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
—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 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
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
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Bard Musician Franz Nicolay Testifies in Congress
Bard Musician Franz Nicolay Testifies in Congress
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.”Franz Nicolay, visiting instructor of music.
“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
Post Date: 06-02-2026
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Hal Haggard's Research on Black Holes Featured on PBS Space Time
Hal Haggard's Research on Black Holes Featured on PBS Space Time
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.”Hal Haggard, associate professor of physics.
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.
Post Date: 06-01-2026
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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 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.Jonathan VanDyke MFA ’05, artist in residence. Photo by Shawn Poynter
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
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Composer in Residence Missy Mazzoli Profiled in the New York Times
Composer in Residence Missy Mazzoli Profiled in the New York Times
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.”Composer in Residence Missy Mazzoli.
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.
Post Date: 05-28-2026
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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, 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.Beto O'Byrne. Photo by Thomas Dunn
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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Bard Scholar Tania El Khoury Honored With Two Residencies
Bard Scholar Tania El Khoury Honored With Two Residencies
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.Tania El Khoury.
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
Faculty Search
Click the link below to browse through an alphabetical list of Bard Faculty
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Search Results
Oleg Minin, Continuing Associate Professor of Russian
Office: Fairbairn, 204
Phone: 845-758-6822
Biography: expand/collapseB.A., University of Victoria; M.A., University of Waterloo; Ph.D., University of Southern California. Fields of specialization include the literature, visual, and performing arts of the Russian Silver Age and Russian avant-garde; the satirical press of the Russian fin de siècle; Habermas’s social theory and Bourdieu’s theory of cultural production; and language pedagogy. His work has been published in The Russian Review, Experiment: A Journal of Russian Culture, and Slavic and East European Journal. Co-curator of the exhibition Demonocracy: All Hell Breaks Loose in 1905 Russia at the Doheny Memorial Library, USC, and curator of the Ferris Collection of Sovietica at the Institute of Modern Russian Culture. He previously taught at the University of Southern California; California State University, Northridge; Glendale Community College; and University of California, Riverside. At Bard since 2012.
Aniruddha Mitra, Associate Professor of Economics
Office: Albee, 204
Phone: 845-752-6019
Biography: expand/collapseM.A., Delhi School of Economics, Delhi University; M.S., Ph.D., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Teaching and research interests include microeconomics; game theory; industrial organization; developmental economics; the economics of race, ethnicity, and gender; and the economics of migration. His research employs both theoretical and empirical methods to investigate the phenomena of discrimination, ethnic conflict, and the international migration of skilled labor. He has published in Applied Economics Letters, Eastern Economic Journal, Mathematical Social Sciences, and Economic Systems. He previously taught at Middlebury College and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. At Bard since 2012.
Chiori Miyagawa, Playwright in Residence
Office: Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, B54
Phone: 845-758-7938
Biography: expand/collapseM.F.A., CUNY Brooklyn College. Playwright and dramaturg. Plays produced Off-Broadway and nationally. Two collections of plays published: Thousand Years Waiting and Other Plays (Seagull Books) and America Dreaming and Other Plays (NoPassport Press). Playwriting fellowships: New York Foundation for the Arts, Van Lier, McKnight. Recipient: Radcliffe Institute Fellowship at Harvard University, Rockefeller Bellagio Center Residency in Italy, Beinecke Playwright-in-Residence at Yale School of Drama, Rockefeller Multi-Arts Production Fund (twice), MAP Fund from Creative Capital, Asian Cultural Council Fellowship. Resident playwright, New Dramatists. Full member: Dramatists Guild, PEN American Center, League of Professional Theater Women. At Bard since 1999.
Kyle Mohr, Visiting Instructor in Economics
Biography: expand/collapseKyle Mohr’s research interests include unemployment, labor economics, monetary theory and policy, and the history of economic thought. He has served as lecturer in the economics department at Skidmore College and research scholar at Bard’s Economic Democracy Initiative. At Skidmore, he taught courses in introductory macroeconomics and economics and the global financial crisis. At the University of Missouri, Kansas City, where he earned his MA degree and is a PhD candidate, he taught the course Money and Banking. Publications include a book review in Journal of Cultural Economy and, as research assistant, 2019 Black Inequality Index: State of Black Kansas City and 2019 Hispanic Inequality Index: State of Hispanic Kansas City, developed for the Urban League of Greater Kansas City. He has made conference presentations on subjects including “Transitioning into Unemployment: Sectoral and Relative Wage Changes since the Great Recession”; “Leaving U: Investigating Monthly Transitions from Official Unemployment”; and “Considering the Community Development Block Grant Program: A Case of Federally Funded and Locally Administered Public Policy.” He also was conference co-organizer for, among others, the OSUN-EDI Summer Workshop in Economic Policy and Public Finance (Bard Annandale), a virtual global forum on democratizing work, and the 13th International Post-Keynesian Conference (Kansas City).
BA, University of California, Santa Cruz; MA, PhD candidate, University of Missouri–Kansas City. At Bard since 2023.
Roosevelt Montas, Laura Y. Chang & Arnold Chavkin Professor in Liberal Education and Civic Life
Jessie Montgomery, Composition Masterclasses
Department(s): Bard Conservatory of Music
Website: https://www.jessiemontgomery.com
Biography: expand/collapseJessie Montgomery is an acclaimed composer, violinist, and educator. She is the recipient of the Leonard Bernstein Award from the ASCAP Foundation and the Sphinx Medal of Excellence, and her works are performed frequently around the world by leading musicians and ensembles. Her music interweaves classical music with elements of vernacular music, improvisation, poetry, and social consciousness, making her an acute interpreter of 21st-century American sound and experience. Her works have been described as “turbulent, wildly colorful, and exploding with life” (The Washington Post). Her growing body of work includes solo, chamber, vocal, and orchestral works. Some recent highlights include Shift, Change, Turn (2019), commissioned by the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra and the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra; Coincident Dances (2018) for the Chicago Sinfonietta; and Banner (2014)—written to mark the 200th anniversary of “The Star-Spangled Banner”—which was presented in its United Kingdom premiere at the BBC Proms on August 7, 2021. Summer 2021 brought a varied slate of premiere performances, including Five Freedom Songs, a song cycle conceived with and written for soprano Julia Bullock, for Sun Valley and Grand Teton Music Festivals, San Francisco and Kansas City Symphonies, Boston and New Haven Symphony Orchestras, and the Virginia Arts Festival (August 7); a site-specific collaboration with Bard SummerScape Festival and Pam Tanowitz Dance, I was waiting for the echo of a better day (July 8); and Passacaglia, a flute quartet for the National Flute Association’s 49th annual convention (August 13). Since 1999, she has been affiliated with the Sphinx Organization, which supports young African American and Latinx string players, and has served as composer-in-residence for the Sphinx Virtuosi, the Organization’s flagship professional touring ensemble. A founding member of PUBLIQuartet and a former member of the Catalyst Quartet, Montgomery holds degrees from The Juilliard School and New York University, and is currently a PhD candidate in music composition at Princeton University. She has served as a professor of violin and composition at the New School, and in May 2021, she began her three-year appointment as the Mead Composer-in-Residence with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
BM, The Juilliard School; MM, New York University; graduate fellow in music composition, Princeton University. (2022– ) Composer in Residence.
[Photo by Jiyang Chen]
Alys Moody, Associate Professor of Literature
Office: Aspinwall, 108
Phone: 845-758-7221
Biography: expand/collapseAlys Moody’s areas of expertise include 20th- and 21st-century European, American, and world literature, with an emphasis on modernism and its contemporary heirs. She received her doctorate at the University of Oxford after completing undergraduate studies at the University of Sydney. Her research focuses on how the persistence and proliferation of modernism’s aesthetic ideas have shaped the way authors, scholars, and the public think about literature and its role in society. She is the author of The Art of Hunger: Aesthetic Autonomy and the Afterlives of Modernism (Oxford University Press, 2018) and coeditor, with Stephen J. Ross, of the anthology Global Modernists on Modernism (forthcoming). Manuscripts in preparation include the book The Literature of World Hunger: Poverty, Global Modernism, and the Emergence of a World Literary System and an article on the Lehrstücke of J. M. Coetzee. She has written on literature and contemporary art for such publications as the Journal of Beckett Studies, American Literary History, and Theatre Journal; contributed book chapters including “Global Modernism: An Introduction and Ten Theses,” in Global Modernists on Modernism, and “Against Culinary Art: Mina Loy and the Modernist Starving Artist,” in Gastro-Modernism: Food, Literature, Culture (forthcoming, 2019); authored book and theater reviews in, among others, Irish Studies Review, Syndicate, The Comparatist, and Beckett Circle: Newsletter of the Samuel Beckett Society. She has also translated works by Aimé Césaire, Suzanne Césaire, and Normil Sylvain. Professor Moody is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including an Andrew W. Mellon Research Fellowship in the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin and a Humanities Traveling Fellowship from the Australian Academy of the Humanities. She previously taught at Macquarie University (Sydney), University of Waikato (New Zealand), Université Paris 7–Paris Diderot, and University of Oxford. BA, MPhil, University of Sydney; DPhil, University of Oxford. At Bard since 2019.
Jubilith Moore, Visiting Artist in Residence
Office: Fisher Center for the Performing Arts
Biography: expand/collapseJubilith Moore is a performer, director, writer, teaching artist, and producer, who has extensive training in traditional Japanese and contemporary American theater. She studies shimai (dance) and utai (chant) with Kinue Oshima and Richard Emmert, and has also trained in komai (dance), kyogen (comic performance), and kotsuzumi (drum). Moore has served as master instructor in noh training at Hampden-Sydney College and as guest teaching artist and lecturer at Willamette University, San Francisco State University, Towson University, Vassar College, and the Center X Center Theatre Festival in Kigali, Rwanda. She has been artist in residence at San Francisco School of the Arts and International Schools Theatre Association, and is a founding member of Theatre Nohgaku, an international ensemble that has performed throughout the United States and Europe. Honors include, among others, the 2020 Della Davidson Prize, Dresher Ensemble Artist Residency, Theatre Bay Area CA$H | Creates Award, and a Japan Foundation Fellowship for travel to Japan to research noh and kyogen.
BA, Bard College. Additional training in Japanese dance, chant, performance, and drum. At Bard since 2021.
A. Sayeeda Moreno, Assistant Professor of Film and Electronic Arts
Office: Avery Center for the Arts, 331
Biography: expand/collapseProfessor Moreno is a director and screenwriter whose works have screened at SXSW, Tribeca Film Festival, BAMCinemaFest, and Rome International Film Festival, among other venues. Her short film White—the inspiration for her San Francisco Film Society/Hearst Screenwriting Grant feature-length script—was funded by ITVS for Futurestates.tv, a series of independent minifeatures, and was also available at PBS.org. Another short film, Sin Salida, aired on HBO/HBO Latino for two years and was a finalist at the American Black Film Festival. The Grey Woman premiered at Lincoln Center and won the Hallmark Channel short film competition. Additional films include I’m Not Down, Bina, Knock Knock, Rolling, and Bushwick Beats, an anthology of short films by six directors that is in postproduction. She previously taught at Montclair State University and City University of New York, and served as lecturer at Cornell University, Williams College, and Marist College, and as teaching artist at The Pelham Picture House.
BA, Empire State University of New York, New York City; MFA, New York University; additional studies at NYU’s Actor’s Studio Drama School. At Bard since 2018.
Rebecca Morgan, Artist in Residence
Biography: expand/collapseRebecca Morgan uses techniques of drawing, painting, and ceramics in works that subvert stereotypes of Appalachia. Stylistically, she embraces the hyper-detailed naturalism of Dutch masters, as well as absurd, repulsive caricature suggestive of cartoonists like R. Crumb. She is represented by Asya Geisberg Gallery in New York, and her work has appeared in solo and two-person exhibitions at venues including Gitler & ___, Santa Barbara; Mother Gallery, Beacon, New York; Gasser Grunert Gallery, New York, Steuben South Gallery, Brooklyn. Group exhibitions at Southampton Arts Center; American Folk Art Museum; Pratt Institute; and galleries in London, Nashville, Paris, Detroit, Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami Beach, Cologne, Woodstock, Vienna, and Mexico City. Press about Morgan and her work in the New York Times, Time Out New York, Hyperallergic, ARTnews, Whitehot Magazine, Beautiful/Decay, Juxtapoz Magazine, Huffington Post, Paper Magazine, and Berlin’s Lodown Magazine. Honors and awards include Lefebvre Ceramic Residency, Versailles, France; Dio Horia Residency, Mykonos, Greece; Wassaic Project juror, guest critic, and visiting artist; Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts, Invited Artist in Residence, Newcastle, Maine; and Yaddo Artist in Residence, Saratoga Springs, New York. She previously taught at the Maine College of Art Graduate Summer Seminar, University of Arkansas, School of the Art Institute Chicago, Keene State College, University of Cincinnati, and George Mason University.
BA, Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania; MFA, Pratt Institute. At Bard since 2022.