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 81-90 of 375
Justin Dainer-Best, Associate Professor of Psychology
Website: https://affectlab.bard.edu
Biography: expand/collapse
Justin Dainer-Best’s research interests are focused on the factors behind mood disorders and include the cognitive bases of depression and novel ways to use the internet and mobile technology to carry out psychological science. His research deals with identifying and modifying negative self-referential thought in depression. His peer-reviewed work has appeared recently in the publications Cognition and Emotion (2024; 2019), Collabra: Psychology (2021), Journal of Affective Disorders-Reports (2024), and Journal of Abnormal Psychology (2019).

BA, Haverford College; PhD, the University of Texas at Austin. Clinical psychology internship, the University of Vermont. At Bard since 2018.

Ziad Dallal , Assistant Professor of Arabic
Biography: expand/collapse
Ziad Dallal’s areas of research/interest include modern Arabic literature and intellectual history, critical theory, translation theory, political philosophy, philology, Marxism and finance, and film theory. He has also written about contemporary Arabic theater and contemporary music in Lebanon and served as lead translator and adviser on This Is Home: A Refugee Story, a 2017 Sundance Film Festival Audience Award winner for world cinema documentary. Publications and conference papers include “Arabic Hip Hop: El Rass and the New Identity,” in Bidayat; “The Madhahib of Modernity: Al-Shidyaq and Literary Politics” at American University of Beirut; “Sovereignty, Contingency, and Arab Tragedy: The Plays of Sulayman al-Bassam” at a conference of the Middle East Studies Association; and “Time Travel and the Recouping of the Nahdah,” an American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) paper presented in New York. Dallal has served as an instructor at New York University and American University of Beirut, teaching courses such as Antiquity and the 19th Century, Islamic Societies, On Liberation, and Arab and Middle Eastern Studies.

BA, American University of Beirut; PhD, New York University. At Bard since 2018.

Mark Danner, James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and the Humanities
Office: Aspinwall, 108
Phone: 917-513-5049
Website: https://www.markdanner.com/
Biography: expand/collapse
Mark Danner is a writer and reporter who for more than three decades has written on politics and foreign affairs, focusing on war and conflict. He has covered, among many other stories, wars and political conflict in Central America, Haiti, the Balkans, Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East, and, most recently, the story of torture during the War on Terror. He also writes regularly on American politics, including on the rise of Donald Trump. Danner is James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and the Humanities at Bard College and Class of 1961 Distinguished Professor of Undergraduate Education at the University of California, Berkeley.

Among his books are Spiral: Trapped in the Forever War (2016), Stripping Bare the Body (2009), The Secret Way to War: The Downing Street Memo and the Iraq War’s Buried History (2006), Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror (2004), The Road to Illegitimacy: One Reporter’s Travels through the 2000 Florida Vote Recount (2004), and The Massacre at El Mozote: A Parable of the Cold War (1994). Danner was a longtime staff writer at The New Yorker and is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books. His work has appeared in Harper’s, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Aperture, and many other newspapers and magazines. He co-wrote and helped produce two hour-long documentaries for the ABC News program Peter Jennings Reporting, and his work has received, among other honors, a National Magazine Award, three Overseas Press Awards, an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship, a Guggenheim, and an Emmy. In 1999 Danner was named a MacArthur Fellow. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the World Affairs Council, and the Century Association. He speaks and lectures widely on foreign policy and America’s role in the world.

At Bard since 2003.

Richard H. Davis, Professor Emeritus and Research Professor of Religion
Office: Hopson, 201
Phone: 845-758-7364
Biography: expand/collapse
Professor Davis’s primary research and teaching interests include classical and medieval Hinduism, Indian history, South Asian visual arts, and Sanskrit. He is the author of The Bhagavad Gita: A Biography (Princeton University Press, 2014); A Priest’s Guide to the Great Festival: Aghorasiva's Mahotsavavidhi (2009); Lives of Indian Images (1997; winner of the 1999 A. K. Coomaraswamy Prize); and Ritual in an Oscillating Universe: Worshiping Siva in Medieval India (1991). He has edited two volumes, Picturing the Nation: Iconographies of Modern India (2007) and Images, Miracles, and Authority in Asian Religious Traditions (1998), and he also wrote the text for a catalog of Indian religious prints, Gods in Print: Masterpieces of India’s Mythological Art (Mandala, 2012). Currently he is continuing work on the reception history of the Bhagavad Gita and on a history of religions in early South Asia. Fellowships include Guggenheim, Fulbright-Hays, Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He previously taught at Yale University. BA, University of Chicago; MA, University of Toronto; PhD, University of Chicago. At Bard since 1997.

Tim Davis, Associate Professor of Photography
Office: Woods Studio, 209
Phone: 845-758-7820
Website: https://www.oththattimdavis.com
Biography: expand/collapse
Tim Davis is an artist, essayist, and songwriter based in Tivoli, NY. He has published many books of photographs, including Lots (Coromandel Design, 2002), Permanent Collection (Nazraeli Press, 2005), My Life in Politics (Aperture, 2006), and I’m Looking Through You (Aperture, 2021). The New Antiquity, the result of his year in Rome as the winner of a Rome Prize fellowship, was published by Damiani Editore in 2009. Many publications have come from commissioned projects, such as Il Tecnogiro dell’Ornitorinco (Linea di Confine, 2010), and Quinto Quarto (Punctum Press, 2011), which grew from an exhibition at the MACRO Museum in Rome. Davis had a large retrospective of nonphotography projects at the Tang Museum at Skidmore College in 2019 called When We Are Dancing (I Get Ideas), which also resulted in a catalogue. Recently, the Fondazione di Sardegna commissioned him to make a work in Sardinia, which resulted in a book and show called Hallucinations. Normaltown, a project involving a book and recorded music made in the state of Georgia, is forthcoming from Fall Line Press in 2024.

His work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Guggenheim Museum, High Museum of Art, Hirshhorn Museum, Milwaukee Museum, and Walker Art Center, among many others. His website is ohthattimdavis.com.

BA, Bard College; MFA, Yale. At Bard since 2004.

Matthew Deming, Artist in Residence of Music

Opal DeRuvo, Visiting Artist in Residence of Studio Arts

Adhaar Noor Desai, Associate Professor of Literature
Office: Aspinwall, 212
Phone: 845-758-7212
Biography: expand/collapse
B.A., Stanford University; M.A., Ph.D., Cornell University. Research and teaching interests include Shakespeare and his contemporaries, late medieval and early modern poetics, the history of science, cultural materialism, and media studies. Presentations at Shakespeare Association of America, American Comparative Literature Association Conference, and New England Medieval Studies Consortium, among others. At Bard since 2014.

Sanjaya DeSilva, Associate Professor of Economics
Office: Albee, 214
Phone: 845-758-7072
Website: https://economics.bard.edu/faculty
Biography: expand/collapse
Professor DeSilva’s teaching fields include economic development, Asian economic history, international trade, and econometrics. Areas of research include urbanization; race, ethnicity, and immigration; and economic history of development. His current project explores the intersection of ethnicity, space, and urban development in Colombo, Sri Lanka, from a historical perspective. Recent publications include “Access to Markets and Farm Efficiency: A Study of Bicol Rice Farms Over Two Decades,” in Technology, Innovations, and Economic Development: Essays in Honour of Robert E. Evenson (Sage, 2015); “Long-term Benefits from Temporary Migration: Does the Gender of the Migrant Matter?”, Levy Economics Institute Working Paper No. 756 (2013); and “Racial and Ethnic Price Differentials in a Small Urban Housing Market” (with A. Pham and M. Smith), Housing Policy Debate, Vol. 22, No. 2 (2012). DeSilva is a research associate at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College and Verité Research in Sri Lanka.

BA, Macalester College; MA, MPhil, PhD, Yale University. At Bard since 2000.

Carolyn Dewald, Professor Emeritus of Classical Studies
Biography: expand/collapse
B.A., Swarthmore College; M.A., Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley. Specializes in classics and ancient historiography. Awards include Princeton University Fellowship (1968–69); University of California Chancellor's Fellowship (1971); National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship (1979; 1984–85); University of Southern California Associates Award for Excellence in Teaching (1991); among others. Visiting distinguished professor, Vassar College (2001–02); Phi Beta Kappa National Lecturer (2002–03); also taught at Stanford University and University of Southern California. Publications include introduction and commentary to Herodotus: The Histories (Oxford University Press, 1998); Thucydides' War Narrative: A Structural Study (University of California Press, 2005); The Cambridge Companion to Herodotus (edited with John Marincola, Cambridge University Press, 2006); and numerous articles in academic journals. At Bard: 2003–16.

Results 81-90 of 375