News

Filmmaker Jackie Bao ’11 was interviewed for Little Black Book Online’s Directors Series, focusing on the work of individual directors. Bao discussed her techniques for bringing a script to life and what she’s most excited about in the industry’s future. “I feel so lucky to have found real mentorship [in production],” Bao said. “I’d feel equally as lucky to be able to support someone else in their path. At the end of the day, you are building a community you want to be a part of.”

Bao graduated from Bard with a degree in Photography and Human Rights before becoming a director of photography and then a director. Her most recent short Just Kids, about a man who finds a new life and connects to his immigrant father through an unexpected elevator ride, premiered at the Asian American International Film Festival and was also selected for the Austin Film Festival, Aesthetica, and Flux. Her next project explores motherhood and follows a mother and son on a hike. LBB Online describes Bao’s directorship as “known for richness and beauty . . . her expert pacing, performance direction, and thoughtful composition convey genuine human emotion.”

At the 68th annual Obie Awards, the American Theatre Wing presented Assistant Dean of Students Corey Sullivan ’03 and other members of his arts collective, Theater Mitu, the Ross Wetzsteon Award for sustained innovation in the field. Theater Mitu was originally formed through Sullivan’s collaborations as an undergraduate at Bard.

In 2001, then an undergraduate, Sullivan began collaborating with visiting artists on a production for Bard’s Theater and Performance Program. Their work together continued beyond the show’s run, and soon after, Sullivan joined the group in forming an interdisciplinary arts collective called Theater Mitu. Since then they have worked together to push the boundaries of theater through innovative productions, global research and education initiatives, programs supporting emerging artists, and the creation of their Brooklyn-based performance and technology center, MITU580.

Theater Mitu will be in residence at the Boston Museum of Science and Arts Emerson in spring 2025 to present Utopian Hotline, a project developed in partnership with the SETI Institute and Arizona State University’s Interplanetary Initiative. Part telephone hotline, part vinyl record, and part live performance, Utopian Hotline uses real voicemails left on a public hotline to create a moment of community—inviting audience members to re-imagine our shared future. Inspired by the 1977 NASA Voyager mission, which launched a vinyl-style recording of sounds found on Earth into space, as well as the uncertainty surrounding the Covid-19 pandemic, this immersive performance begs the question: “If we were to send another message into the distant future, what message would we send?”

Last summer, Theater Mitu premiered (HOLY) BLOOD! at their Brooklyn space, MITU580. Part live-scored silent film, part irreverent midnight movie, the piece created an original live soundscape merged with manipulated fragments of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s cult-classic film Santa Sangre. Projected across a shattered landscape of screens and sculpture, accompanied by explosive blood choreography enclosed in glass booths, the work remapped a story of circuses, blood cults, madness, and forgiveness. 

For more information on the company’s work, visit www.theatermitu.org

Ephraim Asili MFA ’11, associate professor and director of film and electronic arts, has been selected as one of 50 artists to receive a 2025 United States Artists (USA) Fellowship. Each year, individual artists and collaboratives are anonymously nominated to apply by a geographically diverse and rotating group of artists, scholars, critics, producers, curators, and other arts professionals. USA Fellowships are annual $50,000 unrestricted awards recognizing the most compelling artists working and living in the United States, in all disciplines, at every stage of their career. 

“My approach to filmmaking is both hybrid and experimental. My films often alternate between essayistic or observational documentary form, narrative fiction, and self-reflexive gestures which foreground how the film medium itself, and the filmmaker using it, frame lived experience,” says Asili.

Ephraim Asili is an African American artist and educator whose work focuses on the African diaspora as a cultural force. Often inspired by his quotidian wanderings, Asili creates art that situates itself as a series of meditations on the everyday. He received his BA in Film and Media Arts from Temple University and his MFA in Film and Interdisciplinary Art at Bard College. Asili’s films have screened in festivals and venues all over the world, including the New York Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, The Berlinale, and the International Film Festival Rotterdam. Asili’s 2020 feature debut The Inheritance premiered at the 2020 Toronto International Film Festival and was recently the focus of an exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art where it is a part of their permanent collection. In 2021 Asili was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. During the summer of 2022 Asili directed a short film Strange Math along with the 2023 Men’s Spring/Summer fashion show for Louis Vuitton. In 2023, Asili was the recipient of a Harvard Radcliffe Fellowship, and in 2024 Asili was awarded a grant from Creative Capital. 

Sancia Miala Shiba Nash '19 and Drew K. Broderick MA ’19 of kekahi wahi also won a 2025 United States Artists fellowship. kekahi wahi was instigated in 2020 by filmmaker Sancia Miala Shiba Nash and artist Drew K. Broderick. The grassroots film initiative is committed to documenting transformations across the Hawaiian archipelago and sharing stories of the greater Pacific through time-based media.