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 321-330 of 375
Clara Sousa-Silva, Assistant Professor of Physics
Biography: expand/collapse
Professor Sousa-Silva comes to Bard after serving as a quantum astrochemist at the Center for Astrophysics, a collaboration between the Harvard College Observatory and Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. Prior to her tenure at the center, she was a research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her work investigates how molecules interact with light so that they can be detected on faraway worlds. Her July 2021 TED talk, “The Fingerprints of Life beyond Earth,” makes the case for a new way to seek and possibly discover habitable planets and shares her research into a poisonous, smelly molecule that might signal life beyond Earth. She has also served as the director of the Science Research Mentoring Program at the Center for Astrophysics and MIT; and was head of education for the Twinkle Space Mission, a British project to explore exoplanets, and coordinator for EduTwinkle, an outreach and educational program connecting British schools with space missions. Sousa-Silva is the recipient of the prestigious 51 Pegasi b Fellowship from the Heising-Simons Foundation, which supports the growing field of planetary astronomy; Sagan Fellowship (declined); and an MIT research grant for her proposal “Creating a Rosetta Stone for the Interpretation of Exoplanet Biospheres.” Her work and commentary have been featured on the BBC and in Wired and The New York Times, among other publications. Recent scholarly articles include “Phosphine as a Biosignature Gas in Exoplanet Atmospheres,” Astrobiology (2020); “Trivalent Phosphorus and Phosphines as Components of Biochemistry in Anoxic Environments,” Astrobiology (2019); and “New Environmental Model for Thermodynamic Ecology of Biological Phosphine Production,” Science of the Total Environment (2019).

Integrated MPhys, University of Edinburgh; PhD, University College London. At Bard since 2022.

Patricia Spencer, Visiting Associate Professor of Music
Office: Avery Center for the Arts, N004
Phone: 845-758-6822 x6823
Biography: expand/collapse
B.M., Oberlin Conservatory of Music. Teaches at Hofstra University. Awards and grants: National Endowment for the Arts, Mary Flagler Cary Trust, Aaron Copland Fund for Music. Has toured internationally as soloist and flutist with Da Capo Chamber Players. Former chair, New Music Advisory Committee of National Flute Association. Former president, New York Flute Club. Numerous recordings include solo CDs on Neuma Records label. Solo performances include International Computer Music Conference (Beijing, China); Look and Listen Festival; Alternativa Festival, Moscow; and Bard Music Festival. At Bard since 1997.

Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins, Associate Professor of Anthropology
Office: Hopson, 304
Phone: 845-758-7201
Website: https://sophiastamatopoulourobbins.com
Biography: expand/collapse
PhD, Columbia University, 2015. Professor Stamatopoulou-Robbins is an anthropologist with research interests in infrastructure, waste, environment, platform capitalism, and the home. Her first book, Waste Siege: The Life of Infrastructure in Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2019), has won five major book awards and explores what happens when, as Palestinians are increasingly forced into proximity with their own wastes and with those of their occupiers, waste is transformed from “matter out of place,” per prevailing anthropological wisdom, into matter with no place to go—or its own ecology. Her current book, Controlled Alienation: Airbnb and the Future of Home (under contract with Duke University Press), explores the joint world-making of austerity and home-sharing in Greece. Other publications include pieces in Environment and Planning E, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Arab Studies Journal, The Jerusalem Quarterly, Anthropology News, Thresholds, and The New Centennial Review. Her film Waste Underground (with videographer Ali al-Deek) premiered at the Sharjah Biennial in Ramallah in 2017. She serves on the editorial teams of Cultural Anthropology and MERIP. Her research has been awarded funding by the National Science Foundation, Social Science Research Council, Wenner Gren Foundation, Columbia University, and the Palestinian American Research Council. At Bard since 2013.

Laura Steele, Artist in Residence
Biography: expand/collapse
Laura Steele’s artistic practice embraces mediums including photography, video, installation, and performance. Her work has been shown widely in venues including the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Meridian Gallery in San Francisco, and Harvestworks Digital Media Center in New York City. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship. Steele has worked as assistant and studio manager to Susan Weber Professor in the Arts Stephen Shore since 2003, and has managed the digital imaging facilities at Bard since 2004. She teaches courses in fine art printing and digital imaging techniques for photographers at Bard and other venues in the Hudson Valley.

BA, Bard College; also studied at Northwestern University, Massachusetts College of Art and Design, and Instituto Allende.

Birte Strunk, Assistant Professor of Economics
Office: Albee, 202
Biography: expand/collapse
Birte Strunk is an Assistant Professor of Economics. Her teaching focus includes classes in Political Economy of Race and Gender, Ecological Economics, and American Economic History. She holds a PhD in economics from the New School for Social Research (NSSR) in New York City.
Originally from Germany, she received her undergraduate degree from University College Maastricht, a Liberal Arts College in the Netherlands, and holds master’s degrees in both economics (MSc Vienna University; MPhil NSSR) and philosophy (Fernuniversität Hagen). Since 2024, she has pursued a second PhD in philosophy at NSSR (currently on leave). As part of her economics PhD, she was a research fellow at the Germany-based ZOE Institute for future-fit economies, and spent a semester as a visiting research fellow at Harvard University. She has also been a long-standing member of a number of activist and professional networks in Europe, such as the Pluralism in Economics Network or the Post-Growth Economics Network.
As a feminist ecological economist, her research focuses on linking social and ecological perspectives, especially around questions on labor. As a philosopher, she explores Degrowth as a Critical Theory of the economy. In the past, she published on feminist ecological economics, degrowth and philosophy of (plural) economics.

I Ketut Suadin, Visiting Associate Professor of Music
Phone: 845-758-6822
Biography: expand/collapse
Graduate, Konservatori Karawitan (Conservatory for the Performing Arts), Bali, Indonesia. Previously taught at Eastman School of Music and has worked with several gamelan ensembles, most recently Gamelan Semara Santi at Swarthmore College and Gamelan Saraswati at University of Maryland, College Park. He has also served as musical director of Bard’s Gamelan Chandra Kanchana and Gamelan Giri Mekar since 2010.

Richard Suchenski, Associate Professor of Film and Electronic Arts; Director, Center for Moving Image Arts
Office: Ottaway Film Center
Phone: 845-752-6482
Website: https://www.bard.edu/cmia
Biography: expand/collapse
B.A., Princeton University; M.A., M.Phil., joint Ph.D. (Film Studies and History of Art), Yale University. Film historian; has curated and organized retrospectives, series, traveling programs, and interdisciplinary conferences focusing on filmmakers, film movements, and particular moments from the silent era to the present at a number of venues including Bard College, Yale University, the Yale University Art Gallery, Freer and Sackler Galleries of the Smithsonian Institution, National Gallery of Art, Museum of the Moving Image, George Eastman House, Pacific Film Archive, Harvard Film Archive, UCLA Film and Television Archive, Toronto International Film Festival Cinematheque, British Film Institute, Austrian Film Museum, Munich Film Museum, Tokyo Filmex, National Museum of Singapore, Anthology Film Archives, and Princeton University. Author of Projections of Memory: Romanticism, Modernism, and the Aesthetics of Film (Oxford University Press, 2016) and editor, Hou Hsiao-hsien (Austrian Film Museum/Columbia University Press, 2014). Frequent contributor to The Moving Image and Senses of Cinema; articles published or forthcoming in Artforum (October 2015); Viewing Platform: Perspectives on the Panorama (Yale University Press, 2016); Positions: Asia Cultures Critique (2016); Ronshu Hasumi Shigehiko (Hatori Shoten, 2016); Robert Bresson (Indiana University Press, 2012); Olivier Assayas (Austrian Film Museum/Columbia University Press, 2012); Ashish Avikunthak (Aicon Gallery, 2012); Studies in French Cinema (Spring 2011); The Cinema World of Pedro Costa (Jeonju International Film Festival, 2010); Robert Beavers: My Hand Outstretched to the Winged Distance and Sightless Measure (Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, 2009); and the Encyclopedia of the Documentary Film (Routledge, 2005). Recipient, Whiting Fellowship (2009-2010); Stavros S. Niarchos Research Fellowship (2008); others. At Bard since 2010.

Karen Sullivan, Irma Brandeis Professor of Romance Literature and Culture
Office: Aspinwall, 103
Phone: 845-758-7571
Biography: expand/collapse
Professor Sullivan is the author of Introducing the Medieval Bear (University of Wales Press, 2026), Eleanor of Aquitaine, As It Was Said: Truth and Tales about the Medieval Queen (University of Chicago Press, 2023); The Danger of Romance: Truth, Fantasy, and Arthurian Fictions (University of Chicago Press, 2018); The Inner Lives of Medieval Inquisitors (University of Chicago Press, 2011); Truth and the Heretic: Crises of Knowledge in Medieval French Literature (University of Chicago Press, 2005); The Interrogation of Joan of Arc (University of Minnesota Press, 1999); and numerous articles on medieval French and Occitan literature. At Bard since 1993.

Yuka Suzuki, Associate Professor of Anthropology; Director, Anthropology Program
Office: Hopson, 302
Phone: 845-758-7219
Website: https://anthropology.bard.edu/faculty/
Biography: expand/collapse
Yuka Suzuki is an anthropologist with interests in nature and the nonhuman, conservation, science, race, and nationhood. Her first monograph, The Nature of Whiteness: Race, Animals, and Nation in Zimbabwe, was published by the University of Washington Press, and explores how white farmers in western Zimbabwe turned to the environment to legitimize and naturalize their belonging after independence. Professor Suzuki's current project focuses on the politics of vertebrate paleontology, fossil economies, and museums in China and the United States. Her research has been supported by the Social Science Research Council, Wenner-Gren Foundation, Yale University, and the Centre for Applied Social Sciences at the University of Zimbabwe. Her other publications include articles, chapters, and reviews in Anthropological Forum, Journal of Agrarian Change, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, American Ethnologist, and the edited volumes Where the Wild Things Are Now: Domestication Reconsidered and the Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbook on Gender: Animals. She is also a core faculty member in Environmental Studies, Africana Studies, Asian Studies, and Global and International Studies.

BA, Cornell University; MPhil, PhD, Yale University. At Bard since 2003.

Rebecca Swanberg, Site Director, Fishkill Correctional Facility (BPI)
Department(s): Bard Prison Initiative

Results 321-330 of 375