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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

Anne Hunnell Chen Receives 2025 ACLS Digital Justice Development Grant

Anne Hunnell Chen Receives 2025 ACLS Digital Justice Development Grant

“Archaeological Archives as Inclusive Learning Laboratories” is one of seven established projects to be awarded a 2025 ACLS Digital Justice Development Grant of up to $100,000.

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

Recent News

  • 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.”

    The Wagner Foundation was established in Boston in 2005, and over time has expanded its local focus to include grants and support in national and international settings. The foundation seeks to confront the social and historical disparities that perpetuate injustice by partnering with organizations aligned with this goal to serve as both advocates for change and convening thought leaders. It focuses on health equity and economic prosperity, balanced by a holistic approach which aims to develop and strengthen equitable systems throughout the world.

    Post Date: 07-01-2025
  • Coralie Kraft ’13 Interviewed by PBS News About Doomsday Preppers

    Coralie Kraft ’13 Interviewed by PBS News About Doomsday Preppers

    Bard college alumna Coralie Kraft ’13.
    Coralie Kraft ’13, visual editor, writer, and Bard College alumna, was interviewed by PBS News about her New York Times Magazine article “The ‘Panic Industry’ Boom,” for which she was also the contributing photo editor. The article and photo essay explored how some Americans are increasingly spending vast amounts of money prepping for doomsday scenarios by building bunkers, bomb shelters, gun rooms, panic rooms and other means of surviving through a collapse. In conversation with Ali Rogin, Kraft discussed her thoughts on why more people are preparing for disasters, the companies that build the structures meant to safeguard their clients, and the mindsets behind those who are preparing for such scenarios. “I think that as more and more people are impacted by things like pandemics, by civil unrest and demonstrations and activism in their cities, by financial collapse as those factors hit a wider and wider population, it makes sense to me that more of us would be interested in this type of, ‘what can I do in the event of a disaster scenario or a doomsday scenario,’” Kraft told PBS.
    Watch the Full Interview with PBS
    Read Coralie Kraft's Original Article in the New York Times Magazine

    Post Date: 06-20-2025
  • 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
  • Henry Mielarczyk ’25 Joins Stennis Program for Congressional Interns

    Henry Mielarczyk ’25 Joins Stennis Program for Congressional Interns

    Henry Mielarczyk ’25.
    Bard alumnus Henry Mielarczyk ’25, a philosophy and music performance major, has been accepted into the 2025 Stennis Program for Congressional Interns. The internship, given by the Stennis Center for Public Service in Washington, DC, is a competitive bipartisan program designed to provide congressional interns with an opportunity to better understand the role of Congress as an institution and its role in the democracy of the United States. Interns will connect with current and former senior congressional staff through a series of discussion sessions designed to provide an in-depth look at Congress and its operations with other institutions. The Stennis Center is a bipartisan legislative branch agency created by Congress in 1988 to promote and strengthen the highest ideals of public service in the United States. The center aims to develop and deliver a portfolio of unique programs for young people, leaders in local, state, and federal government, and congressional staff.

    Post Date: 06-18-2025
  • For the Washington Post, Francine Prose Reflects on Mrs. Dalloway

    For the Washington Post, Francine Prose Reflects on Mrs. Dalloway

    Francine Prose. Photo by Christine Jean Chambers
    To celebrate the centennial of the publication of Mrs. Dalloway, Distinguished Writer in Residence Francine Prose wrote a retrospective on Virginia Woolf’s most famous work for the Washington Post. Mrs. Dalloway, which follows a woman over a single June day, turns 100 this week. Prose writes that her recent re-read impressed her because of Woolf’s “grace and skill” that “made the [writing] process look easy.” Discussing what makes the novel special a century later, she says it celebrates humanity while not ignoring the suffering of life: “Woolf’s subject is not just Clarissa Dalloway’s life but life itself, the wonder of human consciousness and what it means — what it feels like — to be a human being.”

    Prose is the author of 22 works of fiction and has taught at Bard since 2005.
    Read the Article

    Post Date: 06-10-2025
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