News & Events

The Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College presents two new exhibitions on view from November 6 to December 19. Spectres is an ongoing project of Belgian artist Sven Augustijnen, which revisits one of the most shameful events of European colonial history: the abduction, torture, and execution of Patrice Lumumba, the first elected Prime Minister of independent Congo. Hotel Palenque Is Not in Yucatán is a multilayered exhibition and architectural intervention curated by Montserrat Albores Gleason as the culmination of a three-year curatorial fellowship at CCS Bard supported by the Jumex Foundation. Organized as part of an international curatorial conference to be held at CCS Bard from November 6 to 9, Hotel Palenque Is Not in Yucatán takes its starting point from the narrative in Robert Smithson’s famous Hotel Palenque (1969-72), a slide projection taken from a lecture originally delivered by the artist at the University of Utah. Learn more about Spectres and Hotel Palenque Is Not in Yucatán.

On Monday, November 10, Steven Millhauser, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Martin Dressler, The Knife Thrower, and other works, reads from his most recent short-story collection, We Others: New and Selected Stories, winner of The Story Prize and a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. Charles Simic, in The New York Review of Books, calls We Others “a book of astonishingly beautiful and moving stories by one of America’s finest and most original writers,” and David Rollow, in the Boston Sunday Globe, writes, “Every reader knows of writers who are like secrets one wants to keep, and whose books one wants to tell the world about. Millhauser is mine.” Millhauser will be introduced by novelist and Bard literature professor Bradford Morrow.
http://www.bard.edu/news/releases/pr/fstory.php?id=2617

Bard MFA sculpture faculty Nancy Shaver is the first-ever recipient of the Art as Media Award presented by the National Women’s Political Caucus (NWPC) as part of the Exceptional Merit Media Awards (EMMAs). The EMMAs were created by the NWPC in 1986 to honor and reward journalists and media outlets in radio, television, print and the Internet that inform and educate the public about critical issues that impact women’s lives. The 2014 EMMAs were presented on the evening of October 27 at The Metropolitan Club of New York City. Previous recipients include Ellen Goodman, Cokie Roberts, Barbara Ehrenreich and Diane Sawyer. Cochairs for this year’s awards were Senator Kirsten Gillibrand and Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney. Nancy Shaver's work has been shown extensively in the United States and abroad in both solo and group exhibitions. She has also been the recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant and fellowships from Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony.

The Longy School of Music of Bard College has announced the formation of a unique training orchestra that provides a Master of Music degree, newly approved by the State of New York and is designed to prepare them for the mounting challenges facing today’s orchestra players. The training orchestra, recruited from the finest postgraduate musicians, will offer advanced orchestral and leadership training and grant a Master of Music degree in Curatorial, Critical and Performance Studies. All applicants accepted into the three-year degree program will receive a fellowship, which includes the full expense of tuition as well as an annual stipend.

Visit the training orchestra website

Download the press release (PDF)

Read more in the New York Times and the Boston Globe

Jennifer Cordi, associate professor of biology at Bard High School Early College Manhattan, has been selected to receive a 2014 Sloan Award for Excellence in Teaching Science and Mathematics from the Fund for the City of New York. Professor Cordi joins six other extraordinary New York City public high school science and mathematics teachers in receiving this prestigious award. The prize carries a $5,000 award for Professor Cordi and a $2,500 award for the BHSEC Biology Program, to be presented in a ceremony at the Great Hall at New York City's Cooper Union on Wednesday, December 3. Professor Cordi teaches evolutionary biology, botany, and general biology. Her research focuses on Middle Devonian fossil plants and the evolutionary patterns of vascular plant groups. She is a fellow of the New York Academy for Teachers.

On Tuesday, November 18, the Bard Math Circle will host the middle-school-level American Mathematics Competition (AMC 8) exam. In its third year at Bard, this 25-question, 40-minute exam contains engaging math problems that are challenging at the middle-school level, and is intended to inspire, promote enthusiasm, and foster a healthy attitude toward mathematics. Students will be exposed to the richness of middle-school-level mathematics at a deeper level than is ordinarily encountered in the schools.
http://www.bard.edu/news/releases/pr/fstory.php?id=2625

The Environmental Consortium of Colleges & Universities has awarded its Great Work Award in honor of Thomas Berry this year to Erik Kiviat ’76, executive director and cofounder of Hudsonia, a not-for-profit institute for research, education, and technical assistance in the environmental sciences based at the Bard College Field Station on the Hudson River. A certified wetland scientist, Kiviat has more than 45 years’ experience with natural history and environmental issues—especially those related to rare native species as well as invasive nonnative species—in the Northeast, and across North America, Europe, and Africa.
http://www.bard.edu/news/releases/pr/fstory.php?id=2623

Author Laura van den Berg has been selected to receive the annual Bard Fiction Prize for 2015. The prize, established in 2001 by Bard College to encourage and support promising young fiction writers, consists of a $30,000 cash award and appointment as writer in residence for one semester. Van den Berg is receiving the prize for her book The Isle of Youth (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2013). In this collection of stories, van den Berg explores the lives of women mired in secrecy and deception. The characters in these stories are at once vulnerable and dangerous, bighearted and ruthless—grappling with the choices they have made and searching for the clues to unlock their inner worlds. Van den Berg’s residency at Bard College will be for the spring 2015 semester, during which time she will continue her writing, meet informally with students, and give a public reading.
http://www.bard.edu/news/releases/pr/fstory.php?id=2622

Bard College Center for Civic Engagement and the Political Studies Program will present a panel, “Europe Wonders, What Will America Fight For?” The panel will address the increasing and overlapping challenges facing U.S.-European relations, including the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, tensions with Russia, the military drawdown in Afghanistan, and the future of NATO and security challenges across the Middle East and North Africa. Featured panelists include Simona Soare from Romania, Joe Burton from New Zealand, and Scott Silverstone from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. The event will be on Monday, November 3 at 6:30 p.m. in the Weis Cinema at the Bertelsmann Campus Center at Bard College.
http://www.bard.edu/news/releases/pr/fstory.php?id=2620

On September 24, Pavlina Tcherneva published an article in the Journal of Post Keynesian Economics that rocked the financial news. Examining widely used U.S. income data by economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty, Professor Tcherneva found a startling trend: over the last 60 years, the financial benefits of economic recoveries in the United States have increasingly gone to the wealthiest Americans. Tcherneva, Bard College assistant professor of economics and Levy Economics Institute research associate, illustrated her findings in a striking chart that went viral on social media. Coverage of her research appeared in the New York Times, NPR, Moyers & Company, and Slate, among other publications.
http://www.bard.edu/news/news.php?id=113

The Bard College Model United Nations team participated in the annual Security Council Simulation at Yale University October 16–19. Students served on a wide variety of committees ranging from real world issues (the Syrian crisis and Mandela's South Africa) to those drawing on more creative sources (Downton Abbey and Pirates of the Caribbean). Other participating schools included the U.S. Military Academy, Princeton, Columbia, McGill, SUNY Geneseo, Emory, Mount Holyoke, and NYU. Sophomore Jeremy Kaplitt served as Head Delegate and also won Outstanding Delegate for his work as the National Security Adviser on Hillary Clinton's Cabinet. Other members of the team were: Julia Lang Gordon '17, Simao Chen '18, Sophia Foster (BRIDGE student), Aya Qumber (PIE student), Andrew Djang '16 and Vikramaditya Joshi '18. “These simulations provide an excellent opportunity for students to learn about the complexities of international politics and diplomacy,” said James Ketterer, who co-teaches Bard's United Nations course. “While it is important to read and analyze the literature, diplomacy makes sense in a different way when you have to negotiate and make compromises with others sitting across the table from you.” The Bard team competes again next month at a Model Arab League simulation at Northeastern University.

Max Kenner, Bard alumnus and executive director of the Bard Prison Initiative (BPI), has won the 2014 Smithsonian American Ingenuity Award in Education. The awards recognize 10 of the year’s most amazing achievements and the innovators behind them. On October 16, Smithsonian magazine, the flagship publication of Smithsonian Media, announced winners of the third annual American Ingenuity Awards, saluting 10 groundbreaking individuals across nine categories including technology, performing and visual arts, natural and physical sciences, education, historical scholarship, social progress, and youth achievement. Max Kenner conceived of and created the BPI as a student volunteer organization when he was an undergraduate at Bard College in 1999. Over the last decade, Kenner has led the expansion of BPI from a pilot program with 15 students to a nationally recognized education initiative enrolling nearly 300 students across six campuses in correctional facilities throughout New York State.
http://www.bard.edu/news/releases/pr/fstory.php?id=2615

On Monday, November 3, Julia Elliott, winner of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and a Pushcart Prize, will read from her debut short-story collection, The Wilds, which Publishers Weekly describes as “a brilliant combination of emotion and grime, wit and horror… Elliott’s gift of vernacular is remarkable, and her dark, modern spin on Southern Gothic creates tales that surprise, shock, and sharply depict vice and virtue.” Elliott will be introduced by novelist and Bard literature professor Bradford Morrow.
http://www.bard.edu/news/releases/pr/fstory.php?id=2616

The Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College presents the opening concert for the 2014–15 season of the American Symphony Orchestra concert series on October 24 and 25 at 8 p.m. The program includes Fryderyk Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in E Minor, Op. 11, with Maryna Kysla ’15, piano; and Franz Schubert’s Symphony No. 9 in C Major (“Great”). The concert will be conducted by Leon Botstein, music director. A special preconcert talk by Christopher H. Gibbs, James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Music, Bard College, begins at 7 p.m.
http://www.bard.edu/news/releases/pr/fstory.php?id=2614

Bard has received a two-year grant from the Department of Education totaling $174,623 to support a new Global Partnership Project: Connecting International, Regional, and Language Studies. The College is one of 31 U.S. institutions of higher education to receive funding through the Department of Education’s Undergraduate International Studies and Foreign Language Education program, which provides grants to plan, develop, and implement programs to strengthen and improve undergraduate instruction in international studies and foreign languages in the United States.
http://www.bard.edu/news/releases/pr/fstory.php?id=2613

Bard alumna and La Voz editor Mariel Fiori '05 has been named an Entrepreneurial Woman of the Year by Gateway to Entrepreneurial Tomorrows, Inc. (GET). GET promotes economic development in the Hudson Valley by supporting women, minorities, youth, and veterans in starting their own businesses. Every year the organization recognizes outstanding regional businesspeople with the Hudson Valley Entrepreneurial Awards. Mariel Fiori, who cofounded the Spanish-language magazine La Voz as a Bard student and has edited the publication for a decade, will be recognized for her contributions as a community leader. Fiori and five other awardees will be honored at GET's 10th anniversary celebration on Thursday, October 23, as part of the Hudson Valley Entrepreneurial Conference and Expo in Wappinger Falls.

The Classical Studies Program at Bard College presents Bracko: A reading of Sappho’s poetry on October 18 by Anne Carson, Robert Currie, Nick Flynn, and Sam Anderson. Bracko presents the lyric poetry of Sappho, the ancient Greek poet known to many English-speaking readers through Anne Carson’s translation If Not, Winter. In addition to welcoming Sappho’s most distinguished translator to Bard, the event celebrates an extraordinary moment in the history of Sappho’s poetry. Sappho made headlines in the international press this year because of the rare discovery of two previously unknown poems.
http://www.bard.edu/news/releases/pr/fstory.php?id=2603

Neuroscientist Stephanie Kadison, a biology professor at Bard High School Early College Queens, received a STEM Hero Award from the New York Academy of Sciences (NYAS) during the United Nations 69th Annual General Assembly on September 22. Professor Kadison was recognized as an exceptional educator who inspires young people to enter the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. She was a member of the first cohort of the NYAS's Afterschool STEM Mentoring Fellowship Program, in which she taught genetics to underserved middle school students, an experience that inspired her to become a teacher. The inaugural STEM Hero Awards were given to 10 individuals. Other honorees included Datin Seri Hajah Rosmah binti Mansor, the first lady of Malaysia; Paul Kagame, the president of Rwanda; and Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma, chairperson of the African Union. The NYAS award ceremony accompanied the launch of their Global STEM Alliance, a public-private partnership that brings together governments, companies, schools and NGOs to increase access to STEM education around the world.

This major international symposium, entitled The Future Curatorial What Not and Study What? Conundrum, will take place at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, November 6–9, 2014. Given the extraordinary expansion of curatorial research and its surrounding debates, the focus of this international conference, organized collaboratively by four of the world’s most prominent curatorial programs, asks not “what is next” but rather the more urgent and durable question of “what futures?”
http://www.bard.edu/news/releases/pr/fstory.php?id=2612

“Remembering the Genocide of European Roma During World War II” Followed By a Performance of Mozart’s Requiem

The Bard College Conservatory of Music presents a special event on Friday, October 17: a panel discussion titled “Remembering the Genocide of European Roma during World War II” followed by a performance of Mozart’s Requiem. Exploring issues of history and responsibility, the themed event was conceived of by acclaimed Hungarian conductor Ádám Fischer, who will conduct the Requiem Mass and participate on the panel. The panel discussion will be held at 4 p.m. in the László Z. Bitó ’60 Conservatory Building, followed by a performance of the Requiem with James Bagwell, chorus master at 6:30 p.m. in the Sosnoff Theater of The Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts.
http://www.bard.edu/news/releases/pr/fstory.php?id=2611

The Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College will host its seventh annual international conference in Olin Hall October 9–10. The conference, “The Unmaking of Americans,” will ask what aspirations and which dreams still animate American idealism. Americans today must confront the weakening of a collective vision of freedom and equality. Americans are dismayed at the power of money, the decay of self-governance, and a bureaucracy that seems impervious to popular control. And yet few dare to articulate a collective vision that might hold the country together. The Arendt conference brings together scholars, writers, and educators to ask, “Are there still American values worth fighting for?"
http://www.bard.edu/news/releases/pr/fstory.php?id=2595

The Bard College Center for Civic Engagement is pleased to announce Get Engaged in the Hudson Valley, a volunteer fair with a focus on education, youth services, health-care organizations, and advocacy groups. Get Engaged will be held on Wednesday, October 15, from 4 pm to 6 pm at Bard College’s Bertelsmann Campus Center Multipurpose Room.
http://www.bard.edu/news/releases/pr/fstory.php?id=2610

Bard College has been awarded a $5,000 grant from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) People, Prosperity, and Planet (P3) Phase 1 Award Program to support a Bard Center for Environmental Policy (Bard CEP) graduate students’ project. The grant, for a project titled “The Integrated Use of Road Salt Management and Application Techniques,” was awarded in a national competition to a Bard CEP team of graduate students for an innovative and sustainable design to help solve one of today’s complex environmental problems.
http://www.bard.edu/news/releases/pr/fstory.php?id=2609

Assistant Professor of Classics Lauren Curtis has won the 2014 research prize for best unpublished Ph.D. dissertation in the field of Greek and Roman music from the International Society for the Study of Greek and Roman Music and its Cultural Heritage (MOISA). Professor Curtis's dissertation, On with the Dance: Imagining the Chorus in Augustan Poetry, explores the poetic and cultural significance of Greek song-and-dance culture in Augustan Rome. Professor Curtis is revising her dissertation for publication and will present work from the book-in-progress at the MOISA panel at the next Society for Classical Studies meeting in New Orleans in January.

Has individualism, as one of the highest American values, done more harm or good for American society? The world at large? The Bard Debate Union and Hannah Arendt Center host a debate titled “Resolved: Individualism is an American value worth fighting for” on Tuesday, October 7, at 7 p.m. in the Campus Center Multipurpose Room.
http://www.bard.edu/news/releases/pr/fstory.php?id=2608

The Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts presents “Music Alive! Dynamic Women Making Music from Around the Globe” on Sunday, October 5 at 3 p.m. in the Sosnoff Theater. This exciting program is curated by artistic directors Joan Tower, Grammy Award–winning composer, and Blair McMillen, pianist, and showcases works by female composers performed by more than 30 students from The Bard College Conservatory of Music and the Music Program. There will be a special appearance by Grammy Award–winning soprano Dawn Upshaw.
http://www.bard.edu/news/releases/pr/fstory.php?id=2607

Bard College has received a $5,000 grant from the Avon Foundation for Women through its Speak Out Against Domestic Violence initiative. The grant will fund the Green Dot, etc. program at Bard College to engage community members as activated bystanders in the reduction of sexual assault, dating abuse, and stalking. This is the second year Bard College has received funding from the Avon Foundation for Women.
http://www.bard.edu/news/releases/pr/fstory.php?id=2606

In the second in a regular series of conversations hosted by Bard professor Neil Gaiman, author and artist Audrey Niffenegger (The Time Traveler’s Wife) discusses time travel, Doctor Who, graveyards, taxidermy, graphic novels, pictures, books, and long-distance romance. The program takes place on Friday, October 3 at 7:30 p.m. in the Sosnoff Theater.
http://www.bard.edu/news/releases/pr/fstory.php?id=2605

Bard College and its affiliated programs were well represented at the People's Climate March in New York City on Sunday, September 21. More than 100 faculty, staff, and students participated from Bard College in Annandale, the Bard Center for Environmental Policy, the Bard MBA in Sustainability, and the Bard High School Early Colleges. The Bard Office of Sustainability, Environmental and Urban Studies Program, and student-run EcoReps and Environmental Collective were instrumental in organizing buses from Bard College, with transportation funding provided by the People's Climate March and the Sierra Club. Bard MBA offered a viewing area from their 6th Avenue space overlooking the march route, which was decorated with large banners hanging from the upper-story windows.

The weekend of September 19–21 was a busy one for the Bard College Debate Union, both in Annandale and at Eastern New York Correctional Facility. On Friday, the Bard Debate Union at Eastern defeated the University of Vermont in a debate about the merits of disbanding NATO. On Saturday and Sunday, the Bard Debate Union in Annandale and the Bard Center for Civic Engagement hosted the inaugural Bard College Invitational debate tournament.
http://www.bard.edu/news/news.php?id=112

Bard College Professor of Historical Studies Myra Young Armstead has been awarded a fellowship as a Schomburg Scholar-in-Residence. The fellowship, which is funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, gives access to the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and other centers of The New York Public Library. Schomburg Scholars research and write about black history and culture throughout the black diaspora, interact with other participating scholars, and give lectures on their findings. Professor Armstead has begun her six-month residency, during which she will research progressive public history in Harlem.
Read More

The Bard Globalization and International Affairs program and the West Point–Bard College Exchange will present “New World Disorder: U.S. Grand Strategy in a Chaotic Middle East,” a panel featuring Walter Russell Mead and James Ketterer of Bard College and Ruth Beitler of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. The panel will address the increasing and overlapping challenges facing the United States across the Middle East and North Africa. It will take place on Monday, September 22 at 6:30 p.m. in the Weis Cinema at the Bertelsmann Campus Center at Bard College.
http://www.bard.edu/news/releases/pr/fstory.php?id=2601

The Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts presents a performance by the Longy School of Music of Bard College Sistema Side by Side Orchestra, conducted by Jorge Soto, on September 20 at 3 p.m. The Sistema Side by Side Orchestra travels from Boston to honor Maestro José Antonio Abreu, founder of El Sistema, the unique program from Venezuela that brings about social change through music and has improved the lives of hundreds of thousands of children worldwide.
http://www.bard.edu/news/releases/pr/fstory.php?id=2602

The Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts and The John Cage Trust at Bard College present two special concerts featuring works by acclaimed American composer John Cage. On Saturday, September 20, there will be a rare performance of Cage’s The Ten Thousand Things in the Fisher Center’s LUMA Theater, at 8 p.m., with a preconcert talk at 7 p.m. by musicologist James Pritchett. On Sunday, September 21, Sō Percussion will debut Branches, a new, multimedia program at Bard, with a performance of We Are All Going in Different Directions in the Sosnoff Theater at 3 p.m.
http://www.bard.edu/news/releases/pr/fstory.php?id=2600

The new Bard High School Early College Cleveland officially opened with a ribbon cutting ceremony on Friday, September 5. President Botstein called the students "pioneers" in education, and emphasized the importance of engaging teenagers in learning by treating them with respect and challenging them in school. The new campus is a partnership between Bard College and the Cleveland Metropolitan School District, and joins seven other Bard early college programs around the country. BHSEC students earn a high school diploma and a tuition-free associate's degree from Bard College in four years.


Read More:
Teenagers Need to Be Treated Better, Bard President Tells Cleveland Audience, for Them to Love Learning
Students at New Bard College High School in Cleveland Are "Pioneers" on a Mission to Learn and Succeed

Photos from the Plain Dealer: Bard High School Early College Opens

Bard President Leon Botstein Visits Bard High School Early College Cleveland for Ribbon Cutting

Video: Bard High School Early College Cleveland Welcomes First Students

The Center for the Study of the Drone at Bard College announces the release of The Drone Primer: A Compendium of the Key Issues, an online and print publication about the basic facts, issues, questions, and patterns related to unmanned systems in military, civilian, and commercial contexts. The Drone Primer is a comprehensive and concise handbook covering fundamental themes, questions, and facts about drones in technology, history, law, strategy, and culture. The report includes a portfolio of drone art, a first for a publication of this kind. The primer is free and available to the public.
http://www.bard.edu/news/releases/pr/fstory.php?id=2599

On Monday, September 15, Joseph O'Neill, Bard’s Distinguished Visiting Professor of Written Arts and the author of the PEN/Faulkner Award–winning Netherland, will read from his new novel, The Dog. Publishers Weekly describes The Dog as “Pitch-perfect prose . . . Clever, witty, and profoundly insightful, this is a beautifully crafted narrative about a man undone by a soulless society.”
http://www.bard.edu/news/releases/pr/fstory.php?id=2598

The Landscape and Arboretum Program at Bard College and the New York Botanical Garden (NYBG) are offering noncredit continuing education classes on gardening at Bard College this fall. Open to the public, these classes feature some of the top names in the horticulture industry and cover a wide array of topics.
http://www.bard.edu/news/releases/pr/fstory.php?id=2596

On Monday, September 22, author Lindsay Hill ’75, will read from his novel, Sea of Hooks, winner of the 2014 PEN Center USA Fiction Award, finalist for the Chautauqua Prize, and named one of the top 10 books of the year by Publisher’s Weekly and New York magazine. Kirkus Reviews calls Sea of Hooks “a remarkable and multifaceted novel—philosophical, poignant and puzzling,” while Publisher’s Weekly writes that “nearly every paragraph astonishes, every moment rich with magic and daring.”
http://www.bard.edu/news/releases/pr/fstory.php?id=2597

The Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College, together with Bard's Center for Civic Engagement and Human Rights Project, is launching a new initiative, Hate and the Human Condition. The initiative aims to promote sustained reflection on what hate is and how it works, and to organize its exploration through a range of interdisciplinary and co-taught courses. Both a theoretical and a practical endeavor, it seeks to foster the academic study of hate while also connecting scholars and students to institutions and organizations whose work involves dealing with hate-related issues. Four such courses will take place this fall at Bard College in New York and three Bard-affiliated campuses: Al-Quds University, the American University of Central Asia, and Bard College Berlin.
http://www.berlin.bard.edu/news/view/article/bard-college-berlin-participates-in-a-new-academic-initiative-launched-by-the-hannah-arendt-center/

The Bard College Clemente Course in the Humanities in Kingston is now accepting applications for its 2014–2015 program at the Kingston Library. Now entering its fourth year, the program offers a college-level introduction to the humanities to adults living on low incomes. Students attend at no cost. Tuition, books, childcare, and transportation (within the Kingston area) will be provided. Students who successfully complete the course earn 6 college credits from Bard College.
http://www.bard.edu/news/releases/pr/fstory.php?id=2594

The Center for Curatorial Studies and the Human Rights Project are pleased to announce that Jeanne van Heeswijk, an artist based in the Netherlands, has been selected for the first Keith Haring Fellowship in Art and Activism at Bard College. Made possible through a five year-grant from the Keith Haring Foundation, the Keith Haring Fellowship is a cross-disciplinary, annual, visiting Fellowship for a scholar, activist, or artist to teach and conduct research at both the Center for Curatorial Studies and the Human Rights Project at Bard College.
http://www.bard.edu/news/releases/pr/fstory.php?id=2593

Five students in the Bard College Conservatory of Music departed for Cali, Colombia, on Friday, August 15, for a Trustee Leader Scholar (TLS) project called Sounds of Social Change. Rylan Gajek-Leonard '16, Caitlin Majewski '15, Alexzandra Morris '18, Avery Morris '18, and Daniel Zlatkin '16 are teaching music to children in the Orquesta Sinfónica Infantil y Juvenil de Siloé, an organization that serves at-risk youth in the region. Daniel's sister Rebecca Zlatkin is there making a video documentary of the project. The group has brought donated music books, instrument accessories, and other supplies for students in the program. They will perform a benefit concert with the Orquesta de Siloé on August 21.

The Bard College men's basketball team departed on Monday, August 11, for Costa Rica, where players will participate in three basketball clinics and play three games against professional teams. The Raptors won their first game on Wednesday night, with sophomores Alex Fabean-Scotch and Harry Johnson each scoring 20 points to help defeat Santa Cecelia 94-31. The team has also visited a community center in San Jose, where they played basketball and soccer with local children and donated 200 pairs of shoes, which they brought in partnership with the organization Samaritan's Feet. The team will return to the United States on August 21.
http://www.bardathletics.com/index.aspx?path=mbball

This fall, The Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College presents an extraordinary series of music, dance, art, and theater programs. The season features world-class musical performances, orchestral and chamber concerts, contemporary performance and art events, and innovative student productions from September through December.
http://www.bard.edu/news/releases/pr/fstory.php?id=2592

Mariel Fiori '05 and Emily Schmall '05 founded La Voz in 2004 as a Trustee Leader Scholar (TLS) project, aiming to serve the Latino community of the Hudson Valley with a free Spanish-language magazine. On Tuesday, August 12, the publication will celebrate its 10th anniversary with a benefit party at the Spiegeltent at Bard's Fisher Center. The evening will feature Latino food, live Argentine and Caribbean music, and an art auction of work by local Latin American artists. La Voz will also be honoring inspirational leaders in the Latino community. All proceeds from the event will support the ongoing work of La Voz.
https://fishercentertickets.bard.edu/single/SelectSeating.aspx?p=295

The National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture (NAMAC) has named Peggy Ahwesh, Bard College professor of film and electronic arts, as the winner of the 2014 NAMAC Artist Award. A faculty member at Bard since 1990, Ahwesh's expertise includes film production, feminist studies, and media advocacy. "Ultimately, Ahwesh has developed a practice that insists on political and social topicality, handled with theoretical and formal rigor, while remembering the audience," writes NAMAC’s board of directors in its award announcement. "It is her lighter touch that has helped make her work, densely critical as it is, so accessible to so many people." Professor Ahwesh will receive the award at NAMAC's State & Main conference in Philadelphia on August 8.
http://www.namac.org/idea-exchange/awards-2014-conference

Bard College and the University of Witwatersrand collaborated on an innovative, interdisciplinary workshop on the arts and human rights at the Wits campus in Johannesburg, South Africa, August 5 to 7. A project of Bard and the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research, the event featured presentations by curators, practicing artists, legal advocates, and social scientists. The workshop explored the intersections of human rights and the arts, aiming to foster an intellectual community across disciplines and institutions.
http://wiser.wits.ac.za/event/arts-human-rights-day-one