Division of the Arts

Recent News

• Bard Faculty Tanya Marcuse and Adriane Colburn Awarded a Marble House Project Residency 
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  Bard Faculty Tanya Marcuse and Adriane Colburn Awarded a Marble House Project Residency 

  

  L–R: Tanya Marcuse, associate professor of photography; and Adriane Colburn, artist in residence at Studio Arts.
  

  Bard faculty members Tanya Marcuse, associate professor of photography, and Adriane Colburn, artist in residence in Studio Arts, have each been selected for summer residencies at the Marble House Project in Dorset, Vermont. Each year the residency program welcomes approximately fifty artists to participate in a series of three-week sessions. Each session brings together a carefully curated cohort of eight artists working across disciplines that include the visual arts, writing, music, choreography, and performance, in order to foster collaboration, dialogue, and the exchange of ideas.
  
  During her residency, Marcuse will develop a new body of work titled Circle | Cycle, exploring the symbolic and cosmological power of the circle as both subject and structure. Using natural materials gathered from the surrounding landscape, she will construct and alter a single circular assemblage, documenting its evolution through photographs and a looping stop-motion film. Long associated with ideas of wholeness, infinity, and cosmic order, the circle in this project becomes a site where creation and rupture coexist on the same plane. Marcuse will invite fellow artists to contribute locally found materials, creating a collaborative process rooted in place. 
  
  While in residence, Colburn will develop Windward, a suite of artworks that explore the resonance of trees increasingly felled by wind and water. Through research on vulnerable tree species across northeastern forests, riparian zones, and urban landscapes, and the climatic pressures that bring them down, her project examines the environmental conditions reshaping contemporary forests and the material possibilities of salvaged wood. Working with arborists, foresters, and rural sawyers, she will recover fallen trees and transform them into lumber and paper pulp as raw material for sculptures, installations, and works on paper. The resulting artworks explore interspecies connectivity, woodcraft traditions, and poetic traces of environmental forces embedded within the wood, illuminating escalating environmental crises and their complex web of cause and effect.
  
  Post Date: 03-17-2026
  
• Bard Professor Bryson Rand Receives Ellis-Beauregard Residency
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  Bard Professor Bryson Rand Receives Ellis-Beauregard Residency

  

  Bryson Rand, visiting assistant professor of photography.
  

  Bryson Rand, visiting assistant professor of photography at Bard College, has been selected as a member of the inaugural cohort of the Ellis-Beauregard Residency in Rockland, Maine. The residency, which will take place in June 2026, will support Bryson’s development of his ongoing body of work, A Need to Leave the Water Knows. Engaging with coastal and inland landscapes through site responsive and experimental image making, he will build upon his recent exploration of long exposure photographs made at night. Bryson plans to use this dedicated time to pursue new visual directions shaped by place, chance, and close attention to the surrounding environment. The Ellis-Beauregard Residency was created to recognize and support artists whose work demonstrates innovation, experimentation, and creative risk-taking across disciplines, and will provide dedicated time and space for artistic inquiry at its new coastal Maine campus.
  
  Post Date: 03-03-2026
  
• Mira Dancy ’01 Featured in the Financial Times
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  Mira Dancy ’01 Featured in the Financial Times

  

  Painter and Bard alumna Mira Dancy ’01. Photo by Roman Koval
  

  Mira Dancy ’01, painter and Bard College alumna, was featured in the Financial Times in an article about how artists are still navigating the effects of the Los Angeles fires a year later. Dancy spoke about how for her, the devastation of the fires is an artistic dividing line. The paintings in her studio were damaged permanently, and she vividly remembers the hills glowing red around her house, which was left uninhabitable after the disaster. “There is just no way I can go back to work on a painting that I was making before the fire,” Dancy told the Times. “My whole world changed.” Her latest exhibit, Mourning’s Orbit, opens at Night Gallery during Frieze week, and takes emotional stock of the last year while her family had to relocate between hotels and homes for nearly a year. The paintings reference places that had been damaged in the fires which she has visited in the aftermath, yet relay an element of hope despite the devastation. “I feel that these paintings are a little bit of an antidote to those images of burned houses,” Dancy says.  
  

  Read More in the Financial Times:
  

  
  Post Date: 03-03-2026
  
• Bard Professor Sarah Hennies Receives Civitella Ranieri Music Fellowship
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  Bard Professor Sarah Hennies Receives Civitella Ranieri Music Fellowship

  

  Visiting Assistant Professor of Music Sarah Hennies. Photo by Kay Bell ’26
  

  Sarah Hennies, assistant professor of music at Bard College, has been announced as a recipient of the Civitella Ranieri Music Fellowship, an international residency program for writers, composers, and visual artists. The fellowship, which occurs over the course of four to six weeks, takes place in a 15th century castle in the Umbrian region of Italy and will allow Hennies the free time and space to conduct her music work amidst an international cohort of other creatives. Hennies was selected as one of 25 awardees in the composers cohort through a highly competitive jury process from a pool of 119 candidates. Fellowship support includes travel, a private apartment and studio, and daily meals, allowing fellows to focus fully on their artistic practice. Fellows are encouraged to participate in excursions through the Umbrian countryside, take Italian classes, and give presentations about their work while at the castle. Hennies, whose fellowship was awarded for 2026-27, will defer her residency until 2028. 
  
  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.
  
  Post Date: 02-16-2026
  
• D.M. Aderibigbe’s Collection 82nd Division Featured in Multiple Publications
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  D.M. Aderibigbe’s Collection 82nd Division Featured in Multiple Publications

  

  D.M. Aderibigbe and his collection 82nd Division.
  

  Senior Fellow in Ethics and Writing D.M. Aderibigbe’s 82nd Division, which won the National Poetry Series in 2024, was published by Akashic Books on December 2, 2025. 82nd Division is a poetry collection named after the West African regiment that fought during World War I, and focuses on Nigeria, where Aderibigbe is from. Since its release, it has been reviewed by Literary Hub and received a starred review in Booklist.  “Both enchanting and sorrowful, Aderibigbe writes at the intersection of West Africa and ‘the West,’ plotting a vision that is both deeply historical and urgently contemporary,” Booklist writes.
  
  Aderibigbe was also interviewed by Frontier Poetry. “In my second collection, I was wholly invested in the formal elements of each poem,” he said. “It was important to me [that] the form of each poem adds some degree of complexity to it.” He will give a reading of the collection with Ann Lauterbach on January 29 at Oblong Books in Rhinebeck.
  
  Aderibigbe teaches in Bard’s Written Arts program, which 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 Interview
  Booklist
  Lithub
  
  Post Date: 01-27-2026
  
• 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