News

Bard MFA alumna Robin Coste Lewis discusses her book Voyage of the Sable Venus, which won the National Book Award last year.

Victoria Campbell '98 MAT '16 came to Haiti in 2010 to provide earthquake relief, where she met the charismatic Gaston Jean Edy, the subject of her film Monsieur le President.

Two visiting artists teaching in the Theater & Performance Program, Jack Ferver and David Levine, have been awarded 2016 Foundation for Contemporary Arts grants in Performance Art/Theater in the amount of $40,000 each. Since only three awards were made in the category this year, this is a particularly remarkable achievement. The FCA was founded in 1963 by Jasper Johns and John Cage, and its awards are among the most prestigious in the field. Since the Foundation's inception, more than 2,500 grants awarded to artists and arts organizations—totaling over $11 million—have provided opportunities for creative exploration and development. 

"The facticity of a photograph can conceal the craftiness of its content and selection," writes Bard writer in residence and photographer Teju Cole.

To make the movies she wanted, Kelly Reichardt had to go it alone. She returns to Sundance this year with her sixth feature, Certain Women.

Eight Bard alumni/ae are involved in the production of Bieber Bathos Elegy, created by Felix Bernstein '13, which will premiere at the Whitney Museum in New York City on January 15. This hybrid work by New York–based artist, poet, and writer Bernstein combines musical performance, poetry, cabaret drag, and opera to explore the concept of bathos—the failure to achieve pathos—and illuminate issues of identity and persona through the character of Justin Bieber. The work is directed by Gabe Rubin '14 with assistant director Clara Lipfert MFA '18, composed by Rron Karahoda '13, with production design by George Dupont '14 and sound design by Cammisa Buerhaus MFA '18, and features musical performances by Leila Bordreuil '13 and Lazar Bozic '14.

Films by Film and Electronic Arts faculty members So Yong Kim and Kelly Reichardt as well as alumnus Miles Joris-Peyrafitte '14 will premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, later this month. Reichardt's Certain Women features Kristen Stewart, Laura Dern, Michelle Williams, and James Le Gros. The film follows the intersecting lives of three women in small-town America, and is based on short stories by Maile Meloy. In Kim's Lovesong, with Jena Malone, Riley Keough, and Brooklyn Decker, the relationship between two friends deepens during an impromptu road trip. Joris-Peyrafitte's As You Are is the telling and retelling of a relationship between three teenagers through a construction of disparate memories prompted by a police investigation, with Owen Campbell, Charlie Heaton, Amandla Stenberg, John Scurti, Scott Cohen, and Mary Stuart Masterson.

John Ashbery tells the story of his lifelong fascination with French culture, and how the arts, literature, and people of that country influenced his work as writer and translator.

"We should be grateful to Music Director/Conductor Leon Botstein for giving us the chance to hear this strong work, in director Thaddeus Strassberger's production," writes Richard Sasanow.

"Multimedia and radical conventions make this Oklahoma! much more chilling than you might remember," writes Charles Quittner.

Writers and editors recall stage moments worth singing about from the past year, including Daniel Fish's "radically reimagined" Oklahoma! during Bard's SummerScape.

"Luc Sante’s fascinating guide to the squalid, disorderly, dank, thrilling, dangerous underside of the Paris of the past makes for a suitably sprawling book."

Stephen Shore is one of a number of artists who have been successful at conventional photography and now use Instagram as a sort of extra studio, writes Teju Cole.

Luc Sante's The Other Paris is Times Higher Education's Book of the Week. "Beneath a bourgeois veneer is a secret history of defunct jobs and fascinating lives."

She may feel more comfortable as a supporting player, but Blythe Danner proves she can hold her own as a lead in the new film I’ll See You in My Dreams.

Audiences in Bard's LUMA Theater later this month will watch as Geoff Sobelle's "newest genre-defying work" unfolds in a world of objects stacked in boxes from floor to ceiling.

Tom Eccles, director of Bard's Center for Curatorial Studies, talks about the evolution of the master's program, the relationship to the Hessel Museum, and Eccles's own influential career.

Writing and photography professor Luc Sante's book The Other Paris reminds us of the city's history as a home to the poor, the eccentric, the outcast, and the nonconforming.

After graduating from Bard, photography major Nick Zinner became the guitarist of the band the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Zinner's photographs of his life on and off stage are now on view at an L.A. gallery.

Carey Dunne, former student of Casey's at Bard High School Early College Manhattan, discusses Casey's abstract depictions of landscapes and interiors of the American West.