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 11-20 of 375
Sven Anderson, Associate Professor of Computer Science
Office: Reem-Kayden Center, 205
Phone: 845-752-2322
Biography: expand/collapse
B.A., University of Virginia, Charlottesville; M.A., Ph.D., Indiana University, Bloomington. Recipient: National Science Foundation grant; National Institutes of Health grant for research on phonological awareness in children with language impairment. Research and teaching interests include artificial intelligence, speech recognition, and spoken human/computer interfaces. Articles have appeared in Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, IEEE Transactions on Speech and Audio Processing, Journal of Phonetics, Computational Neuroscience, and Neural Representation of Temporal Patterns. At Bard since 2002.

Victor Apryshchenko, Visiting Scholar, Gagarin Center for Study of Civil Society & Human Rights
Department(s): Center for Civic Engagement
Office: Resnick Family Gatehouse
Biography: expand/collapse
Victor Apryshchenko is a visiting scholar at Bard College. He is a historian by training but has now applied his scholarship to contemporary issues as well. His research focuses on the political history of Europe, including Russia, historical memory management in Europe and Russia, and theories of nation and nationalism. In previous years he was a fellow of Carnegie Foundation, Royal Society of Edinburgh, Paulsen Fellowship (LSE, London) and other international foundations. He was head of international network programs including Jean Monnet Network and Jean Monnet Chair for researching European memory politics. He's the author of monographs and articles on collective memory and European intellectual culture published by Palgrave Macmillan, Routledge and other publishing houses.

Nathanael Aschenbrenner, Assistant Professor of Historical Studies
Biography: expand/collapse
Nathanael Aschenbrenner is a historian of cross-cultural contacts in the late medieval and early modern Mediterranean. His research also focuses on the political thought of Byzantium and its connections with late medieval and early modern Europe. Professor Aschenbrenner completed his undergraduate studies at the US Naval Academy, and served as an explosive ordnance disposal officer in the Navy before pursuing his MA and PhD degrees in history. He is coeditor of The Invention of Byzantium in Early Modern Europe (2022) and is currently working on Empire Beyond Rome: Antiquity, Legitimacy, and Power in the Mediterranean, 1200–1500, a monograph about political and ideological competition over the legacy of the Roman Empire in the Mediterranean world. He has also published articles on the history of scholarship, Byzantine oratory, and late medieval politics.

BS, United States Naval Academy; MA, Georgetown University and King’s College London; PhD, Harvard University; postdoctoral research fellow, Princeton University. At Bard since 2023.

Ephraim Asili, Associate Professor of Film and Electronic Arts; Director, Film and Electronic Arts
Phone: 845-758-7563
Biography: expand/collapse
Ephraim Asili is an African American artist, filmmaker, DJ, and traveler whose work focuses on the African diaspora as a cultural force. His childhood and adolescence were imbued with hip-hop music, Hollywood movies, and television. Often inspired by his day-to-day wanderings, Asili creates art that situates itself as a series of meditations of the everyday. He received his BA in film and media arts from Temple University and his MFA in film and interdisciplinary art at Bard College. Asili is currently the director of the Film and Electronic Arts Program at Bard College, where he is also an associate professor teaching film production and film studies.

Asili’s films have screened in festivals and venues all over the world, including the New York Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, the Berlinale, and the International Film Festival Rotterdam. Asili’s feature debut, The Inheritance, premiered at the 2020 Toronto International Film Festival. The Inheritance was recently acquired by the Whitney Museum of American Art for its permanent collection andis currently in distribution with Grasshopper Films. In 2020, Asili was named as one of "25 New Faces of Independent Film" by Filmmaker magazine. In 2021, Asili was a 2021 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation recipient. Most recently, Asili directed the short film, Strange Math, and a live fashion show at the Louvre for Louis Vuitton.

BA, Temple University; MFA, Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts. At Bard since 2015.

Andrew Atwell, Visiting Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Study of Religions and Jewish Studies
Office: Hopson, 203
Biography: expand/collapse
Andrew K. Atwell is an anthropologist, Judaism and Middle East specialist, and Visiting Assistant Professor of the Interdisciplinary Study of Religions and Jewish Studies at Bard College. He is the author of “Resuscitating Torah: ‘Judaization,’ Moral Imagination, and National-Religious hesed in Central Israel” in Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy, forthcoming 2026; “Religion, Authority, Grammar: The Scholarly Legacy of Secular Concepts” in Buddhist Violence and Religious Authority: A Tribute to the Work of Michael Jerryson, 2022. He is broadly interested in moral imagination in its relation to political theology, political economy, and traditions of critical reflectivity, and his primary focus is on national-religious Israeli Judaism. His current book project, Lod Alight: National-Religious Activism, Moral Imagination, and the Limits of Reflection, is a study of the moral imagination at work in a national-religious “social settlement” movement that has settled in Israel’s binational cities since the mid-1990s. Fellowships include: Wenner-Gren Foundation Dissertation Fieldwork Grant; Fuerstenberg Fellowship in Jewish Studies; Greenberg Center for Jewish Studies Research Grant, University of Chicago. At Bard since 2024.

BS, Eckerd College; MA, University of Virginia; MA (Religious Studies), MA (Anthropology), PhD, University of Chicago.

Erin Atwell, Assistant Professor of Islamic Studies
Office: Hopson, 202
Biography: expand/collapse
BA, Loyola University Chicago; MA, Fordham University; MA and PhD, University of Chicago, Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations and Anthropology. Erin Atwell’s research explores intersections of early Islamic texts and contemporary Muslim practices. Her current book project is a study of early Islamic ethical and aesthetic expressions of godfearingness (taqwā), and how these expressions shape efforts to renew religious discourse in post-revolutionary Egyptian religious spaces. Publications include: “Hold Fast the Reins and Be Guided: Embodied Expressions of Taqwā in Prophetic Hadith and Orations of ʿAli ibn Abī Ṭālib” in Journal of Arabic Literature, 2023; “Renewing Religious Discourse: The Azhar Documents and Conceptions of Reform in Contemporary Egypt” in the Oxford Handbook of Islamic Reform, forthcoming 2025. Fellowships include: Fulbright US Student Program, Egypt; Lichstern Anthropology Dissertation Fellowship, University of Chicago. At Bard since 2024.

Jordan Ayala, Visiting Assistant Professor of Data Analytics and Environmental Studies
Biography: expand/collapse
Jordan Ayala is an applied researcher working across the disciplines of economics, planning, and geography. He is a research scholar with the Open Society University Network (OSUN) Economic Democracy Initiative, where he leads the initiative’s community and civic engagement activities and curricular development. He is a Chicano and Kansas Citian with roots in the historic Westside of Kansas City, Missouri, and Mexican railroad workers in Kansas. He conducts applied research using quantitative and qualitative data collection and analysis, community-based research methods, and spatial analysis through the lens of stratification economics.

BBA, MA, Graduate Certificate in Geographic Information Systems, PhD candidate, University of Missouri–Kansas City. At Bard since 2022.

Souleymane Badolo , Assistant Professor of Dance
Biography: expand/collapse
M.F.A., Bennington College. Souleymane Badolo is a Brooklyn-based dancer, choreographer, and founder of the Burkina Faso–based troupe Kongo Ba Téria, which fuses traditional African dance with Western contemporary dance. A native of Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, Badolo began his professional career with the African dance company DAMA. He has also performed with Salia nï Seydou and the National Ballet of Burkina Faso, and worked with French choreographers Elsa Wolliaston and Mathilde Monnier. Badolo and Kongo Ba Téria are featured in the documentary Movement (R)evolution Africa. He appeared in the 2015 BAM Next Wave Festival; has created solo projects for Danspace, New York Live Arts, Dance New Amsterdam, Harlem Stage, the 92nd Street Y, and New York’s River to River Festival; and was commissioned to create a dance for Philadanco as part of James Brown: Get on the Good Foot, which was produced by the Apollo Theater and toured nationally and internationally. He was nominated for a Bessie Award in 2011 as outstanding emerging choreographer, received the Juried Bessie Award in 2012, and a 2016 Bessie for Outstanding Production for his piece Yimbégré, which “gloriously communicated the clash and reconciliation of the different traditions held within one’s life, one’s body.” The Suitcase Fund of New York Live Arts has supported Badolo’s ongoing research in Africa. He previously taught at the New School, Denison University, and Bennington College. At Bard since 2017.

James Bagwell, Director, Music Performance Studies; Professor of Music
Department(s): Bard Conservatory of Music
Office: Edith C. Blum Institute, N121
Phone: 845-758-7356
Website: https://jamesbagwell.com
Biography: expand/collapse
B.M.E., Birmingham-Southern College; M.M.E., M.M.M., Florida State University; D.M., Indiana University. Music director, The Collegiate Chorale (2009-15); principal guest conductor and artistic consultant, The American Symphony Orchestra (2009- ); director of choruses, The Bard Music Festival (2004-) and May Festival Youth Chorus, Cincinnati (1997– ); guest conductor, the Cincinnati Symphony, San Francisco Symphony, and Seattle Symphony, among others. Prepared choruses nationwide for numerous prominent conductors, including Loren Maazel (New York Philharmonic), Riccardo Muti (Israel Philharmonic), Alan Gilbert (New York Philharmonic), Robert Shaw (Cincinnati May Festival), Esa-Pekka Salonen (Los Angeles Philharmonic), and Michael Tilson Thomas (San Francisco Symphony). At Bard since 2000.

Janaki Bakhle, OSUN Professor
Biography: expand/collapse
Janaki Bakhle comes to Bard from the University of California, Berkeley, where she was an associate professor in the Department of History. Her research interests include the intellectual history of religion in India, Indian political history, and Indian feminist history. Bakhle previously taught at Columbia University, where she also served as director of the South Asia Institute. Professor Bakhle is the author of Savarkar and the Making of Hindutva (forthcoming, Princeton University Press); Two Men and Music: Nationalism and the Making of an Indian Classical Tradition (Oxford University Press, 2005); and articles that have appeared in Global Intellectual History, Social History, Public Culture, Comparative Studies in Society and History, and Journal of Anthropological Research.

BA, University of Bombay, India; MA, University of Pennsylvania; PhD, Columbia University. At Bard since 2023

Results 11-20 of 375