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 201-210 of 375
Patricia López-Gay , Associate Professor of Spanish
Office: Seymour, 203
Phone: 845-758-6050
Biography: expand/collapse
Professor López-Gay specializes in contemporary Spanish literature, with a strong interest in photography and film, and comparative literature (Iberia, Brazil, France). Her research is concerned with fiction and testimony, translation and cultural studies, the relationship between word and image, theories of the archive, and contemporary life narration. She is the author of numerous articles in journals such as Anales de literatura española contemporánea, Hispania, Letral, and Romance Notes; has given conference presentations and guest lectures nationally and internationally; and has been awarded research fellowships and grants from the French and Spanish Ministries of Education, the Generalitat of Catalonia, the Camões Institute of Portugal, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Her new book, True Fictions [Ficciones de verdad] (Iberoamericana/Vervuert, 2020), focuses on archive fever and autobiographical writing through traditional and digital media. Before joining the Bard faculty in 2013, she taught at New York University and the Autonomous University of Barcelona. Professor López-Gay is part of the international research group on autofiction based at the University of Alcalá de Henares in Madrid, Spain. In addition to her teaching and research, she is a member of the North American Academy of the Spanish Language. Currently, she is the coordinator of Latin American and Iberian Studies at Bard.

PhD, Spanish and Portuguese languages and literatures, New York University; joint PhD, comparative literature and translation studies (French and Spanish), University of Paris 7 and Autonomous University of Barcelona.

Tara Lorenzen, Visiting Associate Professor of Dance, Dance Program Director
Office: Fisher Center for the Performing Arts
Phone: 845-758-7996
Biography: expand/collapse
Tara Lorenzen has danced with the Trisha Brown Dance Company, the Repertory Understudy Group under Merce Cunningham, and the Stephen Petronio Company. She has also worked with Kimberly Bartosik, Christine Elmo, Shen Wei Dance Arts, Ashleigh Leite, Todd Williams, Christopher Williams, Renée Archibald, Anna Sperber, and Beth Gill. Lorenzen has worked for the American Dance Festival and Kaatsbaan|cultural park on their education initiatives.

BFA, SUNY Purchase. At Bard since 2017.

Renée Anne Louprette, Assistant Professor of Music; College Organist
Office: Edith C. Blum Institute, 117
Phone: 845-758-7379
Website: https://www.reneeannelouprette.com
Biography: expand/collapse
Renée Anne Louprette, hailed by the New York Times as one of New York’s finest organists, has established an international career as an organ recitalist, accompanist, conductor, and teacher. As director of the Bard Baroque Ensemble, she leads an annual series of Bach cantatas presented in Bard’s Chapel of the Holy Innocents and at venues throughout the Hudson Valley region. She is director of the National Competition in Organ Improvisation and a 2022 US-Romanian Fulbright Scholar. Recent recitals include such venues as Cathedral of Notre Dame, Paris; Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles; Royal Festival Hall, London; Rochester Celebrity Organ Recital Series, Eastman School of Music; Washington National Cathedral; the United States Military Academy at West Point; and the Bard Music Festival. She is associated with several distinguished sacred music programs in the New York City area, having served as associate director of music at the Church of St. Ignatius Loyola, associate director of music and the arts at Trinity Church Wall Street, organist and associate director at the Unitarian Church of All Souls, and director of music at the Church of Notre Dame. She has collaborated with the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra, Berkshire Bach Society, Voices of Ascension, Clarion Music Society, American Symphony Orchestra, Dessoff Choirs, New York Choral Society, Oratorio Society of New York, Los Angeles Dance Project, and the Empire Brass Quintet, among others. Conducting positions have included assistant conductor of the chamber singers and symphonic chorus at Bard College; founder and conductor, Les Demoiselles de Notre Dame, New York City; and assistant conductor of the South West London Choral Society. Professor Louprette has also held academic positions at Rutgers University, Manhattan School of Music, Hartt School, and Montclair State University. Her recording of the Great Eighteen Chorales of J. S. Bach on the Metzler organ in the chapel of Trinity College, Cambridge, was named a classical music Critics’ Choice in 2014 by the New York Times. In 2018, she released a recording of 20th-century French organ repertoire on the Acis Productions label to critical acclaim. Her recording of Bach’s Clavier-Übung III on the Acis label is due for release in September 2023.

BM, Graduate Professional Diploma (organ performance), Hartt School, University of Hartford; Diplôme Supérieur, Centre d'Études Supérieures de Musique et de Danse de Toulouse; MM, conducting, Bard College Conservatory of Music. At Bard since 2019.

Photo: Joshua South

Valeria Luiselli, Sadie Samuelson Levy Professor in Languages and Literature
Office: Shafer House, 203
Biography: expand/collapse
Valeria Luiselli was born in Mexico City and grew up in South Korea, South Africa, and India. She is the author of the award-winning novels The Story of My Teeth (2015) and Faces in the Crowd (2013), and the collections of essays Sidewalks (2013) and Tell Me How It Ends (2017)—all published by Coffee House Press. Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions was described by the Texas Observer as "the first must-read book of the Trump era" and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism in 2017. Her work has been translated into more than 20 languages and has appeared in publications such as the New York Times, Granta, Harper's and McSweeney's. Her most recent novel, Lost Children Archive (Knopf), won the 2020 Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. It was a 2019 Kirkus Prize finalist and was longlisted for the Booker Prize, Women’s Prize for Fiction, and Aspen Words Literary Prize, and shortlisted for the Simpson Literary Prize. Luiselli received the 2020 Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Literature and is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship. At Bard since 2019.

Joseph Luzzi, Asher B. Edelman Professor of Literature
Office: Seymour 204
Phone: 845-758-7150
Website: https://www.josephluzzi.com
Biography: expand/collapse
Joseph Luzzi received his PhD from Yale and is the author of eight books, including most recently Dante’s Divine Comedy: A Biography and a translation of Dante’s Vita Nuova. His Botticelli’s Secret: The Lost Drawings and the Rediscovery of the Renaissance was a New Yorker Best Books of 2022 selection and shortlisted for the Phi Beta Kappa Ralph Waldo Emerson Award. Other books include Romantic Europe and the Ghost of

Italy, which received the MLA’s Scaglione Prize for Italian Studies; A Cinema of Poetry: Aesthetics of the Italian Art Film, a finalist for the international prize “The Bridge Book” Award; My Two Italies, a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice; and In a Dark Wood: What Dante Taught Me About Grief, Healing, and the Mysteries of Love, a Vanity Fair “Must Read” that has been translated into multiple languages. His honors include a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholars Award; Wallace Fellowship from Villa I Tatti, the Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies; Yale College teaching prize; essay award from the Dante Society of America; and fellowships from the National Humanities Center and Yale’s Whitney Humanities Center. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, American Scholar, Times of London, Chronicle of Higher Education, and many others. In 2017, he was named Honorary Citizen of Acri, Calabria, the Italian birthplace of his parents, and he has been profiled in media venues including the Guardian and National Public Radio. At Bard since 2002.

Jana Mader, Director of Academic Programs, Hannah Arendt Center for Politics & Humanities, Visiting Assistant Professor in Environmental Studies & the Humanities
Department(s): Hannah Arendt Center

Nabanjan Maitra , Assistant Professor of the Interdisciplinary Study of Religions
Biography: expand/collapse
Nabanjan Maitra’s area of specialization is Hindu studies, with teaching and research interests in religious identity formation, discourses of religious power, reinventions of tradition, and Sanskrit. His book project, The Rebirth of Homo Vedicus, examines the formulation and implementation of a novel form of monastic power in a medieval south India monastery. He has pieces forthcoming in JSTOR Daily and the Journal of South Asian Intellectual History. Professor Maitra comes to Bard from the University of Texas at Austin, where he taught courses on the religions of South Asia and Sanskrit. He also served as lecturer in Sanskrit at Columbia University. Grants and awards received include, among others, a Mellon Dissertation Completion Fellowship at the University of Chicago; Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Fellowship, Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, India; and Committee on South Asian Studies Fellowship, India.

BA, University of Virginia; MEd, George Washington University; AM, PhD, University of Chicago. At Bard since 2022.

Norman Manea, Francis Flournoy Professor Emeritus in European Studies and Culture; Writer in Residence
Biography: expand/collapse
M.S., Institute of Construction, Bucharest, Romania. Author of novels, volumes of short fiction, and essays. Available in English: The Hooligan’s Return (memoir, 2004); The Black Envelope (novel, 1995); Compulsory Happiness (novellas, 1993); October Eight o’Clock (short fiction, 1992); On Clowns: The Dictator and the Artist (essays, 1992). Awards and honors: DAAD Berliner Kunstler Programm (1987), Fulbright Fellowship (1989), MacArthur Fellowship (1992), Guggenheim Fellowship (1992), National Jewish Book Award (1993), The New York Public Library Literary Lion Medal (1993), Nonino International Prize (2001), Napoli Prize for Fiction (2004), Prix Médicis Étranger (2006), Nelly Sachs Prize (2011). Member, Berlin Academy of Art (2006), Legion d’Honneur (2009), Royal Society of Literature (2011). At Bard: 1989–2017.

William T. Maple, Professor Emeritus of Biology
Department(s): Ecology Field Station
Office: Reem-Kayden Center
Biography: expand/collapse
B.A., Miami University; M.A., Ph.D., Kent State University. Director of Natural Science Museum for Nantucket Maria Mitchell Association (Emeritus). Board of directors, Hudsonia, Ltd. Member: American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists, Society for the Study of Amphibians and Reptiles, Herpetologists League. Professional interests: evolution and ecology of reptiles and amphibians. Faculty, The Master of Arts in Teaching Program. At Bard: 1973–2014.

Tanya Marcuse, Associate Professor of Photography
Office: Woods Studio, Woods 212
Website: https://www.tanyamarcuse.com
Biography: expand/collapse
Tanya Marcuse began making photographs as an early college student at Bard College at Simon’s Rock. She went on to study art history and studio art at Oberlin College and earn her MFA from Yale. After Oberlin, she lived in the Venezuelan rainforest with a small group of indigenous people on a year-long Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, photographing and writing. Her photographs are in many collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the George Eastman Museum. In 2002, she received a Guggenheim fellowship to pursue her project Undergarments and Armor. In 2005, she embarked on a three-part, 14-year project, Fruitless | Fallen | Woven, moving from iconic, serial photographs of trees in Fruitless to lush, immersive, allegorical works in Fallen and Woven. The photographs in Woven are as large as 5 x 14 feet. Fueled by the Biblical narrative of the fall from Eden, these related projects use increasingly fantastical imagery and more elaborate methods of constructions to explore cycles of growth and decay and the dynamic tension between the passage of time and the photographic medium. Professor Marcuse is a student of martial arts and boxing as a method of cultivating mental and physical concentration and discipline. Her work is represented by Julie Saul Gallery in New York City. Her books include Undergarments and Armor (Nazraeli Press, 2005), Wax Bodies, (Nazraeli Press, 2012) and Fruitless | Fallen | Woven (Radius Press, 2019).

AA, Bard College at Simon’s Rock; BA, Oberlin College; MFA, Yale University School of Art. At Bard since 2012.

Results 201-210 of 375