Division of the Arts

Recent News

• Bard Student Grace Miller-Trabold ’26 Awarded Davis Projects for Peace Grant
  ×

  Bard Student Grace Miller-Trabold ’26 Awarded Davis Projects for Peace Grant

  

  Grace Miller-Trabold ’26.
  

  Grace Miller-Trabold ’26, a junior art history and visual culture and human rights major at Bard College with a concentration in Latin American and Iberian Studies, has been awarded a Projects for Peace Grant for $10,000 by the Davis Foundation. Miller-Trabold’s project, “Connecting Threads: Reciprocity and Gratitude as Pedagogies of Peace in Oaxacan Textile,” will provide resources for youth workshops on Indigenous Oaxacan textile traditions, which will take place in Oaxaca, Mexico, and in Poughkeepsie, New York.
  
  “The preservation of these textile traditions, despite colonization and the imperialization of global capitalist markets, exemplify a cultural resilience that is rooted in communal practices which emphasize belonging, presence, and peace,” Miller-Trabold writes in her proposal. “The artistic medium of textile is inherently peacebuilding as it cultivates a multigenerational, community centered experience that is grounded in intentionality, gratitude, and reciprocity.”
  
  Grace will organize and host two weeks of art workshops for youth in Teotitlan del Valle, Mexico, who will work with the Zapotec community on textile traditions and practices. The small artworks they produce will travel back to the US with Miller-Trabold, who will then facilitate workshops for youth groups in New York to collaborate on these projects at educational institutions in Poughkeepsie, using the same traditional dyeing and weaving traditions, before those collaborative works are returned to Oaxaca. The project aims to create spaces of peace across national borders and across generations in which textile traditions that incorporate ancestral Zapotec ecological knowledge and artistic expertise can be continued and shared.
  
  She “will work closely with farms and gardens in our community to grow plants suitable for use as dyes,” said Paul Mairenthal, the director of the Trustee Leader Scholar Program at Bard, where Miller-Trabold developed her project. “Her project is about history, tradition, memory and community building through textiles. It has a lot of great possibilities.”
  
  Projects for Peace, a Davis Foundation initiative facilitated by Middlebury College in Vermont, is a global program that partners with other educational institutions to identify and support peacebuilders and changemakers across college campuses. Every year, 100 or more student leaders are awarded a grant in the amount of $10,000 each to implement a “Project for Peace” anywhere in the world. To learn more, visit: middlebury.edu/projects-for-peace
  
  Post Date: 03-11-2025
  
• Daniel Mendelsohn and An-My Lê Join the American Academy of Arts and Letters
  ×

  Daniel Mendelsohn and An-My Lê Join the American Academy of Arts and Letters

  

  L–R: Daniel Mendelsohn, Charles Ranlett Flint Professor of Humanities, and An-My Lê, Charles Franklin Kellogg and Grace E. Ramsey Kellogg Professor in the Arts.
  

  Bard professors Daniel Mendelsohn, Charles Ranlett Flint Professor of Humanities, and An-My Lê, Charles Franklin Kellogg and Grace E. Ramsey Kellogg Professor in the Arts, have been announced as newly elected 2025 members of the Academy of Arts and Letters. Mendelsohn and Lê, who are among 24 new members to join the organization in 2025, were elected in recognition of notable achievements in their fields into the departments of Literature and Art, respectively. They will be inducted into Arts and Letters during its annual ceremonial in May, where writer and member Caryl Phillips will deliver the keynote address. Founded in 1898, the American Academy of Arts and Letters is an honor society of artists, architects, composers, and writers who foster and sustain interest in the arts. Its members distribute over $1.2 million in awards annually, fund concerts and new works of musical theater, donate art to museums across the US, and present exhibitions, talks, and events for the public in New York City.
  

  Learn more about Daniel Mendelsohn and An-My Lê Joining the American Academy of Arts and Letters
  

  
  Post Date: 03-04-2025
  
• Gia Coppola ’09 Honored at 2025 Kodak Film Awards
  ×

  Gia Coppola ’09 Honored at 2025 Kodak Film Awards

  

  Filmmaker Gia Coppola ’09. 
  

  Filmmaker and Bard alumna Gia Coppola ’09, director and producer of The Last Showgirl starring Pamela Anderson, was honored at the 2025 Kodak Film Awards, which celebrate the artistry of cinematography. Coppola received the Auteur Award—which is bestowed in recognition of extraordinary talent, discernment, and perspective in cinematic arts—for her directorial achievements. The annual Kodak Film Awards, now in its seventh year, recognize acclaimed visual artists who are unyielding in their artistic process and celebrate industry partners who contribute to the support of analog film.
  

  Learn More About the 2025 Kodak Film Awards
  

  
  Post Date: 03-04-2025
  
• Artist Tschabalala Self ’12 Commissioned to Create Portraits of Denzel Washington and His Sons
  ×

  Artist Tschabalala Self ’12 Commissioned to Create Portraits of Denzel Washington and His Sons

  

  Tschabalala Self. Photo by Paula Virta
  

  Visiting Artist in Residence and alumna Tschabalala Self ’12 was commissioned to create portraits of the Washington family—father Denzel and sons John David and Malcolm—who were behind the recent movie adaptation of August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize–winning play The Piano Lesson. Denzel, John David, and Malcolm respectively produced (with his daughter Katia), starred in, and directed the film. Rochelle Steiner writes for TheWrap, “In Self’s hands, images of the Washingtons are intertwined with the film’s characters, such that the real and fictional commingle as references that exemplify Black America.” Inspired by and named after a 1984 Romare Bearden lithograph, The Piano Lesson is one of Self’s favorite August Wilson plays. “When looking at the play’s origin within the context of American slavery, the significance of home for the characters in the play and the figures depicted in Bearden’s piece becomes all the more poignant when you realize the legacy of separation, loss and displacement inflicted on their ancestors,” says Self. 
  
  Her newly installed exhibition Tschabalala Self: Dream Girl is on view February 15–April 26, 2025 at Jeffrey Dietch in Los Angeles. 
  

  Read in TheWrap
  

  
  Post Date: 03-04-2025
  
• Jackie Bao ’11 Talks About her Excitement for Filmmaking
  ×

  Jackie Bao ’11 Talks About her Excitement for Filmmaking

  

  A still from Just Kids, directed by Jackie Bao and produced by Biscuit Filmworks.
  

  Filmmaker Jackie Bao ’11 was interviewed for Little Black Book Online’s Directors Series, focusing on the work of individual directors. Bao discussed her techniques for bringing a script to life and what she’s most excited about in the industry’s future. “I feel so lucky to have found real mentorship [in production],” Bao said. “I’d feel equally as lucky to be able to support someone else in their path. At the end of the day, you are building a community you want to be a part of.”
  
  Bao graduated from Bard with a degree in Photography and Human Rights before becoming a director of photography and then a director. Her most recent short Just Kids, about a man who finds a new life and connects to his immigrant father through an unexpected elevator ride, premiered at the Asian American International Film Festival and was also selected for the Austin Film Festival, Aesthetica, and Flux. Her next project explores motherhood and follows a mother and son on a hike. LBB Online describes Bao’s directorship as “known for richness and beauty . . . her expert pacing, performance direction, and thoughtful composition convey genuine human emotion.”
  

  Read the Interview
  

  
  Post Date: 02-25-2025
  
• Assistant Dean of Students Corey Sullivan ’03 Wins Obie Award
  ×

  Assistant Dean of Students Corey Sullivan ’03 Wins Obie Award

  

  Assistant Dean of Students Corey Sullivan ’03.
  

  At the 68th annual Obie Awards, the American Theatre Wing presented Assistant Dean of Students Corey Sullivan ’03 and other members of his arts collective, Theater Mitu, the Ross Wetzsteon Award for sustained innovation in the field. Theater Mitu was originally formed through Sullivan’s collaborations as an undergraduate at Bard.
  
  In 2001, then an undergraduate, Sullivan began collaborating with visiting artists on a production for Bard’s Theater and Performance Program. Their work together continued beyond the show’s run, and soon after, Sullivan joined the group in forming an interdisciplinary arts collective called Theater Mitu. Since then they have worked together to push the boundaries of theater through innovative productions, global research and education initiatives, programs supporting emerging artists, and the creation of their Brooklyn-based performance and technology center, MITU580.
  
  Theater Mitu will be in residence at the Boston Museum of Science and Arts Emerson in spring 2025 to present Utopian Hotline, a project developed in partnership with the SETI Institute and Arizona State University’s Interplanetary Initiative. Part telephone hotline, part vinyl record, and part live performance, Utopian Hotline uses real voicemails left on a public hotline to create a moment of community—inviting audience members to re-imagine our shared future. Inspired by the 1977 NASA Voyager mission, which launched a vinyl-style recording of sounds found on Earth into space, as well as the uncertainty surrounding the Covid-19 pandemic, this immersive performance begs the question: “If we were to send another message into the distant future, what message would we send?”
  
  Last summer, Theater Mitu premiered (HOLY) BLOOD! at their Brooklyn space, MITU580. Part live-scored silent film, part irreverent midnight movie, the piece created an original live soundscape merged with manipulated fragments of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s cult-classic film Santa Sangre. Projected across a shattered landscape of screens and sculpture, accompanied by explosive blood choreography enclosed in glass booths, the work remapped a story of circuses, blood cults, madness, and forgiveness. 
  
  For more information on the company’s work, visit www.theatermitu.org
  

  Read about the 68th annual Obie Award winners
  

  
  Post Date: 02-04-2025