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This fall, The Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College presents an extraordinary series of music, dance, performance art, and theater programs. Highlights of the fall season include the 75th anniversary season of American Ballet Theatre; the inaugural season of The Orchestra Now, Leon Botstein, music director; singer-songwriter Natalie Merchant and the Bard College Conservatory Orchestra; Trisha Brown Dance Company’s Trisha Brown: In Plain Site, a unique event developed specifically for the Bard campus; the world premiere of choreographer Miguel Gutierrez’s Age & Beauty Part 3 and the premiere performances of the full trilogy; the U.S. premiere screening of Life and Times Episodes 7-9 by avant-garde theater ensemble Nature Theater of Oklahoma; Neil Gaiman in conversation with Armistead Maupin; Conservatory Sunday Series; a special holiday production of Geoff Sobelle’s The Object Lesson; and a variety of student performances.

Spahr's new collection of verse and prose asks, "what it means to remain a disillusioned opponent of capitalism, a not-quite-despondent environmental observer and an anxious parent today."

Basel Yazouri's photo essay of last summer's Israeli military action in Gaza "announces a prodigious new talent in the field of documentary photography."

"The Brink is so funny, so inventive—and so fearless in what it has to say about geopolitics," writes Bard writer in residence Francine Prose.

Ellen Driscoll's fall 2015 residency explores, in drawing and sculpture, the poetics and economics of wood in Siena's history and in the present context of globalization.

"There are certain photographs that seem to have been pulled out of the world of dreams." Teju Cole goes to São Paulo in search of René Burri's "Men on a Rooftop."

"There are invariably delightful surprises among the densely packed programs at Bard," writes Times music critic Vivien Schweitzer.

Bard has been awarded a $2 million grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support the launch of an innovative Master of Music Degree Program in Curatorial, Critical, and Performance Studies and its resultant ensemble, The Orchestra Now (TON). This unique training orchestra and master’s degree program provides musicians with professional-level orchestral training that is integrated into the interdisciplinary graduate study of music’s place in culture and history. The program is designed to prepare select conservatory graduates for the challenges facing the modern symphony orchestra and to produce scholars and advocates of classical and contemporary music as well as practiced members of a top grade orchestra. Musicians receive three years of advanced orchestral training and take graduate-level courses in orchestral and curatorial studies, leading to a Master of Music degree. Funding from the Mellon grant will help to support student stipends, curriculum development, and salary and honoraria for visiting faculty and lecturers.

Bard Alumnus Ian Samuels was named in Filmmaker magazine's annual survey of new talent.

More than 20 years ago Feldman started her now wildly successful crystal glassware company in her apartment with just $2,500 in savings.

Herb Ritts '74 was famous for his celebrity portraits. Now his collection is on display in a career retrospective at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

"This summer represents the Bard Music Festival’s first examination of a Latin American composer, focusing on one who ... may have shaped American music more than any other."

American photographers Stephen Shore and Walker Evans take the spotlight in the 45th Les Rencontres d'Arles photography festival in southern France.