Division of the Arts

Recent News

• Professor Franz Nicolay Reviews Burning Down the House, A New Book About the Talking Heads, for the Wall Street Journal
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  Professor Franz Nicolay Reviews Burning Down the House, A New Book About the Talking Heads, for the Wall Street Journal

  

  Franz Nicolay.
  

  “To make a music scene you need four things,” writes Franz Nicolay, visiting instructor of music at Bard College: “cheap housing, recent art-school graduates, a stage where anyone can play, and a small clique of young critics eager to discover a new subculture.” The Talking Heads, the subject of Burning Down the House by Jonathan Gould, had all four. In a review of Gould’s book for the Wall Street Journal, Nicolay praises the work’s unwillingness to oversimplify, saying Gould is “especially interested in skewering the mythology of downtown.” While the book “remains a largely unflattering portrait of the band,” it tracks the “almost magical, barely explicable, transformation of a group” that, says Nicolay, “has to be a candidate in the perennial conversation about the greatest American rock band.”
  
  The Music Program provides a wide range of musical concentrations, from classical composition and performance to jazz, electronic music, musicology, ethnomusicology, and music theory. The music faculty all maintain highly visible careers outside academia, nationally and internationally.
  

  Read the full review in the Wall Street Journal
  

  
  Post Date: 01-27-2026
  
• Professor Dinaw Mengestu Featured in Poughkeepsie Journal
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  Professor Dinaw Mengestu Featured in Poughkeepsie Journal

  

  Dinaw Mengestu. Photo by Anne-Emmanuelle Robicquet
  

  The Poughkeepsie Journal interviewed John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of the Humanities Dinaw Mengestu about his 10 years at Bard, on the occasion of his selection as president of PEN America. Mengestu, who is also director of Bard’s Written Arts Program, was elected to the 104-year-old nonprofit for a two-year term. Mengestu says his work at Bard, particularly in its writing programs, “‘aligns’ with PEN's core values [of] uniting writers, being champions of the freedom to write, advocates on free expression challenges and campaigning on policy issues and on behalf of writers, as well as journalists, under threat.” Speaking more broadly about freedom of expression rights, Mengestu said "[reading and writing play a] critical role in creating the kind of culture and community and society we want to live in… When I think of the thing that I really want to uphold and protect most, it's literature."
  
  Dinaw Mengestu is the author of three novels, all of which were named New York Times Notable Books: All Our Names, How To Read the Air, and The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears. He has taught in Bard’s Written Arts Program since 2016.
  
  The Written Arts Program at Bard encourages students to experiment with their writing in a context sensitive to intellectual, historical, and social realities. Students are encouraged to consider writing as an act of critical and creative engagement, a way of interrogating and translating the world.
  

  Read the Feature
  

  
  Post Date: 01-21-2026
  
• Bard Professor Tania El Khoury Awarded 2026 Creative Capital Award
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  Bard Professor Tania El Khoury Awarded 2026 Creative Capital Award

  

  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. 
  

  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 won a 2026 Creative Capital Award in support of her project, A Choreography of State Violence. Her project was amongst 49 new works chosen from a pool of 4,546 applications from all 50 states and regions in the United States. Creative Capital, a nonprofit organization dedicated to championing artistic freedom of expression by supporting individual artists across the United States, confers the award in recognition of original, ambitious project proposals for new artistic ideas, and supports artists by providing project funding of up to $50,000 each, professional development services, and community-building opportunities.
  
  El Khoury’s project, A Choreography of State Violence, is an installation performance that examines state violence from a choreographic perspective, exploring how what are perceived as incidental and individualized cases of violence perpetrated by the state are, in fact, conceptualized and rehearsed with calculated dramaturgy.
  
  “Creative Capital remains unwavering in our mission to support individual artists creating new work as a powerful catalyst for freedom of thought and freedom of expression in our democracy,” said Christine Kuan, president and executive director of Creative Capital. The Creative Capital Award will in 2026 support the creation of 49 new works in visual arts, film, dance, theater, music/jazz, and literature, as well as technology, multidisciplinary, and socially engaged forms in all disciplines.
  
  Tania El Khoury creates interactive and immersive installations and performances that reflect on the production of collective memory and the cultivation of solidarity. Her work is activated by tactile, auditory and visual traces collected and curated by the artist and her collaborators, and they are ultimately transformed through audience interaction. El Khoury’s work has been translated to multiple languages and shown in 35 countries across 6 continents in spaces ranging from museums to cable cars. She is the recipient of the Herb Alpert Award, the Soros Art Fellowship, the Bessies Outstanding Production Award, the International Live Art Prize, the Total Theatre Innovation Award, and the Arches Brick Award.
  
  Post Date: 01-16-2026
  
• Bard Alumna Anne Bogart ’74 Inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame
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  Bard Alumna Anne Bogart ’74 Inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame

  

  Anne Bogart ’74.
  

  American theater and opera director and cofounder of SITI Company Anne Bogart ’74 was inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame on November 17. In order to receive the award, the only nationally recognized hall of fame honoring lifetime achievement in the American theater, the awardee must have given 25 years distinguished service to the American theater and at least five major production credits on Broadway. Bogart, who studied drama and dance at Bard and received an honorary doctorate of fine arts from the College in 2014, teaches at Columbia University, where she is a professor and head of the directing concentration.
  
  In December 2022, Bard’s Fisher Center presented the world premiere of SITI Company’s reimagining of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, codirected by Anne Bogart and Tony Award winner Darron L West. The work, commissioned by the Fisher Center, was the final production in SITI Company’s 30th anniversary “Finale Season.” 
  
  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.
  

  Learn more about the event
  

  
  Post Date: 12-16-2025
  
• Jack Ferver’s My Town Reviewed in the New York Times
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  Jack Ferver’s My Town Reviewed in the New York Times

  

  Assistant Professor Jack Ferver.
  

  My Town, a semi-autobiographical show written by Bard Assistant Professor of Theater and Performance Jack Ferver, was reviewed in the New York Times. The play, a one-person retelling of Our Town by Thornton Wilder, follows a schoolteacher and interrogates rural American life through dance-theater. Gia Kourlas writes that My Town, which Ferver performed at NYU Skirball last week, is “purposefully enigmatic” and “a feat of constant storytelling and choreography.”
  
  Ferver discusses their inspirations for My Town, including industrialization, Martha Graham’s choreography, and the Wizard of Oz. They say the questions that animate Our Town, and by extension My Town, are, ‘How are you living? And are you really paying attention? Are you present?’”
  
  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.
  

  Read the Review
  

  
  Post Date: 11-25-2025
  
• Professor Anne Hunnell Chen Recognized by Wikimedia
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  Professor Anne Hunnell Chen Recognized by Wikimedia

  

  Professor Anne Hunnell Chen.
  

  Assistant Professor of Art History and Visual Culture Anne Hunnell Chen was recognized with the 2025 Award for “Outstanding Professional Advancing Open Access to Cultural Heritage” from the Wikimedia Foundation. This international award was given for Chen’s work on the International Digital Dura-Europos Archive (IDEA), which she founded. IDEA is an initiative using digital tools and a Linked Open Data set (LOD) to facilitate archaeological knowledge about the Dura-Europos site in Syria, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
  
  The awarding committee said, “Anne Chen’s work is worthy of the highest recognition, by the advanced use of LOD methods, the sheer scope of collaboration between the digital humanities and across Wikimedia projects, and the focus on an immensely important and underrepresented cultural geography like Syria.” They also recognized the importance of her work at the present moment, “when the organizations that helped fund this work are currently being severely defunded.”
  
  The Art History and Visual Culture Program at Bard introduces students to visual material across a broad range of periods and societies.
  

  More About the IDEA Project
  

  
  Post Date: 11-18-2025