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
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
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

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Results 191-200 of 375
Caitlin Leverson, Assistant Professor of Mathematics
Biography: expand/collapse
BA, Wellesley College; PhD, Duke University. Research interests include low-dimensional topology, symplectic topology, contact topology, and knot theory, with particular interest in three-dimensional contact topology and knot homologies. Articles in Journal of Commutative Algebra, Journal of Symplectic Geometry, Pacific Journal of Mathematics, and Quantum Topology. Recipient of a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellowship and numerous teaching, research, and travel awards from Duke University, Wellesley College, and the American Mathematical Society. Previously taught at the Georgia Institute of Technology. At Bard since 2020.

Huiwen Li, Continuing Associate Professor of Chinese
Office: Fairbairn, 307
Phone: 845-758-7834
Biography: expand/collapse
Huiwen Li is an educator, researcher, Chinese calligrapher, and poet. His teaching and research focus on Chinese language and culture, pedagogy, and teacher competency, with particular emphasis on character etymology, oracle bone inscriptions, and calligraphy. He has published extensively in both books and scholarly journals. At Bard, he teaches courses in Chinese language, calligraphy, and poetry, and has mentored student research on pedagogy, musical instruments depicted in Dunhuang murals, China’s character simplification movement, and the real estate market.

Li’s calligraphy has been exhibited in the United States and internationally, and he has composed hundreds of classical Chinese poems. He has received numerous awards for his achievements in poetry, calligraphy, and curriculum design. He is Honorary President and former President of the American Society of Shufa Calligraphy Education and has also served as Chief Reviewer for a classical Chinese poetry journal and Chief Editor of a Chinese language teaching journal. He is the author/coauthor of articles in publications including Confucius Studies, Frontiers in Psychology, Teaching Chinese in International Contexts, Journal of Overseas Chinese Education, Chinese Language Teaching Methodology and Technology, and Journal of Research on Chinese Teaching, among others.

BA, Shandong Normal University, Jinan, China; MA, University of Pittsburgh; EdD, Duquesne University; PhD Candidate, Cleveland State University. At Bard since 2021.

Marisa Libbon, Associate Professor of Literature
Office: Aspinwall, 203
Phone: 845-758-7211
Biography: expand/collapse
Marisa Libbon specializes in the literature, culture, and book history of medieval England, with particular attention to the early Middle English period (c. 1100–1350). Her research and teaching interests include historiography, hagiography, romance, manuscript studies, textual transmission, and ephemeral culture such as rumor, gossip, and sound. Her essays and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Viator, Notes and Queries, The Auchinleck Manuscript: New Perspectives (ed. Fein), The Chaucer Encyclopedia (ed. Newhauser, et al.), Studies in the Age of Chaucer, The Review of English Studies, and The Medieval Review. Her first book, Talk and Textual Production in Medieval England, was published by The Ohio State University Press in 2021. Her second book in progress, Cultures of Power, asks how the windmill, which first appeared in England c. 1180, impacted the mental landscapes and thus the cultural landscapes of medieval England. She is also a contributor to the European Review of Books. Her work has been supported by the Medieval Academy of America; Richard III Society, American Branch; Trinity College, Cambridge; and the Newberry Library, where she is a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow for the 2022–23 academic year.

BA, MA, PhD, University of California, Berkeley; MPhil, University of Oxford. At Bard since 2012.

Lindsey Liberatore, Visiting Assistant Professor of Theater and Performance
Biography: expand/collapse
Lindsey Liberatore is a New York City–based actor, singer, teaching artist, and corporate coach. Her performance credits include everything from Off-Broadway to international and immersive theater and commercial voice-over. She has worked with Sarah Benson, Neil Gaiman, the Lisps, and Enthuse Theatre. Current projects include CATLADY, a storytelling piece exploring the theme of toxic masculinity. Liberatore is a certified yoga instructor (500 RYT YogaWorks), Roll Model ® Method body worker, and anatomy teacher. She leads mindfulness meditation courses for companies all over the United States and is a devoted student of Buddhism. Lindsey teaches from the perspective that curiosity and courageous self-exploration will yield a pathway to clear communication, uncluttered creative impulse, and interconnectedness.

BFA, Marymount Manhattan College; MFA, A.R.T./MXAT Institute for Advanced Theater Training, Harvard University.

Beate Liepert, Visiting Professor of Environmental and Urban Studies and Physics; Director, Environmental Studies
Biography: expand/collapse
Dr. Liepert is a climate scientist who pioneered research on the phenomenon of “global dimming,” a decline in the amount of sun reaching the Earth’s surface, which has implications on the planet’s water and carbon cycles. She comes to Bard from the Seattle area, where she worked for and founded start-ups in the clean tech and insure tech fields, and was a lecturer in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Seattle University. The start-ups included CLIWEN LLC, a climate, energy, and weather consulting concern; and Lumen LLC, a company that developed design solutions for solar cells. She also served as a research scientist at True Flood Risk LLC in New York, NorthWest Research Associates in Seattle, and the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University. Her work centers on basic questions of climate variability, from interannual to centennial time scales. Research interests also include taking measurements of aerosols and solar radiation and investigating climate effects on ecosystems.

Additional activities have included serving as editor for Environmental Research Letters, a UK-based journal; proposal review panelist and proposal reviewer for the National Science Foundation; presenting at more than 50 international conferences and university colloquia; and authoring reviews and articles for journals including Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, Climate, Frontiers, International Journal of Climatology, Nature, Science, Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, and Global and Planetary Change, among many others. She has been interviewed on CNN and numerous international TV broadcasts; was a featured scientist in the BBC documentary Dimming the Sun, which also aired on PBS; and was profiled in a “Talk of the Town” essay in the New Yorker. Professor Liepert is the recipient of the 2016 WINGS World Quest “Women of Discovery” Earth Award and in 2015 she delivered a Distinguished Scientist Lecture at Bard on “Dimming the Sun: How Clouds and Air Pollution Affect Global Climate.”

Diploma, Institute of Meteorology and Institute of Bioclimatology and Air Pollution Research, Ludwig-Maximilians University Munich; Doctor rer. nat., Institute of Meteorology, Department of Physics, Ludwig-Maximilians University; postdoctoral research scientist, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University; certificate program in fine arts, Parsons School of Design. (2022– ).

Christopher Lindner, Director, Bard Archaeology Field School; Archaeologist in Residence
Office: Achebe House, cellar lab
Phone: 845-758-7299
Website: https://www.bard.edu/archaeology/
Biography: expand/collapse
B.A., Hamilton College; M.A., University of Cincinnati; Ph.D., SUNY Albany. He specializes in historical geoarchaeological landscape investigations and experimental use-wear analysis of ancient tools, often with students as assistants in data acquisition. In addition to scientific articles in journals such as Archaeology of Eastern North America, Northeast Anthropology, and Hudson Valley Regional Review, he has edited two collections of scholarly papers, A Northeastern Millennium and A Golden Chronograph for Robert E. Funk. He recently published a chapter, “Guineatown in the Hudson Valley’s Hyde Park,” in Archaeology of Race in the Northeast. He devotes summers to the Bard Archaeology Field School for college, community, and high school students. He maintains ongoing projects at the prehistoric Forest site at Bard, and at the 18th- and 19th-century Parsonage in Germantown. As scientific consultant, he participates in environmental impact studies and planning for protection of cultural resources in the Mid-Hudson Valley. He is past president of the New York Archaeological Council, the state's professional organization, and former president of Hudson River Heritage, the historic preservation group for advocacy and education. At Bard since 1988.

Erica Lindsay, Artist in Residence
Office: Avery Center for the Arts, Center for Film, Electronic Arts, and Music, N208
Phone: 845-758-6822 x6826
Website: https://ericalindsay.com
Biography: expand/collapse
B.A., New York University. Musician (tenor saxophone, soprano saxophone, flute); composer. Recipient of a 2017 Chamber Music of America New Jazz Works Commission and 2017 Composers Now Creative Residency. Has played at major jazz festivals in Europe and Asia, and at major venues including Carnegie Hall, Avery Fisher Hall, Sweet Basil’s, The Bottom Line, and Merkin Hall. Performances and recordings with McCoy Tyner, Oliver Lake, Baikida Carroll, Howard Johnson, Clifford Jordan, others. Has composed and arranged for Hamburg Radio Big Band, Unique Munich Saxophone Choir, Melba Liston & Co., and theatrical productions (John Carter’s Feed the Beast; Carl Hancock Rux’s Song of Sad Young Men). Orchestral works read by American Composers Orchestra and Detroit Symphony Orchestra. Leads Erica Lindsay Quartet/Quintet. Selected discography: Dreamer (Candid Records), Initiation (w/Sumi Tonooka), Live in Europe (Jeff Siegel Quartet), and Further Explorations, Alchemy Sound Project, (ARC Records). At Bard since 2001.

Gabriella Lindsay, Visiting Assistant Professor of French
Biography: expand/collapse
Professor Lindsay comes to Bard from New York University, where she was a postdoctoral teaching fellow in the Department of French Literature, Thought and Culture. She also received her PhD from NYU; her dissertation, Sexual Violence and the Legacy of the Algerian War in Literature and Film, reflects research interests including 19th-, 20th-, and 21st-century French and Francophone studies; Francophone postcolonial studies; aesthetics; race, gender, and sexuality; and autobiography and autofiction. She is the recipient of a Georges Lurcy Fellowship and numerous research fellowships and travel awards from NYU. Publications include the articles “Hazy Analogies: Sexual and Colonial Complicities in Annie Ernaux’s Mémoire de fille,” in Comparative Literature Studies (special issue), and “How Do You Make Literature Studies Relevant?” in the American Philosophical Association Blog; and a review of Le Triangle atlantique français. Littérature et culture de la traite négrière by Christopher Miller, translated by Thomas Van Ruymbeke, in Études littéraires africaines. Courses taught at NYU cover subjects such as approaches to French literature, intensive elementary French, and advanced grammar and composition.

BA, McGill University; Master II, Université Montpellier III; PhD, New York University. At Bard: since 2021.

Joshua Livingston, Visiting Assistant Professor of American Studies
Biography: expand/collapse
Joshua Livingston earned his PhD in social welfare from the City of New York Graduate Center and holds an MSW and a certificate in human services management from Boston University. Using his experiences as a Licensed Master Barber as a model, Professor Livingston focuses on how social innovation and “place-making” can be utilized by young people of color to challenge institutional environments through the use of community forms that hold cultural significance. His dissertation, “Place-Making by Black and Latinx Students in Predominantly White Institutions: Participatory Design and Meaning through a Social Enterprise,” addressed the problem of Black and Latinx retention in post-secondary institutions, particularly in predominantly white institutions. Despite efforts to welcome and support male students of color, he argues, the structures used are created through dominant cultural norms. The thesis outlines an innovative, solution-based retention effort based on the barbershop model. He conducted research for this work at Bard College, utilizing journals written by barbershop participants on their use of the space and the meaning of it to them. Dr. Livingston previously taught at the Silberman School of Social Work at Hunter College.

BS, University of Missouri–Columbia; MSW, Certificate in Human Services Management, Boston University; PhD, The Graduate Center, City University of New York. At Bard since 2019.

Brian Lobel, Visiting Faculty
Department(s): OSUN

Results 191-200 of 375