Bard’s highly selective, unique, and specialized graduate programs have attracted incredible artists, scholars, curators, and policymakers—all of whom now make up an integral part of the Bard community. Everyone with a Bard degree is a Bardian—from an early college AA graduate to a PhD recipient. We are glad you are here. This is a place where all Bardians can connect, find news of their fellow alumni/ae, and get involved in volunteer opportunities.
Photo by Pete Mauney ’93 MFA ’00
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Keep your records up to date in the alumni/ae directory. The Alumni/ae Association sends out a monthly e-newsletter, The Triangle, which is filled with alumni/ae news, news of the College, and upcoming events. We also send important messages from the College and news on networking events and alumni/ae achievements. Alumni/ae receive snail mail invitations to reunions, holiday parties, and our biannual magazine, The Bardian. Email [email protected] to receive the Triangle or the What's New at Bard weekly update, sent by the Office of Communications. Follow us on social media to make sure you are getting the most out of your Alumni/ae Association.
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Professor Christian Crouch.
Photo by Chris Bertholf
Photo by Chris Bertholf
Christian Crouch, Dean of Graduate Studies at Bard College
Dean of Graduate Studies and Associate Professor of History and American and Indigenous Studies Christian Ayne Crouch has been teaching at Bard since 2014. Her work focuses on the histories of the early modern Atlantic, comparative slavery, American material culture, and Native American and Indigenous Studies. She holds a PhD and an MA with distinction in Atlantic history from New York University, and an AB cum laude in history from Princeton University.
Graduate Alumni/ae News
Artist in Residence Isabelle O’Connell Awarded a 2026 Culture Ireland Grant
Artist-in-Residence and pianist Isabelle O’Connell has been awarded a Culture Ireland Grant for 2026. The Culture Ireland Grant supports the presentation and promotion of Irish arts internationally, funding travel and amenities for artists.
Artist in Residence Isabelle O’Connell Awarded a 2026 Culture Ireland Grant
Isabelle O'Connell. Photo by Stefan Seyfert
O’Connell teaches in the Bard Conservatory of Music, which offers undergraduate and graduate degrees to provide the best possible preparation for a person dedicated to a life immersed in the creation and performance of music.
Post Date: 02-24-2026
Bard College Conservatory of Music and Bard Graduate Vocal Arts Program Present Menotti’s Amelia Goes to the Ball and Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi on March 6 and 8, 2026
The program’s comedic operas bring to life witty tales of love, greed, and disguise in an evening of charm and laughter.
Bard College Conservatory of Music and Bard Graduate Vocal Arts Program Present Menotti’s Amelia Goes to the Ball and Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi on March 6 and 8, 2026
VAP students at a rehearsal for Menotti’s Amelia Goes to the Ball and Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi. Photo by Hsiao-Fang Lin
With comic invention and lyrical wit, Amelia Goes to the Ball, Menotti’s first staged opera, relays the story of an Italian socialite’s navigation of hurdles to attend the season’s first ball, while Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi transforms a Dantean tale of fraud into a masterclass of operatic irony and memorable motifs. Both one-acts showcase composers at the height of craft, blending human folly, clever plotting, and musical sophistication.
The operas will be sung in Italian with English subtitles. The events will take place on Friday, March 6 at 7pm and Sunday, March 8 at 2pm in the Fisher Center’s Sosnoff Theater. Tickets start at $20. Free tickets are available to Bard students through the Passloff Pass. The program will be livestreamed, with virtual tickets offered as pay what you wish. All proceeds will directly support Bard Conservatory students. To purchase or reserve tickets, please visit the Fisher Center Website or call 845-758-7900 (Monday–Friday, 10 am–5 pm), or email [email protected].
Every two years, Bard Conservatory and VAP students mount a full-scale opera production as an exceptional opportunity for Hudson Valley audiences to experience the performances of emerging artists and explore the rich, theatrical world of opera. This year, the program’s comedic operas bring to life witty tales of love, greed, and disguise in an evening of charm and laughter.
About the Artists
James Bagwell (conductor) maintains an active schedule as a conductor of choral, orchestral, and opera repertoire. He is professor of music and director of performance studies at Bard College, and co-director of the Bard Conservatory Graduate Program in Conducting. Bagwell also serves as director of choruses for the Bard Music Festival and as associate conductor of The Orchestra Now. His extensive performance history includes appearances at Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center with ensembles such as the American Symphony Orchestra, The Collegiate Chorale, and numerous international orchestras.Doug Fitch (director) is an internationally acclaimed director and designer whose work spans opera, theater, architecture, and visual art. His productions have been seen at the New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Opera, Royal Stockholm Philharmonic, and Santa Fe Opera, among others. Known for his inventive, interdisciplinary approach to performance, Fitch co-founded the production company Giants Are Small, through which he has created genre-defying collaborations that merge live music, design, and storytelling.
Post Date: 02-18-2026
CCS Bard’s 2026 Graduating Class Seeks Understanding of the Present Through 12 Curatorial Projects
The projects collectively ask where—and when—we look to understand our present moment.
CCS Bard’s 2026 Graduating Class Seeks Understanding of the Present Through 12 Curatorial Projects
Photo of Anne Healy in front of Fugue and Uncle Wiggley’s Sky Blue Pink, c. 1970. Courtesy of the artist.
On April 4, 2026, the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (CCS Bard) will present Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, a collection of 12 graduate thesis exhibitions organized by CCS Bard’s Class of 2026. Informed by the turbulent political climate of the past two years yet motivated by distinct curatorial concerns, the projects collectively ask where—and when—we look to understand our present moment. Spanning diverse disciplines, time periods, and materials, Everything That Happens Will Happen Today will be on view at CCS Bard’s Hessel Museum of Art through May 24, 2026.
The graduate exhibition is a core component of CCS Bard’s master’s program, which offers each student the opportunity to organize an independent project involving new commissions, original research into artists’ practices, and engagement with CCS Bard’s extensive archives and the Marieluise Hessel Collection. Past student-curated exhibitions have served as springboards for artists in the earliest stages of their careers, contributed deep scholarship on historic movements and tendencies, and provided the foundation for ongoing curatorial inquiry by CCS Bard graduates at other leading museums, galleries, and arts organizations around the world.
“Everything That Happens Will Happen Today reflects our students’ rigorous scholarship, as well as a curiosity and urgency to give meaning to our current moment,” said Mariano López Seoane, Director of the Graduate Program at CCS Bard and ISLAA Fellow in Latin American Art. “Spanning underexplored archives to experimental live performance, this year’s thesis exhibitions exemplify CCS Bard’s mission to uplift contemporary artistic practices through incisive, timely exhibition-making.”
This year’s projects consider the legacies and historical narratives surrounding individual artists, curators, and collectives; bring attention to unseen infrastructures; and confront the power of individual images to shape personal and societal narratives, with the collective aim of better understanding contemporary conditions. Everything That Happens Will Happen Today unites work by over 30 artists, including:
CCS Bard Graduate Student Curatorial Statements
Full curatorial statements are linked in the exhibition titles.
False Sponsor
Featured artists: Abigail Raphael Collins, Sophie Kovel, Julia Weist
Curated by Ray Camp
Featuring artworks alongside historical and contemporary documents produced by and for the government, False Sponsor seeks to reveal the often-invisible strategies employed to control perceptions of the American enterprise. Abigail Raphael Collins, Sophie Kovel, and Julia Weist present and restage the US government’s sponsorship of propaganda over the past century and appropriate the official documentation that tracks the state’s relationship with the arts.
Ceremonial Healings of Bastet the Cat: On Halim El-Dabh’s Sonic World
Featured artist: Halim El-Dabh
Curated by Alma Chaouachi
Ceremonial Healings of Bastet the Cat presents the archive of Egyptian American composer, teacher, and ethnomusicologist Halim El-Dabh (1921–2017). Drawing from his personal papers held at Northwestern University Music Library and Special Collections, the exhibition brings together graphic scores, teaching materials, sound works, and ethnomusicological research, providing an entry to El-Dabh’s musical philosophy and Africanist pedagogy.
Prospective Fields: Revisiting Land Marks
Featured Artists: Alice Aycock, Harriet Feigenbaum, Group Material, David Horvitz, Ana Mendieta, Robert Morris, Dennis Oppenheim, Athena Tacha
Curated by Mike Curran
Prospective Fields revisits Land Marks, a 1984 exhibition that invited 22 artists to propose outdoor sculptures for Bard College. Original renderings and scale models from Alice Aycock, Harriet Feigenbaum, Ana Mendieta, Robert Morris, Dennis Oppenheim, and Athena Tacha feature alongside a newly commissioned proposal by David Horvitz, generating a cross-generational dialogue around these unrealized propositions.
part of being alive
Featured artists: Sara Cwynar, Arthur Jafa, Mike Kelley, Carmen Winant
Curated by Christopher Gianunzio
How do artists contend with the suffocating image worlds America produces? part of being alive presents works by U.S.-based artists Sara Cwynar, Mike Kelley, Arthur Jafa, and Carmen Winant, whose work engages vastly diverse—though all decisively American—photographic sources to elaborate on the ways in which photography constitutes our life worlds.
Anne Healy: Logic of Intuition
Featured artist: Anne Healy
Curated by Lila Gould
Logic of Intuition is the first solo exhibition of Anne Healy’s work in decades, featuring both outdoor and indoor sculptures at the Hessel Museum of Art and the Bard College campus. Emphasizing the intersection between public art and theater, Logic of Intuition brings together sculptures and photographs of works from the 1970s. By highlighting this decade of Healy’s career, the exhibition demonstrates how she defines the artist as an actor and considers the audience to be a crucial component of her practice.
Maria Auxiliadora Silva: Imprinted in My Mind
Featured artist: Maria Auxiliadora Silva
Curated by Bruna Grinsztejn
Maria Auxiliadora Silva: Imprinted in My Mind presents paintings of rural and urban life in mid-century Brazil. Drawing from memory, her work explores the interplay between countryside and city, revealing the rhythms and contradictions of modern life. Through vivid color and dynamic compositions, Silva resists reductive labels such as naive or outsider.
Useful Contaminants
Featured artists: Erik DeLuca, Robbie Wing
Curated by Grace Harner
Useful Contaminants brings together artists Robbie Wing and Erik DeLuca, whose newly commissioned works amplify that which remains unseen or unheard. Through Wing’s feedback-driven sound installation—which amplifies vibrations held within organic materials from the Mahicannituck River Valley—and DeLuca’s response to these vibrations through a score for listening, the exhibition unfolds as an evolving sonic dialogue shaped by useful contamination, in which organic materials, instruction, and listening co-produce shifting acoustic conditions.
“Curator Diary”: The Curatorial Work of Shigeko Kubota
Featured artist: Shigeko Kubota
Curated by Gladys Lou
“Curator Diary”: The Curatorial Work of Shigeko Kubota presents the work of Japanese American artist-curator Shigeko Kubota (久保田 成子), emphasizing her role as a cultural mediator and community organizer who advocated for women video artists, placed video alongside film, and fostered international exchange between the United States, Japan, and beyond.
Full Tilt
Featured artist: Jonathan González
Featured performer: Marguerite Hemmings
Curated by Devon Ma
Full Tilt presents newly commissioned works by Jonathan González, building upon his ongoing choreographic project Swerve Fatigue through a new performance and installation. In the face of relentless pressures toward individualism, Swerve Fatigue challenges the illusion of the autonomous individual, instead centering collective resilience. In this exhibition, elements including the sounds of the performers’ labored breathing and the accumulation of their sweat-soaked clothing extend the questions posed by Swerve Fatigue to foreground the exhausting process of striving toward interdependence.
Weather Stress Index
Featured artists: Edgar Arceneaux, Rhea Dillon, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Analia Saban, Charisse Pearlina Weston
Curated by Truth Murray-Cole
Weather Stress Index exhibits recent artworks by Edgar Arceneaux, Rhea Dillon, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Analia Saban, and Charisse Pearlina Weston that register pressures exerted by their ever-shifting environments.
Assume Form
Featured artists: Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, Lendl Barcelos, Oneohtrix Point Never, 0rphan Drift, Sadie Plant
Curated by Emily Nola
Assume Form reimagines what exactly alchemized within the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU), a para-academic collective convened in 1995. Through a highly interdisciplinary practice they attempted to expand the limits of theoretical production, reckoning with new technologies and their distinct historical moment. Via the artworks, music, magazines, and essays produced by the CCRU and its collaborators, the exhibition creates an imagined space in which the ongoing resonances of this highly influential group begin assuming form.
We made it up to remember…
Featured artists: He Zike, Ma Qiusha
Curated by Amy Yuanchen Qian
We made it up to remember … is a two-person exhibition featuring recent film and installation by Chinese artists He Zike and Ma Qiusha. The two artists craft scenes drawn from urban life that frame intimate narratives. The works point to histories that mark important political and infrastructural changes in a nation while imagining extended narratives based on long-spanning research into familial archives and local investigations.
The graduate exhibition is a core component of CCS Bard’s master’s program, which offers each student the opportunity to organize an independent project involving new commissions, original research into artists’ practices, and engagement with CCS Bard’s extensive archives and the Marieluise Hessel Collection. Past student-curated exhibitions have served as springboards for artists in the earliest stages of their careers, contributed deep scholarship on historic movements and tendencies, and provided the foundation for ongoing curatorial inquiry by CCS Bard graduates at other leading museums, galleries, and arts organizations around the world.
“Everything That Happens Will Happen Today reflects our students’ rigorous scholarship, as well as a curiosity and urgency to give meaning to our current moment,” said Mariano López Seoane, Director of the Graduate Program at CCS Bard and ISLAA Fellow in Latin American Art. “Spanning underexplored archives to experimental live performance, this year’s thesis exhibitions exemplify CCS Bard’s mission to uplift contemporary artistic practices through incisive, timely exhibition-making.”
This year’s projects consider the legacies and historical narratives surrounding individual artists, curators, and collectives; bring attention to unseen infrastructures; and confront the power of individual images to shape personal and societal narratives, with the collective aim of better understanding contemporary conditions. Everything That Happens Will Happen Today unites work by over 30 artists, including:
| Edgar Arceneaux Maria Auxiliadora Silva Alice Aycock Lendl Barcelos Abigail Raphael Collins Sara Cwynar He Zike Cybernetic Culture Research Unit Halim El-Dabh Erik DeLuca Rhea Dillon Harriet Feigenbaum Jonathan González | Group Material Anne Healy Marguerite Hemmings David Horvitz Arthur Jafa Kameelah Janan Rasheed Mike Kelley Sophie Kovel Shigeko Kubota Ma Qiusha Ana Mendieta Robert Morris Oneohtrix Point Never | 0rphan Drift Dennis Oppenheim Sadie Plant Analia Saban Athena Tacha Julia Weist Charisse Pearlina Weston Carmen Winant Robbie Wing |
CCS Bard Graduate Student Curatorial Statements
Full curatorial statements are linked in the exhibition titles.
False Sponsor
Featured artists: Abigail Raphael Collins, Sophie Kovel, Julia Weist
Curated by Ray Camp
Featuring artworks alongside historical and contemporary documents produced by and for the government, False Sponsor seeks to reveal the often-invisible strategies employed to control perceptions of the American enterprise. Abigail Raphael Collins, Sophie Kovel, and Julia Weist present and restage the US government’s sponsorship of propaganda over the past century and appropriate the official documentation that tracks the state’s relationship with the arts.
Ceremonial Healings of Bastet the Cat: On Halim El-Dabh’s Sonic World
Featured artist: Halim El-Dabh
Curated by Alma Chaouachi
Ceremonial Healings of Bastet the Cat presents the archive of Egyptian American composer, teacher, and ethnomusicologist Halim El-Dabh (1921–2017). Drawing from his personal papers held at Northwestern University Music Library and Special Collections, the exhibition brings together graphic scores, teaching materials, sound works, and ethnomusicological research, providing an entry to El-Dabh’s musical philosophy and Africanist pedagogy.
Prospective Fields: Revisiting Land Marks
Featured Artists: Alice Aycock, Harriet Feigenbaum, Group Material, David Horvitz, Ana Mendieta, Robert Morris, Dennis Oppenheim, Athena Tacha
Curated by Mike Curran
Prospective Fields revisits Land Marks, a 1984 exhibition that invited 22 artists to propose outdoor sculptures for Bard College. Original renderings and scale models from Alice Aycock, Harriet Feigenbaum, Ana Mendieta, Robert Morris, Dennis Oppenheim, and Athena Tacha feature alongside a newly commissioned proposal by David Horvitz, generating a cross-generational dialogue around these unrealized propositions.
part of being alive
Featured artists: Sara Cwynar, Arthur Jafa, Mike Kelley, Carmen Winant
Curated by Christopher Gianunzio
How do artists contend with the suffocating image worlds America produces? part of being alive presents works by U.S.-based artists Sara Cwynar, Mike Kelley, Arthur Jafa, and Carmen Winant, whose work engages vastly diverse—though all decisively American—photographic sources to elaborate on the ways in which photography constitutes our life worlds.
Anne Healy: Logic of Intuition
Featured artist: Anne Healy
Curated by Lila Gould
Logic of Intuition is the first solo exhibition of Anne Healy’s work in decades, featuring both outdoor and indoor sculptures at the Hessel Museum of Art and the Bard College campus. Emphasizing the intersection between public art and theater, Logic of Intuition brings together sculptures and photographs of works from the 1970s. By highlighting this decade of Healy’s career, the exhibition demonstrates how she defines the artist as an actor and considers the audience to be a crucial component of her practice.
Maria Auxiliadora Silva: Imprinted in My Mind
Featured artist: Maria Auxiliadora Silva
Curated by Bruna Grinsztejn
Maria Auxiliadora Silva: Imprinted in My Mind presents paintings of rural and urban life in mid-century Brazil. Drawing from memory, her work explores the interplay between countryside and city, revealing the rhythms and contradictions of modern life. Through vivid color and dynamic compositions, Silva resists reductive labels such as naive or outsider.
Useful Contaminants
Featured artists: Erik DeLuca, Robbie Wing
Curated by Grace Harner
Useful Contaminants brings together artists Robbie Wing and Erik DeLuca, whose newly commissioned works amplify that which remains unseen or unheard. Through Wing’s feedback-driven sound installation—which amplifies vibrations held within organic materials from the Mahicannituck River Valley—and DeLuca’s response to these vibrations through a score for listening, the exhibition unfolds as an evolving sonic dialogue shaped by useful contamination, in which organic materials, instruction, and listening co-produce shifting acoustic conditions.
“Curator Diary”: The Curatorial Work of Shigeko Kubota
Featured artist: Shigeko Kubota
Curated by Gladys Lou
“Curator Diary”: The Curatorial Work of Shigeko Kubota presents the work of Japanese American artist-curator Shigeko Kubota (久保田 成子), emphasizing her role as a cultural mediator and community organizer who advocated for women video artists, placed video alongside film, and fostered international exchange between the United States, Japan, and beyond.
Full Tilt
Featured artist: Jonathan González
Featured performer: Marguerite Hemmings
Curated by Devon Ma
Full Tilt presents newly commissioned works by Jonathan González, building upon his ongoing choreographic project Swerve Fatigue through a new performance and installation. In the face of relentless pressures toward individualism, Swerve Fatigue challenges the illusion of the autonomous individual, instead centering collective resilience. In this exhibition, elements including the sounds of the performers’ labored breathing and the accumulation of their sweat-soaked clothing extend the questions posed by Swerve Fatigue to foreground the exhausting process of striving toward interdependence.
Weather Stress Index
Featured artists: Edgar Arceneaux, Rhea Dillon, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Analia Saban, Charisse Pearlina Weston
Curated by Truth Murray-Cole
Weather Stress Index exhibits recent artworks by Edgar Arceneaux, Rhea Dillon, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Analia Saban, and Charisse Pearlina Weston that register pressures exerted by their ever-shifting environments.
Assume Form
Featured artists: Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, Lendl Barcelos, Oneohtrix Point Never, 0rphan Drift, Sadie Plant
Curated by Emily Nola
Assume Form reimagines what exactly alchemized within the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU), a para-academic collective convened in 1995. Through a highly interdisciplinary practice they attempted to expand the limits of theoretical production, reckoning with new technologies and their distinct historical moment. Via the artworks, music, magazines, and essays produced by the CCRU and its collaborators, the exhibition creates an imagined space in which the ongoing resonances of this highly influential group begin assuming form.
We made it up to remember…
Featured artists: He Zike, Ma Qiusha
Curated by Amy Yuanchen Qian
We made it up to remember … is a two-person exhibition featuring recent film and installation by Chinese artists He Zike and Ma Qiusha. The two artists craft scenes drawn from urban life that frame intimate narratives. The works point to histories that mark important political and infrastructural changes in a nation while imagining extended narratives based on long-spanning research into familial archives and local investigations.
Exhibition Credits
The graduate student-curated exhibitions and projects at CCS Bard are part of the requirements for the master of arts degree and are made possible with support from Lonti Ebers; Robert Soros and the Enterprise Foundation; the Rebecca and Martin Eisenberg Student Exhibition Fund; the Mitzi and Warren Eisenberg Family Foundation; the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation; The Wortham Foundation; the Board of Governors of the Center for Curatorial Studies; and the Center’s Patrons, Supporters, and Friends.
Post Date: 02-18-2026