News

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.  

Sarah Hennies, assistant professor of music at Bard College, has been announced as a recipient of the Civitella Ranieri Music Fellowship, an international residency program for writers, composers, and visual artists. The fellowship, which occurs over the course of four to six weeks, takes place in a 15th century castle in the Umbrian region of Italy and will allow Hennies the free time and space to conduct her music work amidst an international cohort of other creatives. Hennies was selected as one of 25 awardees in the composers cohort through a highly competitive jury process from a pool of 119 candidates. Fellowship support includes travel, a private apartment and studio, and daily meals, allowing fellows to focus fully on their artistic practice. Fellows are encouraged to participate in excursions through the Umbrian countryside, take Italian classes, and give presentations about their work while at the castle. Hennies, whose fellowship was awarded for 2026-27, will defer her residency until 2028. 

The Music Program, one of the largest programs on Bard’s campus, provides a wide range of musical concentrations, from classical composition and performance to jazz, electronic music, musicology, ethnomusicology, and music theory.

Senior Fellow in Ethics and Writing D.M. Aderibigbe’s 82nd Division, which won the National Poetry Series in 2024, was published by Akashic Books on December 2, 2025. 82nd Division is a poetry collection named after the West African regiment that fought during World War I, and focuses on Nigeria, where Aderibigbe is from. Since its release, it has been reviewed by Literary Hub and received a starred review in Booklist.  “Both enchanting and sorrowful, Aderibigbe writes at the intersection of West Africa and ‘the West,’ plotting a vision that is both deeply historical and urgently contemporary,” Booklist writes.

Aderibigbe was also interviewed by Frontier Poetry. “In my second collection, I was wholly invested in the formal elements of each poem,” he said. “It was important to me [that] the form of each poem adds some degree of complexity to it.” He will give a reading of the collection with Ann Lauterbach on January 29 at Oblong Books in Rhinebeck.

Aderibigbe teaches in Bard’s Written Arts program, which encourages students to experiment with their writing in a context sensitive to intellectual, historical, and social realities. Students are encouraged to consider writing as an act of critical and creative engagement, a way of interrogating and translating the world.
Read the Interview
Booklist
Lithub

“To make a music scene you need four things,” writes Franz Nicolay, visiting instructor of music at Bard College: “cheap housing, recent art-school graduates, a stage where anyone can play, and a small clique of young critics eager to discover a new subculture.” The Talking Heads, the subject of Burning Down the House by Jonathan Gould, had all four. In a review of Gould’s book for the Wall Street Journal, Nicolay praises the work’s unwillingness to oversimplify, saying Gould is “especially interested in skewering the mythology of downtown.” While the book “remains a largely unflattering portrait of the band,” it tracks the “almost magical, barely explicable, transformation of a group” that, says Nicolay, “has to be a candidate in the perennial conversation about the greatest American rock band.”

The Music Program provides a wide range of musical concentrations, from classical composition and performance to jazz, electronic music, musicology, ethnomusicology, and music theory. The music faculty all maintain highly visible careers outside academia, nationally and internationally.

The Poughkeepsie Journal interviewed John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of the Humanities Dinaw Mengestu about his 10 years at Bard, on the occasion of his selection as president of PEN America. Mengestu, who is also director of Bard’s Written Arts Program, was elected to the 104-year-old nonprofit for a two-year term. Mengestu says his work at Bard, particularly in its writing programs, “‘aligns’ with PEN's core values [of] uniting writers, being champions of the freedom to write, advocates on free expression challenges and campaigning on policy issues and on behalf of writers, as well as journalists, under threat.” Speaking more broadly about freedom of expression rights, Mengestu said "[reading and writing play a] critical role in creating the kind of culture and community and society we want to live in… When I think of the thing that I really want to uphold and protect most, it's literature."

Dinaw Mengestu is the author of three novels, all of which were named New York Times Notable Books: All Our Names, How To Read the Air, and The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears. He has taught in Bard’s Written Arts Program since 2016.

The Written Arts Program at Bard encourages students to experiment with their writing in a context sensitive to intellectual, historical, and social realities. Students are encouraged to consider writing as an act of critical and creative engagement, a way of interrogating and translating the world.

Tania El Khoury, distinguished artist in residence, associate professor in theater and performance, and director of the Center for Human Rights and the Arts at Bard College, has won a 2026 Creative Capital Award in support of her project, A Choreography of State Violence. Her project was amongst 49 new works chosen from a pool of 4,546 applications from all 50 states and regions in the United States. Creative Capital, a nonprofit organization dedicated to championing artistic freedom of expression by supporting individual artists across the United States, confers the award in recognition of original, ambitious project proposals for new artistic ideas, and supports artists by providing project funding of up to $50,000 each, professional development services, and community-building opportunities.

El Khoury’s project, A Choreography of State Violence, is an installation performance that examines state violence from a choreographic perspective, exploring how what are perceived as incidental and individualized cases of violence perpetrated by the state are, in fact, conceptualized and rehearsed with calculated dramaturgy.

“Creative Capital remains unwavering in our mission to support individual artists creating new work as a powerful catalyst for freedom of thought and freedom of expression in our democracy,” said Christine Kuan, president and executive director of Creative Capital. The Creative Capital Award will in 2026 support the creation of 49 new works in visual arts, film, dance, theater, music/jazz, and literature, as well as technology, multidisciplinary, and socially engaged forms in all disciplines.

Tania El Khoury creates interactive and immersive installations and performances that reflect on the production of collective memory and the cultivation of solidarity. Her work is activated by tactile, auditory and visual traces collected and curated by the artist and her collaborators, and they are ultimately transformed through audience interaction. El Khoury’s work has been translated to multiple languages and shown in 35 countries across 6 continents in spaces ranging from museums to cable cars. She is the recipient of the Herb Alpert Award, the Soros Art Fellowship, the Bessies Outstanding Production Award, the International Live Art Prize, the Total Theatre Innovation Award, and the Arches Brick Award.