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Two members of the Bard College undergraduate faculty, Tanya Marcuse, associate professor of photography, and Sarah Hennies, assistant professor of music, have been awarded 2025 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowships, a highly competitive program of the New York State Council on the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Marcuse received a fellowship in the category of Photography for Portent, Part II of her larger project Book of Miracles, and Hennies received a fellowship in the category of Music/Sound for her ongoing work as a composer and percussionist exploring the intersections of sound, perception, and social identity. Marcuse is one of 24 Fellows in Photography, selected from 951 applicants; Hennies is one of 22 Fellows in Music/Sound, selected from 1,015 applicants.

In Portent, Marcuse visualizes phenomena that defy the laws of nature by staging fantastical scenes in swamps, rivers, and orchards near her home in the Hudson Valley. Conceived during the Covid-19 pandemic, her project reflects the instability of our world while expanding photography’s ability to navigate the ambiguous terrain between fact and fiction. She is currently preparing a book and several exhibitions of the project. In addition, Marcuse has been named one of five Joy of Giving Something (JGS) Fellows, which supports contributors to the photographic arts.

Throughout her fellowship, Hennies will continue to develop new pieces that challenge conventional boundaries between music, sound art, and lived experience. Her compositions often take the form of immersive, durational works that foreground subtle shifts in rhythm, resonance, and timbre. Her projects engage themes of queer and trans identity, psychoacoustics, and the politics of listening, inviting audiences into heightened awareness of time and embodiment. In a separate honor, Hennies has been named the 2025 Composer in Residence for the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, taking place in Huddersfield, England in November.

Each year, the NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship provides a lens for contemporary artistic expression. The themes, ideas, and materials used by the 2025 Fellows reflect and respond to the larger social, political, and economic issues of today. Artists across categories are exploring topics including diasporic and immigrant identity; gender, race, and sexuality; environmental and disability justice; and civic engagement.

Sara J. Winston, associate director of the Photography Program and artist in residence, has been awarded a 2025 Arts and Culture Project Grant by Arts Mid-Hudson, a nonprofit organization which aims to provide vital support to artists and organizations throughout Dutchess, Orange, and Ulster Counties. The grant will support Winston’s project, Too Visceral to be Intelligent, a special edition of her hybrid visual-textual artist book that chronicles her experience of living with Multiple Sclerosis. Diagnosed in 2015, Winston has developed a body of work centered on self-portrait photographs taken during her monthly and biannual intravenous infusion treatments. These images juxtapose the clinical starkness of the environment with her youthful, able-bodied appearance, producing a striking and deeply personal meditation on chronic illness, resilience, and self-representation. The book will be released in an edition of 250 copies in 2026, and as part of the public component of the grant, Winston will present the work at a talk and book launch event at the Center for Photography at Woodstock’s CPW Kingston on February 12, 2026.

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.
 

Photography Program Director and Susan Weber Professor in the Arts Stephen Shore was profiled by the New York Times. Photographer and Bard alumnus Gus Aronson ’20 shot a video that accompanies the profile of Shore, who has headed the photography program at Bard for over 40 years. The profile celebrates the publication of his new collection Early Work, containing photography he took from the ages of 12 to 17. The photos show Shore’s early street photography in Manhattan, shaped by inspirations like Walker Evans and Bruce Davidson; “I was looking a lot and had a lot of influences,” Shore says. Several years later, at 24, Shore would have a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Shore has had many exhibitions around the world since then, in Milan, Cologne, Chicago, and more. He has taught in Bard’s Photography Program since 1982. He says these early photos reflect concerns he’s addressed through his entire practice: “I see a formal awareness from the beginning. I’m framing, not pointing.”

Jazz pianist and Bard College alumnus Ran Blake ’60 was interviewed by the Boston Globe for an article covering the artist’s career, which has spanned more than 60 years, and how he at 90 is preparing to perform a solo concert in Brookline, MA, this September. Blake, whose career has yielded over 40 recording credits on jazz albums, has also spent over 40 years teaching jazz at the New England Conservatory of Music (NEC), where he cofounded and led the Department of Third Stream, now called the Department of Contemporary Improvisation. “Ran gave me the freedom to find myself in jazz standards,” said Portuguese singer Sara Serpa, who studied with Blake at NEC and collaborated on an album with him, adding that he “really gave me permission to find myself in the songs, to create my own stories.”Blake also spent years bringing music programming to the public as NEC’s community services director, telling the Globe, “It was very important to send music to where the people are and encourage them to play.”
 

Associate Professor of Photography Tanya Marcuse was interviewed by her former student Emma Ressel ’16 in Lenscratch. They discussed how Marcuse’s work is inspired by the ecology of the Hudson Valley, with her projects ranging from photographs of local apple trees to images of fantastical structures she built with natural material gathered in the region. They also discussed their individual approaches to photographing nature. In photography “sometimes things truly, fully come together,” Marcuse said. “You get a random reward, which isn’t so random, because it’s about continually showing up and paying attention.”

Ressel was a Lenscratch Student Prize winner in 2024. She attended Bard’s Photography Program and has held solo exhibits in New Mexico and is on the shortlist for the 2025 Aperture Portfolio Prize. Marcuse has taught at Bard since 2012. She recently completed her 14-year, three-part project Fruitless | Fallen | Woven, inspired by the Biblical story of the fall from Eden.

Sonita Alizada ’23, a rapper and human rights activist, will embark on a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford beginning this fall. She joins Ronan Farrow ’04 as the second Rhodes winner from Bard College in Annandale. (Nawara Alaboud ’23, originally from Syria, is the first Bard College Berlin student to receive a Rhodes Scholarship.)

Alizada, who double-majored in human rights and music, says Bard played a “crucial” part in her award. “The faculty here have been incredibly supportive, offering guidance, mentorship, and resources that helped me refine my academic and professional goals. They provided encouragement and constructive feedback throughout my application process and helped me navigate each step with confidence.”

She looks forward to continuing her work supporting Afghan women and children by combining “academic research with practical impact.” She looks forward to taking public policy classes at Oxford and focusing specifically on women and children's rights. “I’m deeply honored to receive the Rhodes scholarship, [and] I hope to bring back insights that can further support vulnerable communities,” she said.

Robert Kelly, Asher B. Edelman Professor Emeritus of Literature at Bard College, and Charlotte Mandell ’90, translator and Bard alumna, cowrote a remembrance of Pierre Joris ’69, Bard alumnus and poet who passed away earlier this year. Joris was a prolific poet who edited many collections of poetry and translated poems into French, German, and English. Kelly, who taught Joris at Bard, and Mandell, one of Joris’s former colleagues, discussed their friendship with Joris and his work throughout his career.

“He was never jealous of anybody,” said Mandell of Joris. “He was always happy for other people's success.” Speaking about his translations of Paul Celan, Kelly remembers “Pierre somehow intuited a movement [toward] the kind of free line, the importance of the line, long or short. I think Pierre felt that movement in Celan’s later work [and] made it evident in his translations.”

The Literature Program at Bard challenges national, cultural, and disciplinary boundaries that have often dictated the terms by which we understand the meaning and value of the written word, and has a long-standing commitment to fostering the work of writers and thinkers who expand the parameters of public discourse.

An article coauthored by Miriam Felton-Dansky, director of the Theater and Performance Program at Bard College, has won the 2024 Modern Drama Outstanding Article Award from the University of Toronto Press. “Interface Theatre: Watching Ourselves Disappear,” which Felton-Dansky wrote together with Jacob Gallagher-Ross of the University of Toronto, is a timely analysis and assessment of theatrical responses to and engagement with digital culture. The essay explores the concept of what they have termed “interface theatre,” illuminating a genre in which live performance lays bare the invisible architectures of digital life. This new conceptual framework explains how theatre can not only depict but also embody the logics of algorithmic life, revealing how interfaces shape identity, surveillance, and the perception of self. The essay also received an honorable mention for the 2025 Outstanding Article Award from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, one of the largest scholarly organizations in the field.

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.