensors at libraries, town halls, and community centers across the county. The sensors will provide the community with real‑time information about local air pollution and offer free alerts through JustAir, a platform that notifies users when air quality becomes unhealthy and again when conditions improve. The sensors measure fine particulate matter, or tiny particles from sources like soot, smoke, and vehicle exhaust that are small enough to be inhaled and cause serious health impacts. Because the sensors are installed roughly six feet off the ground, they capture the air residents actually breathe, which can differ significantly from rooftop or elevated monitors. “HVCAN demonstrates that science does not belong only in laboratories or universities; it belongs in communities, where people can use knowledge to support healthier futures together,” said Desirée Lyle, program director at Bard’s Center for Environmental Sciences and Humanities. “The data we create encourages curiosity, dialogue, and shared responsibility for environmental health, while offering a model for how science and community engagement can grow together.”Desirée Lyle installs an air quality monitor for the Poughkeepsie Regional Air Quality Station at Adriance Memorial Library. Photo by Julia Beeman
The Center for Environmental Sciences and Humanities puts Bard’s dedication to the environment, science, and social change into practice to support the fair management of our shared natural resources. The center conducts quantitative research in the natural and social sciences, crafts communication, participates in policy making, and bridges academic inquiry with community needs. The data and insights collected through CESH related projects are applied directly back to communities, with the end goal of addressing and solving environmental problems in real time.
Post Date: 06-18-2026
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Sara J. Winston Receives Helena Svetla Fund Grant
Sara J. Winston Receives Helena Svetla Fund Grant
Sara J. Winston, associate director of the photography program and artist in residence, has been awarded the inaugural Helena Svetla Fund Grant, administered through the Patient Caregiver Artist Coalition (PCAC). PCAC, a Brooklyn-based nonprofit founded by Bard alum Jordan Rathkopf ’02, is dedicated to elevating the voices of patients and caregivers through art and storytelling, fostering empathy and inclusion in healthcare culture. This first grant from the fund supports artists working at the intersection of art and healthcare, and will support the production of Sara's forthcoming monograph, Infusion, to be published by Saint Lucy Books of Baltimore, MD. The book showcases over a decade of self-portraits made during monthly and biannual intravenous medical treatments for Multiple Sclerosis, alongside episodic creative nonfiction writing and an interview between the author and the artist Moyra Davey. Infusion will launch on January 30, 2027, in conjunction with a solo exhibition at CPW Kingston in Kingston, NY.Sara J. Winston, associate director of the photography program and artist in residence. Photo by Jordan Swartz
The Photography Program at Bard College offers instruction in the medium while providing a historical and aesthetic framework for student development within the context of a broad-based liberal arts education.
Post Date: 06-18-2026
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Nayland Blake ’82 Profiled in Hyperallergic
Nayland Blake ’82 Profiled in Hyperallergic
Nayland Blake ’82, professor of studio arts at Bard College, was profiled in Hyperallergic. In an interview with Lisa Yin Zhang, Blake spoke about how their art and work affects their understanding of their own identity, what Pride Month means to them, and the movements that informed the work of their peers in queer art. “I think the models were the Civil Rights movement and the Women’s Rights movements—the insistence on the importance and centrality of work by women artists or, for lack of a better term, minority artists, all through the ’60s and ’70s,” Blake told Zhang. “To me, the lessons of those movements were: It’s not enough to just make something in your studio. You have to also be a scholar. You have to also be a writer. You have to be a person who champions other work, so that you build the context within which your work can be legible.” Blake’s first large-scale outdoor installation, “Haunt”: Being the Folly of One Victorya Spectre, will be on view at Art Omi in Columbia County, NY, on June 27.Nayland Blake ’82, professor of studio arts.
The Studio Arts Program at Bard provides a breadth of expanded offerings while retaining a strong core of courses that provide a firm grounding in basic techniques and principles, in an era when much contemporary art cannot be contained within the traditional categories and technology is transforming the production of visual images.
Post Date: 06-17-2026
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