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Division of the Arts

Photo by Chris Kayden

Division of the Arts

The Division of the Arts offers programs in architecture, art history and visual culture, dance, film and electronic arts, music, photography, studio arts, and theater and performance.

Theoretical understanding and practical skills alike are developed through production and performance in all disciplines. In the course of their program studies, students in the arts also develop aesthetic criteria that can be applied to other areas of learning.

  • Why the Arts at Bard?
    Students may undertake the arts for different reasons—as a path to a vocation or an avocation, or simply as a means of cultural enrichment. Working with a faculty adviser, the student plans a curriculum with their needs and goals in mind.
Arts Menu
  • Overview
  • Arts Calendar
  • Arts Faculty
  • Arts News

Our Programs

Programs in the Division of the Arts include:
  • Architecture
  • Art History and Visual Culture
  • Dance
  • Film and Electronic Arts
  • Music
  • Photography
  • Studio Arts
  • Theater and Performance
Division Chair: Julia Rosenbaum, Professor of Art History

Coursework and Requirements

As a student progresses to the Upper College, the coursework increasingly consists of smaller studio discussion groups and seminars in which active participation is expected. Advisory conferences, tutorials, and independent work prepare the student for the Senior Project. This yearlong independent project may be a critical or theoretical monograph, a collection of essays, or, for a large proportion of students, an artistic work, such as an exhibition of original paintings, sculpture, or photography; performances in dance, theater, or music; dance choreography or musical composition; or the making of a short film with sound. In designing their Senior Project topics, students may have reason to join their arts studies together with a complementary field or discipline, including programs or concentrations in other divisions. Plans for such integrated or interdivisional projects are normally created on an individual basis with the adviser.

Discover More

Live Arts Bard
Live Arts Bard
Photo by Paula Court

Live Arts Bard

“When I was a student at Bard, I was drawn to the Fisher Center because of Live Arts Bard. LAB is pushing the frontiers of these art forms, all of which are becoming more open and fluid.” —Sam Miller ’15

Live Arts Bard (LAB) is the interdisciplinary residency and commissioning program of Bard’s Fisher Center. Since its launch in 2012, Fisher Center LAB has supported residencies, workshops, and performances for hundreds of artists, incubating new projects and engaging audiences, students, faculty, and staff in the process of creating contemporary performances.
LAB at the Fisher Center →

Arts News and Events

Featured News

Visiting Associate Professor Susan Fox Rogers Wins the 2025 Harvard Review Chapbook Prize

Visiting Associate Professor Susan Fox Rogers Wins the 2025 Harvard Review Chapbook Prize

Judge Jerald Walker said, “I savored every page, and yet somehow I was still unprepared for their cumulative power."

Visiting Associate Professor Susan Fox Rogers Wins the 2025 Harvard Review Chapbook Prize

Visiting Associate Professor Susan Fox Rogers Wins the 2025 Harvard Review Chapbook Prize
Professor Susan F. Rogers.
Visiting Associate Professor of Writing Susan Fox Rogers has been awarded the Harvard Review Chapbook Prize for 2025. The prize is awarded every two years to works of nonfiction, including travel, memoir, and reportage, that are between 15,000 and 30,000 words. Rogers’s essay, “Guivi,” is about family secrets, following the posthumous letters of a reserved mother and their consequences. Rogers is currently working on a mystery novel set at a birding club in the Hudson Valley.

This year’s judge was Jerald Walker, who is a professor of Creative Writing at Emerson College. Walker describes Rogers as “a master essayist who also happens to have a few secrets of her own” and the essay as “a spellbinding study in humankind’s complexity.” “I savored every page, and yet somehow I was still unprepared for the cumulative power those pages would yield,” he writes.
Read More

Post Date: 07-15-2025

Recent News

  • Beto O’Byrne Receives New York City Small Theatres Fund Award

    Beto O’Byrne Receives New York City Small Theatres Fund Award

    Beto O’Byrne, visiting artist in residence in theater and performance at Bard College.
    Beto O’Byrne, visiting artist in residence in theater and performance at Bard College, along with the collective he cofounded, Radical Evolution Performance Collective, has received a New York City Small Theatres Fund Award. The award, in the amount of $15,500, is bestowed by ART/New York, an arts service organization dedicated to supporting New York City's community of nonprofit theaters, and the Howard Gilman Foundation, which provides funding and support to New York City–based performing arts organizations that are reflective of its vibrant cultural community. One of 17 recipients elected from 182 applications, O’Byrne and Radical Evolution will receive two years of flexible funds to support their theater operations. Since its founding in 2011, Radical Evolution has been committed to creating artistic events that seek to understand the complexities of mixed-identity existence in the 21st century. The collective collaborates with people from many different identities to break down barriers between cultures and creative practices, and aims to seed the field of experimental and collaboratively created theater with practitioners who celebrate the intersectionality of perspectives and aesthetics of New York City.

    Post Date: 07-15-2025
  • Walid Raad Receives Trellis Foundation 2025 Milestone Grant

    Walid Raad Receives Trellis Foundation 2025 Milestone Grant

    Walid Raad, professor of photography.
    Walid Raad, professor of photography at Bard College, has been announced as a recipient of a 2025 Trellis Foundation Milestone Grant. As one of 12 recipients named by the Trellis Art Fund, Raad will receive an unrestricted grant in the amount of $100,000, which will be disbursed in two installments over a two-year period. The award aims to provide support to artists who reflect a consistent, engaged practice and who have demonstrated a trajectory of creative excellence over the course of their career. Grantees will also be supported with career-development assistance, including workshops, and in November Trellis will host a retreat in upstate New York for 2024 and 2025 Milestone grantees to foster community-building. The winners, chosen by an anonymous five-person panel, range in age from 38 to 82 and were selected based on their demonstrated commitment to their respective practices, their unique contributions to their fields, and the consistently high quality of their work.
    Read more in ArtForum

    Post Date: 07-06-2025
  • Anne Hunnell Chen Receives 2025 ACLS Digital Justice Development Grant

    Anne Hunnell Chen Receives 2025 ACLS Digital Justice Development Grant

    Assistant Professor of Art History and Visual Culture Anne Hunnell Chen.
    Assistant Professor of Art History and Visual Culture Anne Hunnell Chen has been awarded an American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Digital Justice Grant for the project “Archaeological Archives as Inclusive Learning Laboratories,” one of seven established projects to be awarded the 2025 ACLS Digital Justice Development Grant of up to $100,000. The project focuses on American excavations at iconic sites, like Dura-Europos in Syria, which have shaped Western scholarship, which hardly includes mention of local communities whose labor made these excavations possible. Through oral histories, an enriched dataset, improved browsing interface, and digital training, their work “aims to insert and amplify local Syrian voices, giving communities a platform to share their stories alongside traditional archaeological narratives” and “to rebalance a one-sided history and make digital archives more accessible to a wider range of users.”

    The Archaeological Archives project is an expansion of Chen’s International Digital Dura-Europos Archive (IDEA), the first project to use a multilingual Linked Open Data dataset to reassemble and recontextualize institutionally- and disciplinarily-fragmented information descendent of colonially-entangled excavation histories. IDEA, which was funded over three years by the National Endowment for the Humanities, aims to address the dispersal of archival materials across the world by improving access to information for those in different disciplinary and linguistic areas. Its iteration at the Bard Center for Experimental Humanities, called IDEA_Lab@EH, has provided public-facing research opportunities for nearly 50 Bard undergraduates over the past three years. Chen hopes to further extend the impact of IDEA_Lab@EH through virtual learning opportunities throughout the Bard network.

    The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) recently announced recipients of the 2025 ACLS Digital Justice Grants, which fund digital projects across the humanities and social sciences that critically engage with the interests and histories of people of color and other historically marginalized communities through the ethical use of digital tools and methods. The program is made possible by a grant from the Mellon Foundation.
    Read more on ACLS

    Post Date: 07-02-2025
  • Wiháŋble S’a Center at Bard College Receives Wagner Foundation Grant

    Wiháŋble S’a Center at Bard College Receives Wagner Foundation Grant

    “Every Wonder in One Spot,” from the project Cosmologyscape by Kite and Alicia B Wormsley. Courtesy the artists and Creative Time
    The Wiháŋble S’a Center for Indigenous AI at Bard College has been announced as the recipient of a $93,000 grant from the Wagner Foundation, a nonprofit organization based in Boston. The grant will support the project “Cosmologyscape,” a multi-platform, socially engaged public art initiative co-lead by Wiháŋble S’a Center Director Dr. Suzanne Kite, distinguished artist in residence and assistant professor of American and Indigenous Studies at Bard, and artist and producer Alisha B. Wormsley MFA ’19.

    “Cosmologyscape” will launch its next chapter with an exhibition at Wagner in January 2026, and will include features such as Dream Mosaic tiles visualizing collective dreams installed along long gallery walls, a comfortable Dream Office space in which attendees can gather and rest, digital projections showcasing a localized “Boston Dreaming” webpage, and other installations. The project, which solicits dreams from the public that are translated into quilting patterns generated from 26 Black and Lakota symbols, aims to activate rest and dreaming as liberatory acts through sculpture, digital engagement, and community programming.

    “This grant affirms that dreaming is a vital, collective act—and that rest, vision, and story are the seeds of real change,” said Dr. Suzanne Kite, director of the Wiháŋble S’a Center. “With support from the Wagner Foundation, ‘Cosmologyscape’ can continue unfolding as a cosmic quilt—each dream a thread, weaving together Black and Indigenous futures across time, land, and memory.”

    Wagner Foundation is a Cambridge, MA-based foundation that invests in health equity, economic prosperity, and cultural transformation across the globe. Wagner Foundation prioritizes work that strengthens equitable systems and views artists as leaders and changemakers who are critical voices in interrogating the past, wrestling with the current moment, and envisioning alternative futures. Learn more at wfound.org.

    Post Date: 07-01-2025
  • Mara Baldwin Awarded Summer 2025 Artist Residency by the McColl Center

    Mara Baldwin Awarded Summer 2025 Artist Residency by the McColl Center

    Mara Baldwin, visiting artist in residence in Studio Arts at Bard.
    Mara Baldwin, visiting artist in residence in Studio Arts at Bard, has been awarded a Summer 2025 Artist in Residency by the McColl Center through its Parent and Educator Artist in Residency Program. The internationally acclaimed program by McColl Center, based in Charlotte, North Carolina, aims to serve as a catalyst for artistic growth among creators, and residents are encouraged to immerse themselves fully in research, exploration, and creation, while also engaging with McColl Center’s community and Charlotte’s local creative sector. Baldwin’s multidisciplinary and research-based work uses textiles and drawings to create serial and narrative forms, and focuses on the impossible dream of utopia. While in residency, which takes place from June 3 to August 11, Baldwin joins three other artists, each of whom will construct immersive, hybrid worlds that reflect layered identities and complex truths using diverse practices spanning sculpture, sound, performance, and installation. Baldwin will receive a $6,000 stipend and have access to a private studio space, shared labs and facilities, including a 3D printer Lab, a ceramics and sculpture studio, a darkroom, a media lab, and a woodshop, along with curatorial guidance and marketing support.

    Post Date: 06-20-2025
  • Richard Aldous Reviews Walter Lippmann: An Intellectual Biography for the Wall Street Journal

    Richard Aldous Reviews Walter Lippmann: An Intellectual Biography for the Wall Street Journal

    Professor of History Richard Aldous.
    Professor of History Richard Aldous published a review in the Wall Street Journal of Tom Arnold-Forster’s biography of Walter Lippmann, a twentieth-century journalist. Walter Lippmann: An Intellectual Biography follows Lippmann’s career as one of the most ubiquitous journalists of his era who wrote several books of democratic theory. Aldous evaluates Arnold-Forster’s biography as a good first book and a “fair hearing,” rather than a defense, for its subject. Despite being less well-known today than some of his contemporaries, Lippmann was significant because of his “arresting, often contradictory ideas [that shaped] the national debate,” argues Aldous. He says Lippman passed the litmus test “for all public intellectuals— to illuminate their own time and make us think about ours.”
    Read the Review

    Post Date: 06-20-2025
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