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 341-350 of 375
Joan Tower, Asher B. Edelman Professor in the Arts; Composition, Bard College Conservatory of Music
Department(s): Bard Conservatory of Music
Office: Avery Center for the Arts, N214
Biography: expand/collapse
Joan Tower is widely regarded as one of the most important American composers living today. During a career spanning more than 50 years, she has made lasting contributions to musical life in the United States as composer, performer, conductor, and educator. Her works have been commissioned by major ensembles, soloists, and orchestras, including the Emerson, Tokyo, and Muir quartets; soloists Evelyn Glennie, Carol Wincenc, David Shifrin, and John Browning; and the orchestras of Chicago, New York, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, and Washington, D.C., among others.

In 1990, Tower became the first woman to win the prestigious Grawemeyer Award for her composition Silver Ladders. She was the first composer chosen for a Ford Made in America consortium commission of 65 orchestras. The Nashville Symphony and conductor Leonard Slatkin recorded that work, Made in America, with Tambor and Concerto for Orchestra for the Naxos label. The top-selling recording won three 2008 Grammy awards: Best Classical Contemporary Composition, Best Classical Album, and Best Orchestral Performance.

From 1969 to 1984, she was pianist and founding member of the Naumburg Award-winning Da Capo Chamber Players, which commissioned and premiered many of her most popular works. Her first orchestral work, Sequoia, quickly entered the repertory. Tower's tremendously popular five Fanfares for the Uncommon Woman have been played by over 500 different ensembles. She is currently Asher Edelman Professor of Music at Bard College, where she has taught since 1972.

Her composer-residencies with orchestras and festivals include a decade with the Orchestra of St. Luke's, the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra’s Composer of the Year for their 2010-2011 season, as well as the St. Louis Symphony, the Deer Valley Music Festival, and the Yale/Norfolk Chamber Music Festival.

Among her recent premieres: White Water (2012), commissioned by Chamber Music Monterey Bay and premiered by the Daedalus Quartet; Stroke (2011), commissioned by the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra; White Granite (2009), commissioned by St. Timothy's Summer Music Festival, Bravo! Vail Valley Music Festival, and La Jolla Music Society for SummerFest; Angels(2008), her fourth string quartet, commissioned by Music for Angel Fire and premiered by the Miami String Quartet; Dumbarton Quintet (2008), a piano quintet commissioned by the Dumbarton Oaks Estate (their third commission after Stravinsky and Copland) and premiered by Tower and the Enso String Quartet; Chamber Dance (2006), commissioned, premiered, and toured by Orpheus; and Copperwave (2006), written for the American Brass Quintet and commissioned by The Juilliard School of Music. A Gift (2007), for winds and piano, was commissioned by Chamber Music Northwest and premiered by The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center (CMS). Other CMS premieres included Trio Cavany (2007) and Simply Purple (2008) for viola, performed by Paul Neubauer.

Her compositions cross many genres: Can I (2007) for youth chorus and percussionist; Copperwave (2006), written for brass quintet; DNA (2003), a percussion quintet commissioned for Frank Epstein and the New England Conservatory Percussion Ensemble; Fascinating Ribbons (2001), her foray into the world of band music, premiered at the annual conference of College Band Directors; Vast Antique Cubes/Throbbing Still (2000), a solo piano piece for John Browning; Tambor (1998), for the Pittsburgh Symphony under the baton of Mariss Jansons; and her ballet Stepping Stones (1993), commissioned by choreographer Kathryn Posin for the Milwaukee Ballet and revisited by Posin with the Bulgarian Ballet in June 2011.

Joan Tower's music is published by Associated Music Publishers.

Photo by Cynthia Del Conte.

Dominique Townsend, Associate Professor of Religion
Biography: expand/collapse
BA, Barnard College; MTS, Harvard Divinity School; MPhil, PhD, Columbia University. Teaching and research interests include Asian religions, Tibetan Buddhism, Buddhism and culture, Buddhist art and aesthetics, poetry in Buddhist literature, gender and sexuality in Buddhism, Tibetan language and literature, tantric traditions, and contemporary Buddhist practice. She previously taught at Columbia University and Barnard College, where her courses ranged from Asian humanities and topics in East Asian civilization to women Buddhist visionaries in Tibet and East Asia. She also served as assistant director of interpretation at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York City. Fellowships and awards include de Bary Postdoctoral Research Fellowship, Whiting Foundation Dissertation Completion Fellowship, Columbia University Teaching and Research Fellowship, Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Research Fellowship (not completed due to unrest in Tibetan areas of People’s Republic of China), and Spalding Trust Grant for research at Dolma Ling Nunnery and Institute for Buddhist Dialectics, Dharamsala, India, among others. Publications include “Buddhism’s Worldly Other: Secular Subjects in Tibetan Buddhist Learning,” in Himalaya: The Journal for the Association of Nepal and Himalayan Studies (forthcoming), and Shantideva: How To Wake Up a Hero, an introduction to Buddhism for children and families. Language competetency in classical and modern Tibetan and Nepali. At Bard since 2016.

Éric Trudel, William Frauenfelder Professor in the College and Professor of French; Director, French Studies Program
Office: Hopson, 102
Phone: 845-758-7121
Website: https://french.bard.edu
Biography: expand/collapse
Professor Trudel is the author of La Terreur à l’œuvre: théorie, poétique et éthique chez Jean Paulhan (Paris, Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, coll. “L’imaginaire du texte,” 2007), and of several scholarly articles and volume chapters on 19th-, 20th- and 21st-century French and Francophone Literatures. He coedited Poétiques de la liste et imaginaire sériel (Montréal, Nota Bene, 2019), "Tout peut servir." Pratiques et enjeux du détournement dans le discours littéraire des XXe et XXIe siècles (Québec, Presses de l'Université du Québec, 2011), Jean Paulhan on Poetry and Politics (Champaign, University of Illinois Press, 2008); and oversaw issues of the journals LHT (Crises de lisibilité, 16, 2016, online), L'Esprit Créateur (“Avant-garde and Arrière-garde in Modernist Literature”, 53/3, 2013; “The Documentary Mode”, 61/2, 2021), and XXI-XX. Reconnaissances littéraires ("Avatars du remake", 4, 2023).

BA, Concordia University, Montreal; MA, French literature, McGill University; PhD, Romance languages, Princeton University. At Bard since 2002.

George Tsontakis, Distinguished Composer in Residence; Composition, Bard College Conservatory of Music
Department(s): Bard Conservatory of Music
Biography: expand/collapse
George Tsontakis has been the recipient of the two richest prizes awarded in all of classical music; the international Grawemeyer Award, in 2005, for his Second Violin Concerto and the 2007 Ives Living, awarded every three years by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He studied with Roger Sessions at Juilliard and, in Rome, with Franco Donatoni. Born in Astoria, New York, into a strongly Cretan heritage, he has, in recent years, become an important figure in the music of Greece, and his music is increasingly performed abroad, with dozens of performances in Europe every season. Most of his music, including eleven major orchestral works and four concertos have been recorded by Hyperion and Koch, leading to two Grammy Nominations for Best Classical Composition, in 2009 and 1999. He is Distinguished Composer in Residence at Bard and artist-faculty emeritus with the Aspen Music Festival, where he was founding director of the Aspen Contemporary Ensemble from 1991 to 1999. He served three years as composer in residence with the Oxford (England) Philomusica; was the featured composer in residence with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center for the 2008-09 season; and is continuing a six-year Music Alive residency with the Albany Symphony. He lives in New York State’s Catskill Mountains, in Shokan.

Robert Tully, Visiting Professor of Philosophy
Biography: expand/collapse
Dr. Tully’s areas of research and publication include 20th-century British philosophy, theory of knowledge, philosophy of language, and logic. He is professor emeritus at both the United States Military Academy at West Point and the University of Toronto, and founder of the Mid-Hudson Philosophical Society, an informal federation of the philosophy programs at Bard, Marist College, SUNY New Paltz, Vassar College, and West Point. He is also cofounder, with Bruce Chilton and the late Jacob Neusner, of the Bard–West Point Seminar, a multidisciplinary project for Bard undergraduates and West Point cadets to which faculty from both institutions contribute original course content. At West Point, he taught ancient philosophy, 17th- and 18th-century philosophy, and formal logic. Publications include Equality: More or Less (coedited with Chilton); Intolerance: Political Animals and Their Prey (coedited with Chilton); Just War in Religion and Politics (coedited with Chilton and Neusner); Logic with Symlog: Learning Symbolic Logic by Computer (with Frederic Portoraro); and a variety of papers in volumes and journals on the philosophy of Russell, Wittgenstein, and others in the early analytic tradition. He is currently writing Natural Logic, which combines philosophy of language and formal logic in the analysis of natural language arguments.

BA, Yale University; DPhil, University of Oxford. At Bard since 2018.

Ali Ugurlu, Visiting Assistant Professor of History and Middle Eastern Studies

David Ungvary, Assistant Professor of Classics
Biography: expand/collapse
AB, Duke University; MSt, University of Oxford; PhD candidate, Harvard University. At Harvard, Professor Ungvary taught classes in Virgil’s poetry and its reception, beginning Greek and Latin, and Late Antique and medieval Latin prose selections. His dissertation, in Medieval Latin, is titled “Verse and Conversion: Poetry, Christianity, and the Transformation of the Roman World, 400–700 AD.” He is the author of “The Voice of the Dead King Chindasuinth: Poetry, Politics, and the Discourse of Penance in Visigothic Spain,” Early Medieval Europe (forthcoming); and “A Letter from Bishop Alexios Celadenos to Pope Julius II (Latin translation), in collaboration with Professor Robert Nelson, Yale University (forthcoming). He has made presentations at the University of Vienna, University of Oxford, Society for Classics Studies Annual Meeting, Medieval Academy of America Annual Meeting, Dumbarton Oaks, and Villanova University, among others. He has a reading knowledge of ancient Greek, Latin (classical and medieval), German, French, Spanish, and Italian; and speaks German and Spanish. At Bard since 2018.

Wendy Urban-Mead, Associate Professor of History, MAT Program
Department(s): Master of Arts in Teaching
Office: MAT Building, 104
Phone: 845-758-7115
Biography: expand/collapse
B.A., Carleton College; M.A., University at Albany; Ph.D., Columbia University. She is the author of The Gender of Piety: Faith, Family, and Colonial Rule in Matabeleland Zimbabwe (Ohio University Press, 2015). Areas of interest include African history, with emphasis on southern Africa; European imperialism; history of Christianity in Africa; religion and gender. Taught secondary school social studies for five years in Red Hook and Arlington, New York, school districts. Member, American Historical Association, African Studies Association, Britain Zimbabwe Society. Awards: German Academic Exchange Service Grant (1984-85), Richard Hofstadter Fellowship (1995-2000), Columbia University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertation Research Grant (1999). Co-Editor, Social Sciences & Missions (Brill). Articles in Journal of Religion in Africa, Women's History Review, and a chapter in Competing Kingdoms: Women, Mission, Nation, and the American Protestant Empire, 1812-1960 (Duke, 2010), "Gender and the Limits of Ndebeleness: Abezansi Churchwomen's Domestic and Associational Alliances," in Gendering Ethnicity in African Women's Lives, ed. Jan Bender Shetler (University of Wisconsin Press, 2015).

Marina van Zuylen, Clemente Chair in the Humanities at Bard College; National Academic Director, Clemente Course in the Humanities
Office: Hopson, 103
Phone: 845-758-7381
Website: https://french.bard.edu/faculty
Biography: expand/collapse
Marina van Zuylen is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Bard College. She was educated in France before receiving a BA in Russian literature and a PhD in comparative literature at Harvard University. She is the author of Difficulty as an Aesthetic Principle, Monomania, and The Plenitude of Distraction. She has published in praise of some of the most beleaguered maladies of modernity—boredom, fatigue, idleness, mediocrity—and written about snobbery, dissociative disorders, and obsessive compulsive aesthetics. She has published extensively on the work of Jacques Rancière and has written about art and aesthetics for MoMA and other art-related venues. She has taught at Harvard, Columbia, Princeton, and the university of Paris VII. She is the national academic director of the Clemente Course in the Humanities (clemente.bard.edu), a free college course for underserved adults, and accepted on its behalf a National Humanities Medal from President Obama in 2014. She is presently writing Good Enough, a book about the unsung virtues of classical and modern mediocrity. AB, MA, PhD, Harvard University. At Bard since 1997.

Jonathan VanDyke, Artist in Residence
Website: https://www.jonathanvandyke.com
Biography: expand/collapse
Jonathan VanDyke is a New York City–based visual artist working at the intersection of painting and performance, with an emphasis on a queer, collaborative, and embodied practice. VanDyke studied at the Glasgow School of Art and the University of Glasgow as the recipient of a Rotary International Fellowship. He received his MFA from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College. Through a Joan Mitchell Foundation grant, he was a resident at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, where he was mentored by the artist Paul Pfeiffer. In 2008 he attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, where he studied with Harmony Hammond, Julianne Swartz, Charles Gaines, Francis Cape, and Yun-Fei Ji. Other residencies include Yaddo, the Hans Scharoun House of the Ferdinand Moller Foundation in Germany, Qwatz in Rome, and the William Penn Performing Arts Institute. Solo and two-person exhibitions and performances at venues including 1/9unosunove, Rome; Loock Galerie, Berlin; MassArt Galleries, Boston; Tops Gallery, Memphis; Four Boxes Gallery, Skive, Denmark; Storm King Art Center, New York; NADA New York; Power Plant, Toronto; Este Arte, Uruguay; and Vox Populi, Philadelphia. VanDyke previously taught or served as visiting lecturer, scholar, or critic at, among others, Cornell University Spring in NYC program; University of Alaska Fairbanks; Massachusetts College of Art MFA program, Boston; University of the Arts MFA program, Philadelphia; Corcoran School of the Arts and Design at George Washington University; New Hampshire Institute of Art MFA program; and Sotheby’s Institute of Art. He has also been a visiting artist at institutions including Columbia University School of the Arts; University of Toronto; University of Houston, Cranbrook Academy of Art; Bryn Mawr College Colloquium in Visual Arts; California Institute of the Arts; and Parsons School of Design, the New School; among many others.

BA, Washington and Lee University; MFA; Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Bard College. At Bard since 2022.

Results 341-350 of 375