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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.