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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.  

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.

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.
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“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.

The Poughkeepsie Journal interviewed John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of the Humanities Dinaw Mengestu about his 10 years at Bard, on the occasion of his selection as president of PEN America. Mengestu, who is also director of Bard’s Written Arts Program, was elected to the 104-year-old nonprofit for a two-year term. Mengestu says his work at Bard, particularly in its writing programs, “‘aligns’ with PEN's core values [of] uniting writers, being champions of the freedom to write, advocates on free expression challenges and campaigning on policy issues and on behalf of writers, as well as journalists, under threat.” Speaking more broadly about freedom of expression rights, Mengestu said "[reading and writing play a] critical role in creating the kind of culture and community and society we want to live in… When I think of the thing that I really want to uphold and protect most, it's literature."

Dinaw Mengestu is the author of three novels, all of which were named New York Times Notable Books: All Our Names, How To Read the Air, and The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears. He has taught in Bard’s Written Arts Program since 2016.

The Written Arts Program at Bard 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.

Tania El Khoury, distinguished artist in residence, associate professor in theater and performance, and director of the Center for Human Rights and the Arts at Bard College, has won a 2026 Creative Capital Award in support of her project, A Choreography of State Violence. Her project was amongst 49 new works chosen from a pool of 4,546 applications from all 50 states and regions in the United States. Creative Capital, a nonprofit organization dedicated to championing artistic freedom of expression by supporting individual artists across the United States, confers the award in recognition of original, ambitious project proposals for new artistic ideas, and supports artists by providing project funding of up to $50,000 each, professional development services, and community-building opportunities.

El Khoury’s project, A Choreography of State Violence, is an installation performance that examines state violence from a choreographic perspective, exploring how what are perceived as incidental and individualized cases of violence perpetrated by the state are, in fact, conceptualized and rehearsed with calculated dramaturgy.

“Creative Capital remains unwavering in our mission to support individual artists creating new work as a powerful catalyst for freedom of thought and freedom of expression in our democracy,” said Christine Kuan, president and executive director of Creative Capital. The Creative Capital Award will in 2026 support the creation of 49 new works in visual arts, film, dance, theater, music/jazz, and literature, as well as technology, multidisciplinary, and socially engaged forms in all disciplines.

Tania El Khoury creates interactive and immersive installations and performances that reflect on the production of collective memory and the cultivation of solidarity. Her work is activated by tactile, auditory and visual traces collected and curated by the artist and her collaborators, and they are ultimately transformed through audience interaction. El Khoury’s work has been translated to multiple languages and shown in 35 countries across 6 continents in spaces ranging from museums to cable cars. She is the recipient of the Herb Alpert Award, the Soros Art Fellowship, the Bessies Outstanding Production Award, the International Live Art Prize, the Total Theatre Innovation Award, and the Arches Brick Award.

American theater and opera director and cofounder of SITI Company Anne Bogart ’74 was inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame on November 17. In order to receive the award, the only nationally recognized hall of fame honoring lifetime achievement in the American theater, the awardee must have given 25 years distinguished service to the American theater and at least five major production credits on Broadway. Bogart, who studied drama and dance at Bard and received an honorary doctorate of fine arts from the College in 2014, teaches at Columbia University, where she is a professor and head of the directing concentration.

In December 2022, Bard’s Fisher Center presented the world premiere of SITI Company’s reimagining of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, codirected by Anne Bogart and Tony Award winner Darron L West. The work, commissioned by the Fisher Center, was the final production in SITI Company’s 30th anniversary “Finale Season.” 

Bard’s Theater and Performance Program offers an interdisciplinary, liberal arts-based approach to the making and study of theater and performance, and embraces a wide range of performance practices, from live art and interactive installation to classical theater from around the globe.

My Town, a semi-autobiographical show written by Bard Assistant Professor of Theater and Performance Jack Ferver, was reviewed in the New York Times. The play, a one-person retelling of Our Town by Thornton Wilder, follows a schoolteacher and interrogates rural American life through dance-theater. Gia Kourlas writes that My Town, which Ferver performed at NYU Skirball last week, is “purposefully enigmatic” and “a feat of constant storytelling and choreography.”

Ferver discusses their inspirations for My Town, including industrialization, Martha Graham’s choreography, and the Wizard of Oz. They say the questions that animate Our Town, and by extension My Town, are, ‘How are you living? And are you really paying attention? Are you present?’”

Bard’s Theater and Performance Program offers an interdisciplinary, liberal arts-based approach to the making and study of theater and performance, and embraces a wide range of performance practices, from live art and interactive installation to classical theater from around the globe.

Assistant Professor of Art History and Visual Culture Anne Hunnell Chen was recognized with the 2025 Award for “Outstanding Professional Advancing Open Access to Cultural Heritage” from the Wikimedia Foundation. This international award was given for Chen’s work on the International Digital Dura-Europos Archive (IDEA), which she founded. IDEA is an initiative using digital tools and a Linked Open Data set (LOD) to facilitate archaeological knowledge about the Dura-Europos site in Syria, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

The awarding committee said, “Anne Chen’s work is worthy of the highest recognition, by the advanced use of LOD methods, the sheer scope of collaboration between the digital humanities and across Wikimedia projects, and the focus on an immensely important and underrepresented cultural geography like Syria.” They also recognized the importance of her work at the present moment, “when the organizations that helped fund this work are currently being severely defunded.”

The Art History and Visual Culture Program at Bard introduces students to visual material across a broad range of periods and societies.

In an op-ed for the New York Times, Distinguished Visiting Writer M. Gessen wrote about how Americans can learn from citizens of other countries that grapple with human rights issues. Speaking to Jewish citizens of Israel, Gessen discusses what it means to benefit from government actions one disagrees with. Gessen spoke with Michael Sfard, a human rights lawyer who represents Palestinians in Israeli courts, and Ella Keidar Greenberg, who refused to enlist in the Israeli army. “Being an idle bystander is doing something,” Greenberg says of her decision. “I’m either maintaining the system or dismantling it.”

“To be a good citizen of a bad state, one has to do scary things,” Gessen concludes. “It may be using your body to shield someone more vulnerable, [or] withdrawing your economic cooperation, weighing… flying under the radar against taking a risk.”

Bard College Artist in Residence Jeffrey Gibson was featured in the Financial Times ahead of his recent exhibition coinciding with Art Basel Paris. Gibson reflects on the trajectory of his artistic career, following his ups and downs before becoming the first Indigenous artist to represent the US at the Venice Biennale in 2024. Gibson shares that he nearly abandoned art in his 40s before moving to the Hudson Valley, finding his current studio, and beginning to experiment with his current “psycho-prismatic” art.

Gibson’s art includes sensory objects like flashes, jingle dress dance, and op-art patterns to produce a feeling of “luminous, multisensory release.” His upcoming show This Is Dedicated To The One I Love is focused on bright paintings inspired by prisms and nebulas. These pieces reflect his childhood, which he spent surrounded by many different cultures, and impart  the sense that humanity is “encased by this planet… on the same, massive, phenomenal organism.”