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

Faculty Search

Click the link below to browse through an alphabetical list of Bard Faculty

Search Again

Search Results

Results 261-270 of 375
Laura Parnes, Visiting Artist in Residence, Film and Electronic Arts
Website: https://www.lauraparnes.com
Biography: expand/collapse
Laura Parnes is a multiplatform, lens-based artist whose work has been screened and exhibited throughout the United States and internationally at venues including the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus; the Museum of Modern Art and Fashion Institute of Technology, New York; Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Spain; Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia; International Film Festival Rotterdam; Deste Foundation for Contemporary Art, Athens; MassArt Film Society, Boston; Overgaden-Institute for Contemporary Art, Copenhagen; and CinemaTexas in Austin. Participant Press published a book of her scripts, Blood and Guts in Hollywood: Two Screenplays by Laura Parnes (2009), and Video Data Bank published a box set of her works. She is the recipient of a Creative Capital Award, New York Film Academy Fellowship, and John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. Parnes has lectured as a visiting artist at numerous institutions, including Harvard University, Columbia University, and the University of California, Los Angeles; and served as visiting critic at Yale University. She previously taught at the School of Visual Arts, Parsons School of Design, Cooper Union, and Bennington College, among others.

BFA, Tyler School of Art, Temple University. At Bard since 2019.

Bhavesh Patel, Visiting Artist in Residence, Theater and Performance
Biography: expand/collapse
Bhavesh Patel is an actor who has appeared on stage in the 2017 revival of Present Laughter opposite Kevin Kline, the Broadway premiere of multiple Tony Award winner War Horse, the Off-Broadway production of India Ink, and Shakespeare in the Park’s A Midsummer’s Night Dream; and on screen in the television series The Good Wife, Blue Bloods, New Amsterdam, The Blacklist, Madame Secretary, Person of Interest, Elementary, and Gossip Girl, among others. In addition to his New York City theater work, he has performed at some of the country’s top regional theaters, including Westport County Playhouse, Guthrie Theater, St. Louis Repertory Theater, and Berkshire Theater Festival. Patel is a member of the theater group Grundleshotz and, together with other members, wrote the book for the Gettin’ the Band Back Together, which premiered on Broadway in 2013. He previously taught at the New School and SUNY Albany and serves as a private acting coach/mentor.

BA, Southern Illinois University; certificate, Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts; MFA, New York University Tisch Schol of the Arts. At Bard since 2021.

Chiara Pavone, Assistant Professor of Japanese
Biography: expand/collapse
Chiara Pavone’s research is broadly concerned with the production, canonization, and circulation of disaster narratives. Her doctoral dissertation topic at the University of California, Los Angeles, focuses on media and works of literature produced after the March 2011 Great Eastern Japan earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster with the objective of unveiling “the evidence of radiation as a trope in a public sphere that has strived to erase it.” Her work draws on scholarship in ecocriticism and ecofeminism, political philosophy, and queer theory to propose a mode of reading Pavone calls Radioactive Aesthetics. She delivered a Bard Zoom lecture on the subject in March 2023. Publications include the coauthored “Spoiled Meals: Immunitary and Metabolic Imaginaries in Kawakami Mieko’s ‘Dreams of Love, Etc.’ and Murata Sayaka’s Convenience Store Woman” in Literature after Fukushima (Routledge, 2023). Professor Pavone is the recipient of numerous honors from UCLA, including a dissertation year fellowship and Sasakawa graduate fellowship. She previously taught in UCLA’s Department of Asian Languages and Cultures on subjects ranging from global narratives of crisis to beginner and intermediate Japanese and Japanese civilization.

BA, University of Bologna; MA, Ca’ Foscari University, Venice; PhD, University of California, Los Angeles; also studied at Waseda University. At Bard since 2023.

Gilles Peress, Distinguished Visiting Professor of Human Rights and Photography
Department(s): Arts
Phone: 845-758-6822
Biography: expand/collapse
Gilles Peress started using photography to create museum installations and books in 1971, having previously studied political science and philosophy in Paris. His ongoing project, Hate Thy Brother, looks at similitude and difference and its consequences in ethnic conflicts. Peress’s books include Telex Iran; The Silence: Rwanda; Farewell to Bosnia; The Graves: Srebrenica and Vukovar; A Village Destroyed; and Haines. Peress’s work has been exhibited in and collected by institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Museum of Modern Art in New York; Getty Museum in Los Angeles; V&A in London; Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris; and Museum Folkwang, Essen; among others. Peress is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts grants, Pollock-Krasner and New York State Council of the Arts fellowships, W. Eugene Smith Grant for Humanistic Photography, and International Center of Photography Infinity Award. Peress joined Magnum Photos in 1971 and has served three times as vice president and twice as president of the cooperative.

Studies at Institut d’Etudes Politiques and Université de Vincennes, France. At Bard since 2008.

Gabriel G. Perron, Associate Professor of Biology
Office: Reem-Kayden Center, 216
Phone: 845-752-2334
Biography: expand/collapse
B.Sc., M.Sc., McGill University; Ph.D., University of Oxford; Banting Postdoctoral Fellow, Center for Advanced Research in Environmental Genomics, University of Ottawa. He also served as visiting research fellow at Harvard University and Imperial College London, and received a teaching certificate from Harvard’s Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning. Additional honors and fellowships include: Canadian National Award of Linacre College; Clarendon Fund Scholarship of the University of Oxford; and postgraduate scholarship, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. Peer-reviewed publications: PLOS One, Genetics, The American Naturalist, Discovery Medicine, Current Biology, and others. Invited seminars and presentations at institutions throughout Canada, Europe, and the United States, including several at Bard: “A Blizzard in a Bottle: Antibiotic Resistance in Ancient Permafrost”; “Nature Walk: Seeing Evolution in Action”; and “Meet a Scientist.” At Bard since 2015.

Eric Person, Visiting Artist in Residence
Website: https://www.ericperson.com
Biography: expand/collapse
For more than 30 years, Eric Person has been committed to composing, recording, and performing dynamic and innovative music. His personal sound on alto, soprano, and tenor saxophone and flute has been featured on more than 50 recordings. He has taught and performed internationally, working with jazz legends Dave Holland, McCoy Tyner, Chico Hamilton, Houston Person, and John Hicks, among others. He’s also performed with genre-bending musicians such as Ben Harper, Vernon Reid, Ronald Shannon Jackson, Will Calhoun, and Bright Dog Red. As a band leader, he fronts Meta-Four, Trio-kinesis, and the Eric Person Big Band. As a composer, he’s released 10 CDs.

For 15 years, beginning in 1982, he toured the United States, Europe, Japan, and South America with drummer Chico Hamilton. From 1994 to 1997, he was a pivotal member of the Dave Holland Quartet, performing at prestigious concert halls and festivals nationally and internationally, and with the group recording Dream of the Elders, which highlighted a sound that was light and ethereal, but also energetic. During the 1990s he also performed and recorded with the World Saxophone Quartet. In 1993, he released his debut CD as leader, Arrival. This was followed by Prophecy and More Tales To Tell. In 1999, Person established his working band Meta-Four; started his own label, Distinction Records; and released Extra Pressure and Live at Big Sur. In the 2000s, Person released a succession of CDs, including Reflections, Rhythm Edge, The Grand Illusion, Thoughts on God, and Duoscope. Bill Milkowski of JazzTimes called Person a “risk-taking improviser, accomplished composer, and inveterate swinger. His best outing to date, Rhythm Edge, presents an abundant sampling of this multifaceted yet underrated talent.”

BM, Empire State College; additional studies, St. Louis Conservatory of Music, Herb Alpert School of Music at University of California, Los Angeles. At Bard since 2022.

Tami Petty, Visiting Artist in Residence of Music

Charlotte Peyraud, Instructor, MBA in Sustainability
Department(s): MBA in Sustainability

Judy Pfaff, Richard B. Fisher Professor in the Arts
Office: Fisher Studio Arts Building, Room 151
Phone: 845-758-7306
Website: https://www.judypfaffstudio.com
Biography: expand/collapse
B.F.A., Washington University, St. Louis; M.F.A., Yale School of Art. Recipient, MacArthur Fellowship (2004); Guggenheim Fellowship (1983); National Endowment for the Arts grants (1979, 1986); member, American Academy of Arts and Letters. Numerous solo exhibitions and group shows in major galleries and museums in the United States and abroad. Commissions include Pennsylvania Convention Center Public Arts Projects, Philadelphia; large-scale site-specific sculpture, GTE Corporation, Irving, Texas; installation: vernacular abstraction, Wacoal, Tokyo, Japan; and set design, Brooklyn Academy of Music. Work in permanent collections of Museum of Modern Art; Whitney Museum of American Art; Brooklyn Museum of Art; Detroit Institute of Arts; others. Milton Avery Distinguished Professor of Art, Bard College (1989, 1991). At Bard since 1994.

Lucas G. Pinheiro, Assistant Professor of Political Studies
Website: https://www.lucasgpinheiro.com
Biography: expand/collapse
Professor Pinheiro’s research connects political thought and critical theory to social and intellectual history by focusing on the development of global capitalism, empire, racial slavery, and abolition in the Atlantic world since the late 17th century. Other areas of interest include the history of political thought, contemporary political theory, critical theory, and politics and aesthetics. His current book project, Factories of Modernity: Political Thought in the Capitalist Epoch, recasts the factory system as a decisive stage for social, economic, and political ideas and practices in Britain and its Atlantic colonies between 1688 and 1807. From this historical study, he developed a long-range conceptual framework for understanding modern capitalism and confronting its enduring patterns of discipline, racialization, and inequality at contemporary workplaces like Google and Amazon. Pinheiro is also currently coediting a collection of essays by political theorists and historians titled Intellectual Histories of Global Capitalism, which was the subject of a two-part conference held at the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society at the University of Chicago in January and June 2022. Publications also include the article “A Factory Afield: Capitalism and Empire in John Locke’s Political Economy,” in Modern Intellectual History (2022); and reviews and essays in Political Theory, Perspectives on Politics, Contemporary Political Theory, and Disability and Political Theory. He previously served as postdoctoral fellow at Dartmouth College and postdoctoral teaching fellow at the University of Chicago.

BA, University of British Columbia; MPhil, University of Cambridge; MA, PhD, University of Chicago; additional studies, Sciences-Po Paris, certificate du Programme d’Échange. At Bard since 2022.

Results 261-270 of 375