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 111-120 of 375
Elizabeth Frank, Joseph E. Harry Professor of Modern Languages and Literature
Office: Aspinwall, 303
Phone: 845-758-7220
Biography: expand/collapse
B.A., M.A., Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley. Fellowships: Ford Foundation (1967–72); Temple University (1977); The Newberry Library (1977); American Council of Learned Societies (1977); National Endowment for the Humanities. Recipient, 1986 Pulitzer Prize for Biography for Louise Bogan: A Portrait (1985). Author of the novel Cheat and Charmer (Random House, 2004) and numerous articles on literature, art, and literary and art criticism in New York Arts Journal, Art in America, Journal of Modern Literature, Twentieth-Century Literature, ARTnews, Bennington Review, The Nation, Salmagundi, New York Times Book Review, Partisan Review, others. Author, Jackson Pollock (1983), Esteban Vicente (1995); cotranslator of novels by Bulgarian writer Angel Wagenstein, Farewell, Shanghai (2007) and Isaacï¿½s Torah (2008). At Bard since 1982.

Kenji Fujita, Artist in Residence, Bard College; Faculty, Sculpture, Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts
Department(s): Arts, Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts
Office: Fisher Annex, Room 105
Phone: 845-758-7057
Website: https://www.kenjifujita.com
Biography: expand/collapse
BA, Bennington College; MFA, Queens College; attended Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. Solo exhibitions at Samson Projects, Boston; Jean Bernier, Athens; Cable Gallery and Luhring Augustine, New York; Schmidt/Markow Gallery, St. Louis; Daniel Weinberg Gallery, Los Angeles. Group exhibitions include the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Brooklyn Museum of Art, Butler Institute of American Art, Venice Biennale, who knows one (curated by Haim Steinbach), Vistamare, Pescara, Italy, through February 14, 2020. Recipient, Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, and Pollock-Krasner Foundation grants. Faculty, MFA Program, School of Visual Arts. At Bard since 1995.

Derek Lance Furr, Dean of Teacher Education; Associate Professor of Literature
Department(s): Master of Arts in Teaching
Office: MAT Building, 101
Phone: 845-758-7136
Biography: expand/collapse
B.A., Wake Forest University; M.Ed., University of Virginia; M.A., Ph.D., University of Virginia. Author of Recorded Poetry and Poetic Reception from Edna Millay to the Circle of Robert Lowell (Palgrave 2010), Suite For Three Voices (Fomite 2012), and Semitones (forthcoming 2015). Recent work in Twentieth Century Literature, Able Muse, and Diagram. Areas of interest include Romanticism and its legacies; sound recording; folk music and poetics; postcolonial Anglophone literature; reading disabilities; secondary school English Language Arts curriculum and instruction; writing fiction and essays. Has been a middle school ELA teacher and reading specialist in the Charlottesville City Schools, a research assistant for Center for Improvement of Early Reading Achievement, and a faculty associate for the Institute for Writing and Thinking.

Yebel Gallegos, Assistant Professor of Dance
Office: Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, B-50
Phone: 845-758-7935 x7935
Biography: expand/collapse
Yebel Gallegos, a dance artist from El Paso, Texas, played an important role in the founding of Cressida Danza Contemporánea in Yucatán, Mexico. At Cressida Danza, he served as dancer, company teacher, rehearsal director, and academic coordinator for the Conservatorio de Danza de Yucatán. He also helped create and implement Festival Yucatán Escénica, an international contemporary dance festival. Gallegos recently concluded a six-year tenure with the Salt Lake City–based Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company to pursue a master in fine arts degree from the University of Washington. At Ririe-Woodbury, he worked with a diverse range of choreographers including Daniel Charon, Ann Carlson, Doug Varone, Kate Weare, Jonah Bokaer, and Netta Yerushalmy, among others. While in Utah, he also was involved in projects with local artists as well as teaching in the community. In addition to contemporary dance, he has taught classes in ballet and jazz techniques. As a performer and educator, he has toured throughout the United States and internationally to countries such as Austria, Chile, France, Mongolia, and South Korea.

BFA, University of Texas at Austin and Escuela Profesional de Danza de Mazatlán, directed by the Delfos Dance Company. At Bard since 2021.

Kyle Gann, Taylor Hawver and Frances Bortle Hawver Professor of Music
Department(s): Conductors Institute
Office: Old Blum 211
Phone: 845-758-7251
Website: https://www.kylegann.com/
Biography: expand/collapse
B.Mus., Oberlin Conservatory of Music; M.Mus., D.Mus., Northwestern University. Recipient, National Endowment for the Arts Individual Artist’s Grant (1996); Peabody Award (2003); American Music Center Letter of Distinction (2003). Music critic for the Village Voice, 1986–2005. Taught at Bucknell University, Columbia University, Northwestern University, Brooklyn College, and School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Books include The Arithmetic of Listening: Tuning Theory and History for the Impractical Musician (2018); Charles Ives’s Concord: Essays after a Sonata (2017); Robert Ashley (2012); No Such Thing as Silence: John Cage’s 4’33” (2010); Music Downtown: Writings from the Village Voice (2006); American Music in the 20th Century (1997); The Music of Conlon Nancarrow (1995); and, as coeditor, The Ashgate Research Companion to Minimalist and Postminimalist Music (2013). Vice president of the Charles Ives Society. Music on the Other Minds, New World, New Albion, Mode, Cold Blue, Lovely Music, and other record labels. At Bard since 1997.

Oscar Gardea, Visting Faculty/Scholar in Residence
Department(s): OSUN

M. Gessen, Distinguished Visiting Writer
Website: https://www.nytimes.com/by/m-gessen
Biography: expand/collapse
M. Gessen is a staff writer at The New Yorker and author of 11 books of nonfiction, most recently Surviving Autocracy (Riverhead Books, June 2020); The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, which won the 2017 National Book Award for Nonfiction; The Brothers: The Road to an American Tragedy, a 2015 award-winning account of the Boston Marathon bombers; and The Man without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin, a 2012 portrait of the Russian leader that Foreign Affairs said “shines a piercing light into every dark corner of Putin’s story.” Gessen is the recipient of numerous awards, including Guggenheim, Andrew Carnegie, and Nieman Fellowships, Hitchens Prize, Overseas Press Club Award for Best Commentary, and an honorary doctorate from the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York. Gessen has written about Russia, Putin, LGBT rights, and Donald Trump for the New York Review of Books and New York Times, among other publications; appeared as a commentator on CNN, MSNBC, PBS, and other news outlets; and served as a translator for the acclaimed FX series The Americans. Gessen previously taught at Amherst College and Oberlin College.

Studied at Rhode Island School of Design, Cooper Union. At Bard since 2020.

Arthur Gibbons, Professor of Sculpture
Department(s): Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts
Office: Fisher Annex, Room 104
Phone: 845-758-7442
Website: https://www.arthurgibbons.com
Biography: expand/collapse
B.A., Ohio Wesleyan University; B.F.A, M.F.A., University of Pennsylvania. Solo exhibitions at Robert Freidus Gallery and Andre Emmerich Gallery, New York. Sculptures reviewed in New York Times, Village Voice, ARTnews, Arts, International Sculpture. Work selected for group shows in New York at Guild Hall, East Hampton; Storm King Art Center, Mountainville; Neuberger Museum, SUNY Purchase. Work in permanent collections of Storm King Art Center, Albright-Knox Gallery (Buffalo), Denver Art Museum, Chase Manhattan Bank, Prudential Insurance Company of America, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Case Western Reserve University. Awards include Reynolds Metals Company Commission, Edward F. Albee Foundation Fellowship. At Bard since 1988.

Christopher H. Gibbs, James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Music; Faculty, Bard College Conservatory of Music; Artistic Codirector, Bard Music Festival
Department(s): Bard Music Festival
Office: Edith C. Blum Institute, N204
Phone: 845-758-7108
Biography: expand/collapse
Christopher H. Gibbs is executive editor of The Musical Quarterly; editor of The Cambridge Companion to Schubert (1997); author of The Life of Schubert (2000), which has been translated into five languages; coeditor of Franz Liszt and His World (2006) and Franz Schubert and His World (2014); and coauthor of The Oxford History of Western Music, College Edition (2013; 2nd ed., 2018). He is a contributor to New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 19th-Century Music, Schubert durch die Brille, Current Musicology, Opera Quarterly, and Chronicle of Higher Education. Additionally, he has served as program annotator and musicological consultant to the Philadelphia Orchestra (2000– ); musicological director of the Schubertiade at the 92nd Street Y in New York City; musicological adviser for the Schubert Festival at Carnegie Hall (1997); and artistic codirector of the Bard Music Festival (2003– ). Gibbs is the recipient of numerous honors, including the Dissertation Prize of the Austrian Cultural Institute (1992), ASCAP–Deems Taylor Award (1998), and American Council of Learned Societies fellowship (1999–2000). He previously taught at SUNY Buffalo (1993–2003). BA, Haverford College; MA, MPhil, PhD, Columbia University. At Bard since 2002.

Jeffrey Gibson, Artist in Residence
Office: Fisher Annex, 116
Phone: 845-758-6822
Biography: expand/collapse
Jeffrey Gibson is a painter, sculptor, and installation artist. He has had numerous solo and two-person shows throughout the United States, and has been part of group exhibitions at venues such as the Peabody Essex Museum; Museum of Arts and Design, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Denver Art Museum; Mass MoCA; Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art; Jersey City Museum; Institute of American Indian Arts, Santa Fe; and National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, New York. His work can be found in public collections, including the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art, Indianapolis; and Denver Art Museum. Named a MacArthur Fellow in 2019, he has held visiting artist, lecturer, and teaching positions at Cornell University; Pont-Aven School of Contemporary Art, Pont-Aven, France; California College of the Arts; Claremont Graduate University; and Cooper Union School of Art; among others. He also sits on various arts-related panels, including the New York State Council on the Arts and the Eiteljorg Museum’s fellowship selection panel. In 2012, he was named a TED Foundation Fellow. Other honors include grants and awards from the Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of the American Indian, Jerome Foundation, and Harpo Foundation, among others. BFA, Art Institute of Chicago; MA, Royal College of Art, London. Also studied with sculptor Ernest Mirabal in Nambé, New Mexico. At Bard since 2012.

Results 111-120 of 375