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Bard College alumnus Ka-Man Tse is one of five finalists chosen from among 900 portfolios reviewed for the highly competitive award.

Two Bard College faculty members, Playwright-in-Residence Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas and Visiting Artist in Theater and Performance Annie Dorsen, are among the 173 winners of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation’s 94th competition for the United States and Canada. Cortiñas and Dorsen were awarded Guggenheim Fellowships for their work in drama and performance art. Appointed on the basis of prior achievement and exceptional promise, the successful candidates were chosen from a group of almost 3,000 applicants. The great variety of backgrounds, fields of study, and accomplishments of Guggenheim Fellows is one of the unique characteristics of the Fellowship program.

Cortiñas and Dorsen bring the number of Bard faculty members who have received Guggenheim Fellowships to almost 40. Previous recipients from Bard College include Nancy Shaver, Lothar Osterburg, Peggy Ahwesh, JoAnne Akalaitas, Peter Hutton, Ann Lauterbach, An-My Lê, Norman Manea, Daniel Mendelsohn, Bradford Morrow, Judy Pfaff, Luc Sante, Stephen Shore, Mona Simpson, and Joan Tower. This year, former Bard faculty member David Levine was awarded a fellowship in drama and performance art and John Heginbotham, who choreographed Fantasque in the 2015 SummerScape Festival, won a fellowship in choreography.

Playwright Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas has been a Bard College faculty member since 2011. He received a B.A. from Georgetown University, M.P.H. from University of California, Berkeley, and M.F.A. from Brown University. He has won several honors, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Helen Merrill Award, “playwright of the year” in El Nuevo Herald’s 1999 year-end list, a Writers Community Residency from the YMCA, National Writer’s Voice, and the Robert Chesley Award, among others. His plays include Maleta Mulata (Campo Santo); Sleepwalkers (Area Stage, Carbonell Award; and Alliance Theatre); Tight Embrace (Intar); and Blind Mouth Singing (Teatro Vista, and National Asian American Theatre Company). His plays have been published by Playscripts and TDR/The Drama Review. The Mark Taper Forum, South Coast Repertory, New World Theater, Hartford Stage, and Playwrights Horizons have all commissioned his work. He is a Usual Suspect at New York Theatre Workshop and a member of New Dramatists. He is cofounder of Fulcrum Theater. His poetry, fiction, and nonfiction have been published in many journals and anthologies. He has taught at University of Rochester, Denison University, University of Miami, and Children’s Theater Center, Minneapolis.

Annie Dorsen is an Obie Award–winning director and writer whose works explore the intersection of algorithms and live performance. Dorsen received a B.A. from Yale College and M.F.A. from Yale School of Drama. In her work, she tries to “make perceptible how ideas change over time: where they come from, how they influence and are influenced by politics and culture, and how they take root in the body, physically and emotionally.” Since 2010, she has worked with algorithms as full creative collaborators in what she calls "algorithmic theater.” Recent algorithmic works include The Great Outdoors (2017) and Yesterday Tomorrow (2015), performed in New York and throughout Europe; Youtube 1–4, a series of short videos made from YouTube comments; A Piece of Work, a deconstruction of Hamlet; and Hello Hi There, a dialogue inspired by a televised debate between Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault. Other works include the 2008 Broadway musical Passing Strange, which won the Obie for best new theater piece and was the subject of a film by Spike Lee that was screened at the Sundance and Tribeca Film Festivals; Magical, a 2010 collaboration with choreographer Anne Juren; and Pièce sans Paroles, with Juren and DD Dorvillier. Dorsen is the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships from, among others, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Fondation d’Enterprise Hermès New Settings Program, New York State Council on the Arts, and MAP Fund. In addition to the Obie, honors include the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts and the Audelco Award for best director of a musical. She is currently a visiting artist in residence at Bard College. She has taught or served as guest lecturer or instructor at the University of Chicago, Columbia University, California Institute of the Arts, and Brown University.

Manhattan’s just-opened Freehand New York boasts art commissioned from 10 artists, students and alumni/ae of Bard College, who painted mixed-media murals in the hotel’s 395 guest rooms.

There’s no one path to success as a curator of contemporary art, but the trend toward degree programs in curatorial studies continues to rise.

Montgomery Place: A Window on the World of Alexander Jackson Davis’s Architecture and Design will take place on four consecutive Saturdays beginning April 14.