A man in a navy blue bomber jacket teaches in a seminar-style classroom.

Ephraim Asili MFA ’11, associate professor of film and electronic arts; director, Film and Electronic Arts Program. Photo by Chris Kayden

Bard Faculty

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

Faculty News

Bard College Professor Jenny Xie Selected for 2026 Howard Foundation Fellowship

Xie’s fellowship in the category of Poetry is one of 14 fellowships awarded by the foundation this year.

Bard College Professor Jenny Xie Selected for 2026 Howard Foundation Fellowship

Jenny Xie, assistant professor of written arts.

Jenny Xie, assistant professor of written arts at Bard College, has been announced as a recipient of a Howard Foundation Fellowship for 2026-27. Xie’s fellowship in the category of Poetry, conferred by the George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation, is one of 14 fellowships awarded by the foundation this year, which support independent creative and scholarly work on major projects by early mid-career individuals who have demonstrated potential to be future leaders in their fields.

During her fellowship, Xie will receive $40,000 in unrestricted funds to devote her time to researching, developing, and writing her third poetry collection, Dead Time, which delves into forms of directionless time, or time untroubled by plot and by imperatives of action. Xie is the author of two other collections of poetry. Eye Level (2018) was a finalist for the National Book Award, and the recipient of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets and the Holmes National Poetry Prize from Princeton University. The Rupture Tense (2022) was a finalist for the National Book Award and the CLMP Firecracker Award, and a recipient of the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award. Xie has also been supported by fellowships and grants from Civitella Ranieri Foundation, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Kundiman, New York Foundation for the Arts, the Vilcek Foundation, and the Jerome Foundation.

The Howard Foundation is an independent agency administered at Brown University. Established in 1954, it awards annual, unrestricted fellowships to promising individuals in selected artistic and academic fields. Past fellows have authored bestsellers, directed Oscar nominated feature-length films, and earned some of the world’s most prestigious honors including Pulitzer Prizes, the Rome Prize, and the Whiting Award. For more information, visit howard-foundation.brown.edu.

Post Date: 06-04-2026

President Botstein Awarded Honorary Degree and Bard Medal

Botstein received an honorary Doctorate of Civil Law in recognition of his 51 years of transformative leadership. Botstein was also presented with the Bard Medal, which honors individuals whose efforts on behalf of Bard and whose achievements have significantly advanced the welfare of the College.

President Botstein Awarded Honorary Degree and Bard Medal

President Leon Botstein at Bard College’s 166th Commencement. Photo by Samuel Stuart Hollenshead

At Bard College’s 166th Commencement, President Leon Botstein, who became the College’s 14th president in 1975, was awarded an honorary degree and Bard Medal. Botstein received an honorary Doctorate of Civil Law in recognition of his 51 years of transformative leadership. Botstein was also presented with the Bard Medal, which honors individuals whose efforts on behalf of Bard and whose achievements have significantly advanced the welfare of the College.

The numerous Bard College initiatives designed and founded under his leadership encompass a wide range of educational work ranging from local community programs to international efforts with global impact. Bard High School Early Colleges have enlarged the opportunities available to talented high school students in under-resourced communities across the country. The Bard Prison Initiative has made a liberal arts education available to incarcerated learners hungry for meaning and hope in their lives. Bard’s renowned music programs, its internationally recognized Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, and its Center for Curatorial Studies and Art in Contemporary Culture offer unparalleled interdisciplinary education in the arts. Bard College Berlin, Al-Quds Bard College, and Bard’s other international programs offer an education across the world to students from places where access to a liberal arts education is otherwise unavailable or suppressed.

“Starting decades ago, with limited resources, President Botstein led Bard toward all these achievements,” states the citation for Botstein’s Doctor of Civil Law honorary degree. “Recently, aided by a generous match from the Open Society Foundations, he completed a boldly ambitious endowment campaign that goes a long way toward securing Bard’s future.” The citation for Botstein’s Bard College Award stated: “Over fifty-one years as president, Botstein has transformed Bard College into the extraordinary institution that it is today, and his work and leadership have defined Bard’s distinct and important mission.”

Post Date: 06-02-2026

More News

Bard Musician Franz Nicolay Testifies in Congress

Bard Musician Franz Nicolay Testifies in Congress

Franz Nicolay, visiting instructor of music.

Franz Nicolay, visiting instructor of music at Bard College, spoke at a Congressional hearing about a Live Nation/Ticketmaster antitrust case, reported Chronogram. The case concerned the merger of Live Nation and Ticketmaster which has resulted in a monopoly on event ticket sales in the United States. “Live music hasn’t been a healthy competitive market,” said Nicolay during the hearing. “Instead, a vertically integrated corporation that controls venues and tour promotion and ticketing and artist management, to the almost total control of many music markets, is, to a comical degree, the epitome of the kind of monopolistic power that antitrust law was created to address.”

“We, as artists, simply don’t have the range of city-to-city, venue-to-venue choices that would constitute a healthy ecosystem,” Nicolay continued. “It’s a problem of affordability, in an economic climate which, through drastically increasing gas prices, airfare, postage and international shipping fees for merchandise, and hardening borders, is making the touring on which our livings depend increasingly unaffordable for musicians. And that increased overhead… has a corresponding effect on affordability and access for fans.”

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.

Read more in Chronogram

Further Reading in Rural Intelligence

Watch the Congressional Hearing

Post Date: 06-02-2026
Bard Artist in Residence Jonathan VanDyke MFA ’05 Awarded a Grant from the Gottlieb Foundation

Bard Artist in Residence Jonathan VanDyke MFA ’05 Awarded a Grant from the Gottlieb Foundation

Jonathan VanDyke MFA ’05, artist in residence. Photo by Shawn Poynter

Jonathan VanDyke MFA ’05, artist in residence at Bard College, was awarded a Gottlieb Foundation Individual Support Grant, a competitive arts grant for artists who have worked in their field for at least 20 years. The grant, which aims to “recognize and support the serious, fully-committed artist,” gives individuals $25,000 to fund their creative projects. VanDyke’s portfolio began in 2005, while he was pursuing an MFA at Bard focusing on painting and sculpture. He has presented major projects at The Museum of Art of Ravenna, The Columbus Museum, The Power Plant, The AKG Buffalo Art Museum, and many other institutions worldwide. “This award is especially meaningful for me in relation to Bard: to apply for this award you must submit 20 years of studio work, and so the first images in my portfolio came from my Bard MFA thesis exhibition, while the last images documented work I’ve made since joining the Bard faculty a few years ago,” VanDyke said.

VanDyke teaches in the Studio Arts Program at Bard, which 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

Post Date: 06-01-2026
Hal Haggard's Research on Black Holes Featured on PBS Space Time

Hal Haggard's Research on Black Holes Featured on PBS Space Time

Hal Haggard, associate professor of physics.

Research by Associate Professor of Physics Hal Haggard was featured on Matt O’Dowd’s PBS Space Time, an informational show that introduces viewers to concepts in astrophysics. The episode focused on an idea Haggard helped pioneer about black holes: that instead of becoming singularities at the end of their lifetime, as was previously thought, they may instead lead into cores of energy, also known as “white holes.” Haggard’s research on these structures, also known as Planck stars, and black-to-white hole tunneling was discussed in the context of physicists’ anxieties around black holes and how the perception of them has changed in previous decades. The Planck star’s existence is “one of our final hopes,” O’Dowd says. “Let’s hope they’re real, for physics’ sake.”

Haggard teaches in Bard’s Physics Program, which is dedicated to helping students at all levels gain a better understanding of the universe and how it works.

Watch the Episode

Post Date: 06-01-2026
Composer in Residence Missy Mazzoli Profiled in the New York Times

Composer in Residence Missy Mazzoli Profiled in the New York Times

Composer in Residence Missy Mazzoli.

Bard Composer in Residence Missy Mazzoli was profiled in a New York Times article about the Luna Composition Lab, the mentorship program she founded with fellow composer Ellen Reid. They founded the lab after they realized they’d never experienced female mentorship in composing. “We took a good hard look at what we wished we had had,” said Mazzoli, and the two asked themselves, “What can we do to make this more diverse, more vital, more alive, more fun?” The Lab, which turns 10 this year, matches young and experienced composers who are female, nonbinary or gender nonconforming, and mentees receive eight months of mentorship and attend a music festival in New York. Now, Mazzoli and Reid are organizing musical events for LunaLab@10, an anniversary celebration of the program and its expanded reach. “We want the field to expand,” said Mazzoli, “and so bringing in gender diversity, racial diversity, economic income diversity, geographic diversity helps [the] field survive and thrive.”

Mazzoli is a Grammy-nominated composer and musician who has written operas including Lincoln in the Bardo and Proving Up that are based on contemporary literature. She teaches in the Bard College Conservatory of Music, which provides the best possible preparation for a person dedicated to a life immersed in the creation and performance of music.

Read the Article

Post Date: 05-28-2026
Visiting Artist in Residence Beto O'Byrne Awarded Franklin Research Grant

Visiting Artist in Residence Beto O'Byrne Awarded Franklin Research Grant

Beto O'Byrne. Photo by Thomas Dunn

Beto O'Byrne, visiting artist in residence in theater and performance at Bard College, has been awarded a Franklin Research Grant by the American Philosophical Society. O'Byrne’s grant will support archival research and ethnographic fieldwork in San Antonio and Austin, Texas, in collaboration with Radical Evolution Performance Collective, toward the development of Forget the Alamo. This research-driven theatrical work reexamines the mythology surrounding the Alamo and the Texas Revolt, restoring Tejano, Black, and Indigenous perspectives long marginalized from state-sanctioned narratives, and grounding the performance in culturally specific aesthetics rooted in Tejano, Mexican American, and carpa traditions.

Established in 1933, the Franklin Research Grant program supports noncommercial research in all areas of knowledge. Awards are designed to help meet various related costs, such as for travel to libraries and archives, the purchase of microfilm, photocopies, or equivalent research materials, fieldwork, and laboratory research expenses.

Bard’s Theater and Performance Program offers an interdisciplinary, liberal arts-based approach to the making and study of theater and performance, and embraces a wide range of performance practices, from live art and interactive installation to classical theater from around the globe.

Post Date: 05-28-2026
Bard Scholar Tania El Khoury Honored With Two Residencies

Bard Scholar Tania El Khoury Honored With Two Residencies

Tania El Khoury.

Tania El Khoury, distinguished artist in residence, associate professor in theater and performance, and director of the Center for Human Rights and the Arts at Bard College, has been honored by two residencies, one with the École Universitaire de Recherche ArTeC, a research school that supports experimental practices, and one with Théâtre Chaillot, a program within the French National Theater of Dance. In April, El Khoury was appointed as one of three leading international scholars invited annually by ArTeC whose work involves a transdisciplinary approach. During this residency in Paris, she delivered a public lecture in French, led a public workshop, provided feedback to MA students, and participated in a creative research event with Performing Knowledge, where she is an associate artist.

El Khoury’s residency through Fabrique Chaillot, a selective program at Théâtre Chaillot within the French National Theater of Dance, provided her with three weeks to develop her new work, Choreography of State. The project deconstructs the embodied gestures of law enforcement and border patrol to reveal the dramaturgy of state violence. This multimedia installation performance approaches choreography as a forensic practice, inviting women choreographers from diverse practices around the world to create dance notations as evidence of power structures: scores of resistance to be activated by performers and embodied by the audience in a celebration of self-defense. Choreography of State is coproduced by the Théâtre Chaillot in Paris and the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College, as part of Evidence, an international festival by the Fisher Center LAB. The work will premiere at Théâtre Chaillot in Paris from October 8–10, 2026, with its US premiere at Evidence, Fisher Center LAB, at Bard College from December 4–6, 2026.

Post Date: 05-28-2026

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Results 101-110 of 375
Helen Epstein, Visiting Professor of Human Rights and Global Public Health
Office: Rose Science Laboratories, 116
Phone: 845-758-7203
Website: https://easternafricatransparency.wordpress.com/
Biography: expand/collapse
B.A., University of California, Berkeley; Ph.D., Cambridge University; M.Sc., London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Professor Epstein is the author of Another Fine Mess: America, Uganda, and the War on Terror (Columbia Global Reports, 2017) and The Invisible Cure: Africa, the West, and the Fight Against AIDS (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007; published in paperback as The Invisible Cure: Why We Are Losing the Fight Against AIDS in Africa, Picador, 2008). She has contributed articles to newspapers and journals including New York Review of Books, New York Times Magazine, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Times Literary Supplement, and The Lancet, among others. She has also served as an adviser to numerous international organizations on HIV prevention and as a consultant on public health in developing countries to UNICEF, World Bank, Human Rights Watch, and other organizations. At Bard since 2010.

Gidon Eshel, Research Professor
Office: Hegeman Science Hall, 203
Phone: 845-758-7232
Biography: expand/collapse
B.A., Haifa University, Israel; M.A., M.Phil., Ph.D., Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University. Professor Eshel specializes in oceanography, climatology, and geophysics. He is the author of Spatiotemporal Data Analysis (Princeton University Press, 2011) and the forthcoming Agrophelia and Food Math: From Stellar Nucleosynthesis to Your Plate. Recent publications include an article on sustainable beef production for Nature, Ecology, and Evolution and an analysis on the climate impact of intensive vs. pastoral beef that was highlighted in Nature’s Research Highlights. His work has also appeared in Climatic Change, Environmental Research Letters, Environmental Science & Technology, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, Earth Interactions, and American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, among other publications. Selected talks and outreach activities include the keynote address at the Israel Society of Ecology and Environmental Sciences' 45th annual meeting (July 2017); an invited contribution to the website of and appearance in Leonardo DiCaprio’s 2016 Before the Flood; appearances on WAMC Public Radio’s Earth Wise, coproduced by the Cary Institute of Ecosystems Studies, and NPR’s On Point with Tom Ashbrook (2015); and presentations at MIT Water Summit, University of Wisconsin’s Nelson Institute Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment; Harvard University; Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, and the Culinary Institute of America, among many others.

Recent honors include a Radcliffe Fellowship (2016–17) and PopTech Science and Public Leadership Fellowship (2010–12). Eshel also serves as a senior research scientist for NorthWest Research Associates and as an independent consultant to environmentalCalculations.com, with his primary client the Hudson Valley Smart Energy Coalition. Previous positions include: Bard Center Fellow (2007–12); Senior Fellow, Center for Environmental Science, University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory (2002–07); principal investigator, Center for Integrating Statistical and Environmental Science, University of Chicago (2001–03); and associate scientist of physical oceanography, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (1998–99). Eshel was assistant professor of geophysics at the University of Chicago (1999–2007) before joining the Bard faculty in 2008.

John Esposito, Visiting Assistant Professor of Music
Office: Avery Center for the Arts, N206
Phone: 845-594-3133
Website: https://sunjumprecords.com
Biography: expand/collapse
Musician, composer. Studied with Robert Ashley, John Cage, Elliott Carter, Frederick Rzewski. Has performed and/or recorded with Rashied Ali, Nick Brignola, Dave Douglas, Beaver Harris, Dave Holland, Carter Jefferson, Franklin Kiermyer, J. R. Montrose, Arthur Rhames, Sam Rivers, Roswell Rudd, Pharaoh Sanders, Bill Saxton, Woody Shaw, John Stubblefield, others. Recent recordings include The Blue People with the John Esposito Quintet (SunJump, 2006); Down Blue Marlin Road with the John Esposito Trio (SunJump, 2006); Extra Pressure with Eric Person and Meta-Four (Distinction Records, 1999). At Bard since 2001.

Tabetha Ewing, Associate Professor of History
Office: Fairbairn, 205
Phone: 212-995-8479
Biography: expand/collapse
B.A., Bard College; M.A., Ph.D., history, Princeton University. Tabetha Ewing, associate professor of history, chair of the Social Studies Division, and former dean of studies at Bard High School Early College (2009–14), is the author of Rumor, Diplomacy and War in Enlightenment Paris (Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment, 2014). She serves as cochair of the Columbia University Seminar “Beyond France.” She is also a fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities. Her teaching and research interests are in the sociocultural and sociopolitical history of 18th-century France, early-modern media, early-modern city, early-modern women and gender, old-regime borders, old-regime police, francophone black diasporic thought, and négritude. Her current work-in-progress, provisionally titled “Rights Over Persons: France and Extradition in the Age of Kings,” is on runaway wives, clandestine marrieds, fugitive slaves, dissident writers, counterfeiters, identity thieves, and spies. It explores the confluence of emergent state and individual sovereignty and international policing before the era of modern extradition treaties and national borders. Using diplomatic correspondence and the supplication letters of the detainees, this book will show political subjectivity unfolding, not only in the world of ideas or revolutionary events, or among a special class of subject, but also in the confrontation of states around often marginal subjects who transgress and, in doing so, invent political boundaries. She has been at Bard since 1998.

Lisa Fagan, Visiting Artist in Residence

Nuruddin Farah, Distinguished Professor of Literature
Office: Aspinwall, 201
Phone: 845-758-7210
Biography: expand/collapse
Somali novelist, essayist, playwright, screenwriter. Educated at Panjab University, Chandigarh, India. Works include two trilogies, Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship and Blood in the Sun, and several novels, novellas, short stories, plays. International prizes include the Premio Cavour (Italy), the Kurt Tucholsky Prize (Sweden), the Lettre Ulysses Award (Berlin), and the Neustadt International Prize for Literature. In recent years he has been a perennial nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature. At Bard: 2010–11; 2013– 16.

Kris Feder, Associate Professor Emeritus of Economics
Office: Albee, Room 201
Phone: 845-758-7243
Website: https://economics.bard.edu/faculty
Biography: expand/collapse
B.A., University of Pennsylvania; Ph.D., Temple University. Dissertation: "Issues in the Theory of Land Value Taxation." Specialization in public-sector economics and history of economic thought. Temple University awards: Russell Conwell Fellowship (1984–86), University Fellowship (1983–84), summer tuition scholarship (1984). Taught at Franklin and Marshall College, West Chester University, and Temple University. Coauthor, "What's Missing from the Capital Gains Debate," Levy Institute Public Policy Brief No. 32 (1997). Contributor, The Corruption of Economics (1994), Beyond Neoclassical Economics: Heterodox Approaches to Economic Theory (1995), and Critics of Henry George (2003). At Bard since 1991.

Miriam Felton-Dansky, Associate Professor of Theater and Performance
Office: Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, B57
Phone: 845-758-7960
Biography: expand/collapse
Miriam Felton-Dansky is Associate Professor of Theater and Performance and director of Bard's undergraduate Theater and Performance Program. Her research and teaching interests include experimental and avant-garde performance, the politics of attention and spectatorship, and theater in the digital age. Her book Viral Performance: Contagious Theaters from Modernism to the Digital Age was published by Northwestern University Press in 2018. Her articles and essays have appeared in publications such as Theatre Survey, Theatre Journal, Theater, PAJ, ASAP/J, and Artforum.com, and she was a theater critic for the Village Voice from 2009 to 2018. She is a regular cohost of the On Tap theater and performance studies podcast, and a contributing editor for Theater, where she guest coedited the "Digital Dramaturgies" trilogy (2012–18).

BA, Barnard College; MFA/DFA, Yale School of Drama. At Bard since 2012.

Jack Ferver, Assistant Professor of Theater and Performance
Office: Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, 175
Website: https://www.jackferver.org/
Biography: expand/collapse
Jack Ferver is a New York–based writer, choreographer, and director. Their genre defying performances, which have been called “so extreme that they sometimes look and feel like exorcisms” (New Yorker), explore the tragicomedy of the human psyche. Ferver’s “darkly humorous” (New York Times) works interrogate and indict an array of psychological and sociopolitical issues, particularly in the realms of gender, sexual orientation, and power struggles. Their visionary direction blurs boundaries between fantastic theatrics and stark naturalism, character and self, humor and horror.

Ferver’s works have been presented in New York City at the New Museum; New York Live Arts; The Kitchen; The French Institute Alliance Française, as part of Crossing the Line; Abrons Arts Center; Gibney Dance; Performance Space 122; the Museum of Arts and Design, as part of Performa 11; Danspace Project; and Dixon Place. Domestically and internationally, Ferver has been presented by the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College; American Dance Institute (Maryland); Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (Illinois); Portland Institute of Contemporary Art (Oregon); Institute of Contemporary Art at MECA (Maine); Institute of Contemporary Art (Massachussets); Diverse Works in collaboration with the Contemporary Arts Museum of Houston; and Théâtre de Vanves (France).

Ferver’s work has been critically acclaimed in the New York Times, La Monde, Artforum, New Yorker, Time Out NY, Modern Painters, Financial Times, Village Voice, and ArtsJournal. Ferver has received residencies and fellowships from the Maggie Allesee National Center of Choreography at Florida State (2012); Baryshnikov Arts Center (2013); Watermill Center (2014); Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art (2014); and Live Arts Bard, the commissioning and residency program of The Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College (2014); and Abrons Art Center (2014-2015). They are a 2016 recipient of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant.

Ferver teaches at Bard College in the Theater and Performance Program and for the graduate Vocal Arts Program. They have also taught at NYU Tisch, SUNY Purchase, and have set choreography at The Juilliard School. As an actor they have appeared in numerous films and television series and plays. They are currently working on a solo work to be presented in collaboration with the visual artist Marc Swanson at Mass MoCA and a new play with the playwright Jeremy O Harris.

Noah Fischer, Faculty - Bard Experiential Learning Lab

Results 101-110 of 375