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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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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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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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
Francine Prose, Distinguished Writer in Residence
Office: Shafer House
Phone: 845-758-7600
Biography: expand/collapseB.A., Radcliffe College. Author of 12 novels, including A Changed Man (HarperCollins, 2005) and Blue Angel (HarperCollins, 2000; finalist for National Book Award). Nonfiction works include Reading Like a Writer (HarperCollins, 2006); Caravaggio: Painter of Miracles (Eminent Lives, 2005); The Lives of the Muses: Nine Women and the Artists They Inspired (HarperCollins, 2002; a New York Times Notable Book for 2002). Contributing editor, Harper's; essays, reviews, and criticism in New York Times Book Review, Wall Street Journal, Parkett, other publications. President, PEN America (2007– ); former Director's Fellow, Center for Scholars and Writers, New York Public Library. Recipient, 2008 Edith Wharton Achievement Award for Literature; many other grants and awards, including Guggenheim and Fulbright fellowships. At Bard since 2005.
Walid Raad, Professor of Photography
Biography: expand/collapseWalid Raad is a Beirut- and New York–based artist whose works—spanning photography, video, mixed media installations, and performance—explore how historical events of physical and psychological violence affect bodies, minds, and culture. These works include The Atlas Group, a 15-year project (1989–2004) on the contemporary history of his native Lebanon, with an emphasis on the civil wars of 1975 to 1990. Raad found and produced audio, visual, and literary documents that shed light on this history. Other projects include Sweet Talk: Commissions (1987–2006), photographs of Beirut’s residents, buildings, streets, stairs, squares, monuments, storefronts, and gardens; and Scratching on Things I Could Disavow, an ongoing project about the history of art in the “Arab” world. His work has been featured in solo exhibitions at institutions including the Louvre (Paris), Museum of Modern Art (New York), Institute of Contemporary Art (Boston), Hamburger Kunsthalle (Hamburg), Museo Nacional Thyssen Bornemisza (Madrid), Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), Moderna Museet (Stockholm), and Whitechapel Gallery (London). Professor Raad’s works have also been shown at Documenta 11 and 13 (Germany), Venice Biennale, Whitney Biennial, Sao Paulo Bienal, Istanbul Biennial, and other venues across Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and the Americas. He is the recipient of multiple grants, prizes, and awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, ICP Infinity Award, Hasselblad Award, Rockefeller Fellowship, and Aachener Kunstpreis. He previously taught at the Cooper Union School of Art, Queens College, and Hampshire College.
BFA, Rochester Institute of Technology; MA, PhD, University of Rochester. At Bard: 2023–24 .
Karen Raizen, Assistant Professor of Italian
Office: Fairbairn, 103
Phone: 845-758-7885
Biography: expand/collapseKaren Raizen’s research focuses on operatic adaptations of Italian classics, particularly in the 17th and 18th centuries. She is the coeditor of Pier Paolo Pasolini, Framed and Unframed: A Thinker for the 21st Century (Bloomsbury, 2018) and has published articles, essays, and reviews in Italica, Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies, and Senses of Cinema; she has also worked on a number of translations of scholarly articles and operas. She is a recipient of the Yale Elizabethan Club prize for her dissertation, “Adaptations in Arcadia: Orlando furioso on the Eighteenth-Century Operatic Stage.” Professor Raizen also has extensive training as a classical violist and has played in a number of ensembles and participated in festivals both in the United States and abroad. BM, Rice University; MM, Conservatorio della Svizzera Italiana; PhD, Yale University.
Dina Ramadan, Continuing Associate Professor of Human Rights and Middle Eastern Studies
Office: Seymour, 103
Phone: 845-758-6822 x7506
Biography: expand/collapseB.A., American University in Cairo; M.A., M.Phil., Ph.D., Columbia University. Articles, chapters, and reviews in Arab Studies Journal, Art Journal, Journal of Visual Culture, Middle East Studies Association Bulletin, others. Founding member and secretary, Association for Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab World, Iran, and Turkey. At Bard since 2010.
Raman Ramakrishnan, Cello & Chamber Music, Bard Conservatory of Music; Artist in Residence, Bard College
Department(s): Bard Conservatory of Music
Biography: expand/collapseAs a member of the Horszowski Trio, cellist Raman Ramakrishnan has performed across North America, Europe, India, Japan, and in Hong Kong, and recorded for Bridge Records and Avie Records. For eleven seasons, as a founding member of the Daedalus Quartet, he performed around the world. Mr. Ramakrishnan is currently an artist member of the Boston Chamber Music Society. Mr. Ramakrishnan has given solo recitals in New York, Boston, Seattle, and Washington, D.C., and has performed chamber music at Caramoor, at Bargemusic, with the Chicago Chamber Musicians, and at the Aspen, Bard, Charlottesville, Four Seasons, Kingston, Lincolnshire (UK), Marlboro, Mehli Mehta (India), Oklahoma Mozart, and Vail Music Festivals. He has toured with Musicians from Marlboro and has performed, as guest principal cellist, with the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra. As a guest member of Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble, he has performed in New Delhi and Agra, India and in Cairo, Egypt. He has served on the faculties of the Taconic and Norfolk Chamber Music Festivals, as well as at Columbia University.
Mr. Ramakrishnan was born in Athens, Ohio and grew up in East Patchogue, New York. His father is a molecular biologist and his mother is the children's book author and illustrator Vera Rosenberry. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in physics from Harvard University and a Master’s degree in music from The Juilliard School. His principal teachers have been Fred Sherry, Andrés Díaz, and André Emelianoff. He lives in New York City with his wife, the violist Melissa Reardon, and their young son. He plays a Neapolitan cello made by Vincenzo Jorio in 1837.
Bryson Rand, Visiting Assistant Professor of Photography
Website: https://www.brysonrand.com
Biography: expand/collapseBryson Rand is a Brooklyn–based photographer whose work has been exhibited throughout the United States and internationally at such venues as Zeit Contemporary Art, New York; Dencker+Schneider Gallery, Berlin; Museo Universitario Del Chopo, Mexico City; Abrons Art Center, New York; La Mama La Galleria, New York; Westbeth Gallery, New York; and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco. Publications include The Origins of Color (Raw Meat Collective, 2018); Waters (Dashwood Books, 2017); Some Small Fever (Raw Meat Collective, 2017); and Matte Magazine #37: Bryson Rand (2015). His work has been included in numerous publications, including Primal Sight, Der Grief, Dear Dave, Matte Magazine, Vice, and NEWSPAPER, and was featured as a critics’ pick at ArtForum.com. Honors and awards include Robert Giard Foundation Grand finalist (2020); John Ferguson Weir Award, Yale School of Art; Seton Elm-Ivy Award, City of New Haven and Yale University; and Paula Rhodes Memorial Award, School of Visual Arts, He previously served as a thesis adviser at Maine College of Art, Wurtele Gallery Teacher at Yale University Art Gallery; and teaching fellow at Yale Norfolk School of Art.
BFA, University of Colorado Boulder; MAT, School of Visual Arts; MFA, Yale School of Art; also studied at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. At Bard since 2021.
Jussara dos Santos Raxlen, Visiting Assistant Professor of Sociology
Office: Fairbairn, 201
Biography: expand/collapseJussara dos Santos Raxlen’s research focuses on the intersection of knowledge systems, power, and care. She is interested in how the politics and ethics of forms of knowing and ordering the world create spatial and symbolic boundaries that facilitate or burden social relations and individual well-being. Jussara's current research on long-term care for older adults in the US, in its current configuration of “aging in place," shows how, taken together, shifting welfare governance, medicine, technology, labor, gender, and immigration regimes give rise to one of the most intractable problems of the 21st century. She is working on a book manuscript based on this research while devising a participatory and creative intervention to engage people outside of academic spaces to think together about these issues.
Jussara teaches courses on knowledge, technology, and science; work and occupations; sociological, methodological, feminist, and decolonial theory; the racialized, classed, gendered, and sexed body; and care and caregiving. In addition, with her previous experiences as a theater performer and social theater practitioner in Brazil, Portugal, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Lesotho as well as the US, she welcomes opportunities to participate in socially engaged art forms as a critical practice that produces collective knowledge about the social world, an urgent sociological task.
BA, SUNY Empire State University; MA, MPhil, PhD, The New School for Social Research.
Melissa Reardon, Viola; Artist in Residence, Bard College
Biography: expand/collapseGrammy-nominated violist Melissa Reardon is the Artistic Director of the Portland Chamber Music Festival in Portland, ME, Artist in Residence at Bard College and Conservatory and a founding member and the Executive Director of the East Coast Chamber Orchestra (ECCO). As a member of the Ensō String Quartet from 2006 until its final season in 2018, Melissa toured both nationally and internationally, with highlight performances in Sydney, Melbourne, Rio de Janeiro, New York’s Carnegie Hall, and Washington, DC’s Kennedy Center to name a few. Melissa won first prize at the Washington International Competition, and is the only violist to win top prizes in consecutive HAMS International viola competitions. She has appeared in numerous festivals across the United States and around the world, including tours with Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble, and with Musicians from Marlboro. She held the post of Associate Professor of Viola at East Carolina University from 2007 -2013, and earned degrees from the Curtis Institute of Music and the New England Conservatory. Melissa is married to the cellist Raman Ramakrishnan and they live in NYC with their seven-year-old son Linus.
David Register, Director of Debate, Bard Debate Union; Faculty Fellow and Director of Debate, Bard Prison Initiative
Department(s): Bard Prison Initiative, Learning Commons
Office: Shea House, 201
Phone: 845-758-6822 x4517
Website: https://debate.bard.edu
Biography: expand/collapseDavid Register is the director of the Bard Debate Union and a faculty member in the Bard Learning Commons, where he teaches courses in public speaking and argumentation. He is also founder and director of the internationally recognized Bard Prison Initiative (BPI) Debate Union. Before coming to Bard, Register worked at the University of Vermont, where taught communication courses and coached both parliamentary and policy debate. He also led debate workshops and institutes in the United States, Germany, Serbia, Slovenia, Hungary, Russia, and Colombia.
BFA, Emporia State University; MS, University of North Texas. At Bard since 2012.
Kelly Reichardt, S. William Senfeld Artist in Residence
Office: Ottaway Film Center, 322
Phone: 845-758-7146
Biography: expand/collapseKelly Reichardt is an award-winning independent filmmaker whose most recent work, First Cow, was screened at the 2019 New York Film Festival. Other films include Certain Women, starring Laura Dern, Michelle Williams, Kristen Stewart, and Lily Gladstone, which premiered at the 2016 New York Film Festival; Night Moves (2013), Meek’s Cutoff (2010), Wendy and Lucy (2008), Old Joy ( 2006), and River of Grass (1994). Honors received include a United States Artists Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship, Anonymous Was a Woman Award, and Renew Media Fellowship. Her work has been screened at the Whitney Biennial (2012), Film Forum, Cannes Film Festival in “un certain regard,” Venice International Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival, Berlin International Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, and BFI London Film Festival; with retrospectives at Anthology Film Archives, Pacific Film Archive, Museum of the Moving Image, Walker Art Center, and American Cinematheque Los Angeles. She previously taught at New York University, SUNY Buffalo, Columbia University, and the School of Visual Arts.
BFA, School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Tufts University. At Bard since 2006.