Division of the Arts

Recent News

• 2026 Guggenheim Fellowships Awarded to Bard Faculty Members
  ×

  2026 Guggenheim Fellowships Awarded to Bard Faculty Members

  

  L–R: Jacqueline Goss and and Joseph Luzzi. 
  

  The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has awarded 2026 Guggenheim Fellowships to Bard College faculty members Jacqueline Goss, professor of film and electronic arts, and Joseph Luzzi, Asher B. Edelman Professor of Literature. Chosen through a rigorous application and peer review process from a pool of nearly 5,000 applicants, Goss and Luzzi were awarded in recognition of their career achievement and exceptional promise. Guggenheim fellowships were also awarded to James Hoff, Steve Reinke, and Kenneth Tam, who will teach this upcoming summer at Bard’s Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts.
  
  “Our new class of Guggenheim Fellows is representative of the world’s best thinkers, innovators, and creators in art, science, and scholarship,” said Edward Hirsch, award-winning poet and president of the Guggenheim Foundation. “As the Foundation enters its second century and looks to the future, I feel confident that this new class of 223 individuals will do bold and inspiring work, undaunted by the challenges ahead. We are honored to support their visionary contributions.”
  
  Goss’s fellowship will support the development of an experimental narrative film project that engages with larger questions of artistic life, visibility, and the uneven recognition of artists and artistic forms, explored within the social and cultural landscape of New York in the late 1960s and early 1970s. During Luzzi’s fellowship year, he will work on The Lives of Beatrice: The Muse Who Made Us Modern, a book of narrative nonfiction that traces the remarkable afterlife of Dante's great muse, Beatrice Portinari, across seven centuries of art, literature, and culture. Beginning with a biography of Beatrice as a historical woman in late thirteenth-century Florence, the book follows her transformation into one of the most frequently reimagined figures in the Western imagination, from Petrarch and Cervantes to the Pre-Raphaelites and into contemporary pop culture. Ultimately, Luzzi’s project asks what each era's reinvention of Beatrice reveals, not only about the woman herself, but about the cultures that have continually returned to her.
  
  Goss, Luzzi, Hoff, Reinke, and Tam are among 223 distinguished individuals working across 55 disciplines appointed to the 101st class of Guggenheim Fellows. As established in 1925 by founder Senator Simon Guggenheim, each fellow receives a monetary stipend to pursue independent work at the highest level under “the freest possible conditions.” Since its inception, the foundation has granted nearly $450 million in Fellowships to over 19,000 individuals, among whom are more than 125 Nobel laureates, members of all the national academies, winners of the Pulitzer Prize, Fields Medal, Turing Award, Bancroft Prize, National Book Award, and other internationally recognized honors.
  
  Jacqueline Goss is an experimental filmmaker whose work examines the human impulse to quantify and control even the most ineffable experiences and environments. Using diverse methods and tools, her work explores the ways vanity, fear, loneliness and desire seep into scientific experimentation, language, mapping, and political systems. Her projects include an animated documentary on the effects of biometric surveillance on migrants’ senses of self (Stranger Comes To Town), a film enacting the quotidian gestures of a weather observer on the windiest mountain in the world (The Observers), and a theoretical musical about Wilhelm Reich (OR119). Over the last 25 years, these works and others have shown at film festivals worldwide including the London Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, the New York Film Festival, European Media Arts Festival, and Faculdade de Belas Artes. Goss’s moving image work has also screened at art centers, galleries, and museums including MOMA, the Natural History Museum in New York, Eyebeam Atelier, Wexner Center for the Arts, Walker Center for the Arts, Pacific Film Archive, Kunsthall Aarhus, UnionDocs, Microscope Gallery, Vancouver Art Gallery, Anthology Film Archives, Arsenal, Piano Nobile, and the National Gallery in Washington, DC. Her films, videos, and animations have been covered in various journals and newspapers including The Brooklyn Rail, the New York Times, Chicago Reader, San Francisco Bay Guardian, Four Columns, Film Comment, BOMB, Art Forum, Cinemascope, Sage Journals, and Millenium Film Journal.
  
  Joseph Luzzi received his PhD from Yale University. He is the author of nine books, including his recent The Innocents of Florence: The Renaissance Discovery of Childhood (Norton, 2025), one of The New Yorker's Best Books of 2025. His other books include Botticelli’s Secret: The Lost Drawings and the Rediscovery of the Renaissance (Norton, 2022), a New Yorker Best Books of 2022 selection and shortlisted for the Phi Beta Kappa Ralph Waldo Emerson Award; A Cinema of Poetry: Aesthetics of the Italian Art Film (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), a finalist for the international prize “The Bridge Book” Award; and My Two Italies (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, amongst others. Luzzi’s essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Chronicle of Higher Education, TLS, Bookforum, and American Scholar, among others, and his scholarly writing has appeared in PMLA, Modern Language Notes, Modern Language Quarterly, Raritan, Italica, and Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century.
  
  Post Date: 04-28-2026
  
• Stephen Shore Announced as Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters
  ×

  Stephen Shore Announced as Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters

  

  Stephen Shore, director of the Photography Program and Susan Weber Professor in the Arts.
  

  Stephen Shore, director of the Photography Program and Susan Weber Professor in the Arts at Bard College, has been announced as a newly elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, an honor society founded to foster and sustain excellence in American literature, music, and art. Shore was honored in the department of Art in recognition of notable achievement in his field of photography, and will be inducted along with other new members during the organization’s annual Arts and Letters Ceremonial in May. 
  
  The Photography Program at Bard College offers instruction in the medium while providing a historical and aesthetic framework for student development within the context of a broad-based liberal arts education.
  
  Post Date: 04-21-2026
  
• A. Sayeeda Moreno Receives 2026 Film Independent Amplifier Fellowship 
  ×

  A. Sayeeda Moreno Receives 2026 Film Independent Amplifier Fellowship 

  

  A. Sayeeda Moreno, assistant professor of film and electronic arts. Photo by Francis Guevara
  

  A. Sayeeda Moreno, assistant professor of film/electronic arts at Bard, has been selected as a 2026 Film Independent Amplifier Fellow, one of only six filmmakers chosen nationally from a highly competitive pool. The fellowship will support Moreno’s development of her screenplay into a feature film, Out in the Dunes, a coming-of-age romance set in Provincetown in 1992. The story follows Soledad, a heartbroken romantic who becomes involved in an unexpected passionate affair with Jules, a lesbian artist who challenges her belief in love. The film offers a bold exploration of humanity through its reflection on love, friendship, and the strength and salvation that community can provide.The Amplifier Fellowship, supported by Founding Sponsor Netflix and its Fund for Creative Equity, provides emerging and mid-career Black or African American filmmakers with a $30,000 unrestricted grant and a twelve-month program that provides creative and strategic support to advance a selected project, along with customized mentorship from industry advisors, professional coaching, and financial and business advising.
  
  The Film and Electronic Arts Program encourages interest in a wide range of expressive modes in film and electronic arts including animation, narrative and non-narrative filmmaking, documentary, performance, and installation practices. The program emphasizes imaginative engagement and the cultivation of an individual voice that has command over the entire creative process.
  
  Post Date: 03-18-2026
  
• Bard Faculty Tanya Marcuse and Adriane Colburn Awarded a Marble House Project Residency 
  ×

  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
  ×

  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
  ×

  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