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 71-80 of 375
Ben Coonley, Associate Professor of Film and Electronic Arts
Office: Avery Center for the Arts, A220
Phone: 845-758-6822 x6687
Biography: expand/collapse
B.A., Brown University; M.F.A., Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Bard College. Media artist working in video, installation, stereoscopic 3D, VR, digital animation, and live performance. His work has been exhibited at LACMA; Whitney Museum of American Art; Film Society of Lincoln Center; MoMA PS1; Performa; Microscope Gallery, Brooklyn; Moscow Biennale; Images Festival, Toronto; and the New Museum of Contemporary Art; among others. Previously taught at Princeton University, Parsons The New School for Design, and the New School MA in Media Studies Program. At Bard since 2010.

Volmir Cordeiro, Visiting Artist in Residence
Biography: expand/collapse
Volmir Cordeiro is a Brazilian-born and France-based dancer, artist-researcher, and choreographer. The 2021 recipient of the SACD (Society of Dramatic Authors and Composers) award for young choreographers, Cordeiro is teaching at Bard as part of the Dance Program’s partnership with Villa Albertine / FACE Foundation (French-American Cultural Exchange). The mission of Villa Albertine is to bring together leading French and American thinkers, writers, artists, and activists for a series of dynamic and thought-provoking debates on topics central to today’s society, and to forge new relationships between the United States, France, and the French-speaking world. Cordeiro and fellow FACE artist Marcela Santander are leading a dance repertory course based on the work of women artists from the 20th and 21st centuries. Cordeiro earned a bachelor’s degree in theater at Universidade Federal do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, and master’s and PhD degrees at University of Paris 8. He is the author of Ex-Corpo (2019), a continuation of his doctoral research at Paris 8a that examines the notion of the artist-researcher and marginality in contemporary dance. At Bard: Fall 2023.

Frank Corliss, Director and Faculty, Bard College Conservatory of Music
Department(s): Bard Conservatory of Music
Office: László Z. Bitó '60 Conservatory Building, Bito 101
Phone: 845-752-2402
Biography: expand/collapse
Frank Corliss is the director of the Bard College Conservatory of Music. Prior to coming to Bard he was for many years a staff pianist for the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, and the director of music at the Walnut Hill School for the Arts. He was a frequent performer on the Boston Symphony Prelude Concert series and he has also performed throughout the United States as a chamber musician and collaborative pianist. Corliss has worked as a musical assistant for Yo-Yo Ma and has assisted Ma in the musical preparation of many new works for performance and recording, including concertos by Elliot Carter, Richard Danielpour, Tan Dun, John Harbison, Leon Kirchner, Peter Lieberson, Christopher Rouse, and John Williams.

A graduate of the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, he received his Master of Music from SUNY at Stony Brook, where he studied with Gilbert Kalish. While at Oberlin he received the Rudolf Serkin Award for Outstanding Pianist and was a member of the Music from Oberlin Ensemble, which toured throughout the U.S. He has also studied at the Mozarteum in Salzburg, Austria, and the Cracow Academy of Music in Cracow, Poland. Mr. Corliss has participated in several summer festivals, including the Tanglewood Music Festival and the Taos Chamber Music Festival and the Aspen Music Festival.

He was appointed as an Artistic Ambassador for the United States Information Agency and in that capacity went on a three-week concert tour of Eastern Europe. He was also the recipient of a Rockefeller grant from the Cultural Contact US-Mexico Fund for Culture to commission works for flute and piano by American and Mexican composers and premiered in Boston and in Mexico City.

Mr. Corliss can be heard in recording on Yo Yo Ma’s Grammy-winning SONY disc “Soul of the Tango”, as well as the Koch International disc of music by Elliot Carter for chorus and piano with the John Oliver Chorale.

Rebecca Cox, Assistant Professor of Biology
Office: Reem-Kayden Center
Biography: expand/collapse
Dr. Rebecca Cox received her PhD from Weill Cornell Medicine in 2019, before completing a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Michigan. She studies the mechanism governing co-regulation of the retromer complex, which is implicated in the development of Alzheimer’s disease.

Christian Ayne Crouch, Dean of Graduate Studies; Professor of History and American and Indigenous Studies; Director of the Center for Indigenous Studies
Department(s): Graduate Programs
Office: Ludlow, 302
Phone: 845-758-7895 x7895
Biography: expand/collapse
BA, Princeton University; MA, MPhil, PhD, New York University. Author, Nobility Lost: French and Canadian Martial Cultures, Indians, and the End of New France (Cornell, 2014); winner, Mary Alice and Philip Boucher Book Prize, French Colonial Historical Society (2015). Selected articles and chapters in Early American Studies (2016), The William & Mary Quarterly (2018), The French Revolution as a Moment of Respatialization (DeGruyter, 2019), Panorama (2021), Beyond the Horizon (Chicago, 2022), Journal of the Early Republic (2023). Fellowships and grants from the American Philosophical Society, John Carter Brown Library, the Ford Foundation, Harvard University Hutchins Center for African and African-American Research, the Massachusetts Historical Society, Mellon Foundation, Newberry Library, William L. Clements Library, and Yale Center for British Art. Member, Omohundro Institute Council (2018–22). Curatorial advisor, Jeffrey Gibson: When Fire Is Applied to a Stone It Cracks (Brooklyn Museum, 2020–21). Michèle Dominy Award for Teaching Excellence (2019). Teaching and research specialization in early modern Atlantic history, Native American and Indigenous studies, Atlantic slavery, empire, and visual and material culture. Director, Center for Indigenous Studies. At Bard since 2006.

John Cullinan, Professor of Mathematics
Office: Albee, 300
Phone: 845-758-7104
Website: https://math.bard.edu/faculty
Biography: expand/collapse
B.A., Bates College; Ph.D., University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Has taught at Colby College and University of Massachusetts. At Bard since 2006.

Robert J. Culp, Professor of History and Asian Studies; Director, Historical Studies Program
Office: Fairbairn
Phone: 845-758-7395
Biography: expand/collapse
Rob Culp is the author of The Power of Print in Modern China: Intellectuals and Industrial Publishing from the End of Empire to Maoist State Socialism (Columbia University Press, 2019); Articulating Citizenship: Civic Education and Student Politics in Southeastern China, 1912–1940 (Harvard University Asia Center, 2007); and numerous book chapters and articles. He was also coeditor of Knowledge Acts in Modern China: Ideas, Institutions, and Identities (UC Berkeley Institute of East Asian Studies Publications, 2016) and The Politics of Historical Production in Late Qing and Republican China (Brill, 2007). He has received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Spencer Foundation, Fulbright Foundation, American Council of Learned Societies, Committee for Scholarly Communication with China, American Philosophical Society, and Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation. His current research focuses on book distribution and knowledge production as well as youth culture in 20th-century China.

BA, Swarthmore College; MA, University of Michigan; MA, PhD, Cornell University. At Bard since 1999.

Lauren Curtis, Associate Professor of Classics
Office: Aspinwall, 309
Phone: 845-758-7282
Biography: expand/collapse
Lauren Curtis hails from the north of England, near Hadrian’s Wall, the northernmost boundary of the Roman Empire. After completing her BA in literae humaniores (classics) at University College, Oxford, and her PhD in classical philology at Harvard University, she joined Bard in 2013. She teaches Latin and Greek at all levels, as well as courses in translation on topics such as gender and sexuality in the ancient world and introductory Roman history and culture, and courses on Greek and Roman poetry and drama. Her research is focused on Latin poetry, especially of the Augustan period; Latin literature’s engagement with performance, religion, music, and dance; ancient book culture, antiquarianism, and cultural memory; gender and sexuality in the Greco-Roman world; and the literature and experience of ancient exile. Professor Curtis’s first book, Imagining the Chorus in Augustan Poetry, was published in 2017 by Cambridge University Press; articles and reviews have appeared in journals such as TAPA, Classical Philology, Vergilius, Phoenix, Arethusa, and Classical Review. She has presented papers and organized panels at the Society of Classical Studies annual meetings in San Francisco, New Orleans, and Seattle; at the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, the Villa Vergiliana at Cuma, Italy, and at the University of Lisbon, among other venues. She is currently working on a Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics (“green and yellow”) commentary on Ovid’s exile poetry, as well as a volume, coedited with Naomi Weiss, on the relationship between music and memory in the ancient world. She is always interested to meet with students who want to discover more about the Greek and Roman worlds.

BA, MA, University of Oxford; PhD, Harvard University. At Bard since 2013.

Deirdre d'Albertis, Dean of the College; Professor of English
Office: Ludlow, Room 208
Phone: 845-758-7242
Biography: expand/collapse
B.A., Barnard College; M.A., Ph.D., Harvard University. Author, Dissembling Fictions: Elizabeth Gaskell and the Victorian Social Text (Palgrave, 1997), and volume editor, Elizabeth Gaskell's Ruth (Pickering & Chatto, 2006). Essays published most recently in Victorian Writers and the Environment: Ecocritical Perspectives (2016); Cambridge Companion to Victorian Women’s Literature, 1830-1900 (2015); Afterlives of the Brontës: Biography, Fiction, and Literary Criticism (2014); Other Mothers: Beyond the Maternal Ideal (2008), and The Cambridge Companion to Elizabeth Gaskell (2007). Articles and reviews in Nineteenth-Century Contexts; Victorian Studies; Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900; Victorians Institute Journal; Journal of the History of Sexuality; and Review. President, Interdisciplinary Nineteenth Century Studies (2013-15). Areas of interest: Victorian literature and culture, gender studies, narrative theory, history of the novel, Irish history and literature. At Bard since 1991.

Laurie Dahlberg, Associate Professor of Art History and Visual Culture and Photography
Office: Fisher Annex, 108
Phone: 845-758-7239
Website: https://arthistory.bard.edu/?page_id=58
Biography: expand/collapse

Education: BS, MA, Illinois State University; MA, PhD, Princeton University.

Awards include the National Endowment for the Humanities summer stipend (2012 and 2000); The Franklin Research Grant from the American Philosophical Society (2012); Model/Blum Fellow, National Gallery of Canada (1995); and the Fowler-McCormick Research Fellowship, Princeton University (1993).

Her current publishing projects include “Amateur vs. amateur: Photography and the [D]evolution of a Gentleman’s Art”; “‘Art’s Mortal Enemy’: Baudelaire, Photography, and the Ruin of French Taste.” Her books include Stephen Shore: The Hudson Valley (Blindspot Editions, 2011); Victor Regnault and the Advance of Photography: The Art of Avoiding Errors (Princeton Univ. Press 2005); and Larry Fink 55 (Phaidon, 2005).

Other Publications: “At Home with the Camera: Modeling Masculinity in Early French Photography,” in Interior Portraiture and Masculine Identity in France, 1789-1914 (Belnap-Jensen, et al., Ashgate, 2011); Contributor, Impressionism and the Ecology of Landscape, Stephen Eisenman, ed., Complesso del Vittoriano, 2010; Contributor, Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography, John Hannavy, ed., Routledge, 2007.

Selected Public Presentations: The Royal Museums of Fine Art, Belgium (2012); Concordia University (2010); Western Society for French History (2008); Princeton University (2007); Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia (2005); Bibliotheque Nationale de France (2004); Brooklyn Museum of Art (2002); Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark (2001).

She has also been a critic for Aperture Magazine since 2004. At Bard since 1996.

Results 71-80 of 375