Newsmakers

Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City, a new memoir by Bard alumna and poet Jane Wong ’07, documents her childhood growing up as a second-generation working class American, falling asleep on bags of rice in her immigrant parents’ Atlantic City Chinese restaurant, which her father eventually loses to his gambling addiction. “The poet Wong’s book is reminiscent of an abstract watercolor, free-flowing, nonlinear, without clear borders,” writes Qian Julie Wang for the New York Times. Ultimately a love song, Wong’s memoir “explore[s] the many forms of hunger that come with being Asian in America.” Wong’s memoir was also reviewed in the Boston Globe, and she was interviewed about her book for the Los Angeles Review of Books and Lit Hub.

Interviews:
LA Review of Books: “Tenderness and Ferocity Go Hand in Hand: A Conversation with Jane Wong”
Lit Hub: “Jane Wong: How Non-Linearity Mirrors the Experience of Migration”
 

Brandon Blackwood ’13, Bard alumnus and designer, was invited to speak at the White House by Vice President Kamala Harris as part of the Young Men of Color Small Business Roundtable. Blackwood was one of more than 35 entrepreneurs and small business owners of color to attend the event, where Vice President Harris discussed resources and opportunities offered by the Biden-Harris Administration, reported Essence. In opening remarks, Vice President Harris spoke of the importance of access and resources to overcome obstacles faced by many businesses owned by people of color, including “access to capital, access to markets, access to consumers—access—and what can we do to facilitate and better improve access so that you can then be out there to compete.”

“It was really amazing to see a room full of black entrepreneurs being heard or listened to and voicing their opinions,” Blackwood told Essence. “That was a really beautiful and cool thing to see that I wasn’t the only person that had these issues and that these issues were things that people such as Madam Vice President wanted to address and talk about.”

Juliana Maitenaz ’22, who graduated with a BA in Global and International Studies and a BM in Classical Percussion Performance, has been selected for an independent study–research Fulbright scholarship to Brazil for the 2023–24 academic year. Her project, “Rhythm and Statecraft,” seeks to identify Brazilian percussion and rhythms as a method of cultural communication. Maitenaz aims to conduct her research in São Paulo and will focus on how percussional elements in the Brazilian traditions of Carnival and Samba School performances are instrumental to the country’s statecraft and national identity. The goal of her research is to examine international communication and collaboration through cultural and musical diplomacy. “I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to learn more about the role Brazilian percussion plays as an inspiring means of cultural communication,” Maitenaz said. 
 
Evan Tims ’19, who was a joint major in Written Arts and Human Rights with a focus on anthropology at Bard, has been selected for a Fulbright-Nehru independent study–research scholarship to India for the 2023–24 academic year. His project, “From the River to Tomorrow: Perceptions of Kolkata’s Water Future,” studies the perceptions of Kolkata’s water future among urban planners, infrastructure experts, and communities—such as those who work in river transport, fishing, and who live in housing along the banks—most vulnerable to water changes along the Hooghly River. He will analyze the dominant narratives of the city and river’s future and reference scientific and planning literature in understanding the points of confluence and divergence between scientific and colloquial understandings of the river, particularly as different stakeholder communities approach an uncertain water future. “In light of urban development and climate change, Kolkata’s water is facing significant change over the coming decades,” said Tims. “It is crucial to understand the complex, layered relationships between stakeholder communities as they seek to negotiate an increasingly uncertain water future.” While in India, Tims also plans to teach a climate fiction writing workshop. In 2021-2022, he was Bard’s first recipient of the yearlong Henry J. Luce Scholarship, which enabled him to conduct ethnographic research on Himalayan water futures and lead a climate writing workshop in Nepal and, later, in Bangladesh. Earlier this academic year, Tims won the prestigious Schwarzman Scholarship to China. As an undergraduate at Bard, Tims also won two Critical Language Scholarships to study Bangla in Kolkata during the summers of 2018 and 2019. Read an interview with Tims about Southeast Asia's place in contemporary climate fiction here.
 
Elias Ephron ’23, a joint major in Political Studies and Spanish Studies, has been selected as a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant (ETA) to Spain for the 2023–24 academic year. While in Spain, Ephron hopes to engage with his host community through food, sharing recipes, hosting dinner parties, and cooking together; take part in Spain’s unique and visually stunning cultural events, like flamenco performances, and Semana Santa processions; visit the hometown of the great poet and playwright Federico García Lorca; and, as a queer individual, meet other queer people. “Having learned Spanish, French, and German to fluency or near-fluency, I understand that language learning requires many approaches. Some are more commonly thought of as ‘fun’ or ‘nascent’ modes of learning, while others more clearly resemble work. I hope to marry this divide, showing students that language learning is both labor and recreation; they may have to work hard, but it can be a great deal of fun, too,” said Ephron. In addition to his work as a writing tutor in the Bard Learning Commons, Ephron has received multiple awards, including the PEN America Fellowship and the Bard Center for the Study of Hate Internship Scholarship.  
 
Eleanor Tappen ’23, a Spanish Studies major, has been selected as a Fulbright ETA to Mexico for the 2023–24 academic year. Tappen has studied abroad in Granada, Spain, received her TESOL certification (which involved 40 hours of training), volunteered in a local elementary school in the fall of 2022, and works as an ESL tutor at the Learning Commons. For Tappen, a Fulbright teaching assistantship in Mexico is an intersection of her academic interest in Mexican literature and her passion for accessible and equitable language learning. During her Fulbright year, Tappen intends to volunteer at a local community garden, a setting she found ideal for cross-cultural exchange and friendship during her time at the Bard Farm. She also hopes to learn about pre-Colombian farming practices, whose revival is currently being led by indigenous movements in Mexico seeking to confront issues presented by unsustainable industrial agricultural practices. “I’m thrilled by the opportunity to live in the country whose literature and culture have served as such positive and significant points in both my academic and personal life. During my time as an ETA in Mexico, I hope to inspire in my students the same love of language-learning I found at Bard.”
 
Biology major Macy Jenks ’23 has been selected as an ETA to Taiwan for the 2023–24 academic year. Jenks is an advanced Mandarin language speaker having attended a Chinese immersion elementary school and continuing her Mandarin language studies through high school and college, including three weeks spent in China living with host family in 2015. She has tutored students in English at Bard’s Annandale campus, as well as through the Bard Prison Initiative at both Woodbourne Correctional Facility and Eastern New York Correctional Facility. She also has worked with the Bard Center for Civic Engagement to develop curricula and provide STEM programming to local middle and high school students. “As a Fulbright ETA, I hope to equip students with the tools necessary to hone their English language and cultural skills while encouraging them to develop their own voices,” says Jenks. While in Taiwain, she plans to volunteer with the Taiwan Root Medical Peace Corps, which offers medical care to rural communities, or with the Taipei Medical University in a more urban setting to further engage with the community and learn more about Taiwan’s healthcare systems and settings. With her love of hiking, Jenks also hopes to explore various cultural sites including the cave temples of Lion’s Head Mountain and Fo Guang Shan monastery and enjoy the natural beauty of Taiwan.

Bard Conservatory alumna Avery Morris ’18, who graduated with a BA in Mathematics and a BM in Violin Performance, has been selected for a prestigious Fulbright Study Research Award for 2023–24. Her project, “Gideon Klein’s Lost Works and the Legacy of Czech Musical Modernism,” aims to bring to light the early works of Czech composer and Holocaust victim Gideon Klein (1919–1945), which were lost until they were discovered in a suitcase in the attic of a house in Prague in the 1990s. She will live in Prague for the upcoming academic year and continue her research on Klein, which has been a focus of her studies at Stony Brook University, where she is pursuing a Doctorate of Musical Arts in Violin Performance.

Getzamany "Many" Correa ’21, a Global and International Studies major, has been selected as an ETA to Spain for the 2023–24 academic year. Correa was an international student in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Hungary. As an international student in high school, she started an initiative called English Conversation Buddies with the State Department-sponsored American Corner in Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina. She has received her TESOL certification (which involved 40 hours of training) and worked as an ESL tutor at the Learning Commons. In Spain, Correa hopes to create a book club that introduces students to diverse authors writing in English, study Spanish literature, and host dinners with the locals she meets. She also plans to volunteer with EducationUSA and support students applying to colleges and universities in the U.S. “A year-long ETA in Spain will allow me to experience a culture and language central to my academic and personal interests, leverage my background in education while furthering my teaching experience, and make meaningful connections through cross-cultural engagement,” says Correa.
 
The Fulbright US Student Program expands perspectives through academic and professional advancement and cross-cultural dialogue. Fulbright creates connections in a complex and changing world. In partnership with more than 140 countries worldwide, the Fulbright US Student Program offers unparalleled opportunities in all academic disciplines to passionate and accomplished graduating college seniors, graduate students, and young professionals from all backgrounds. Program participants pursue graduate study, conduct research, or teach English abroad. us.fulbrightonline.org.

Marty Two Bulls Jr. MFA ’24 was chosen as one of 21 Indigenous leaders to receive a 2023–24 NDN Changemaker Fellowship. The fellowship comes with a flexible cash prize of $75,000 to invest in a project of the fellow’s choosing. “Each fellow was uplifted and selected by grassroots members of their region in a process which involved over 300 applicants from 21 different regions across the colonial nation-states of Canada, Mexico, and the US, including its surrounding Island nations,” said the NDN Collective.

“I’m extremely humbled to have received the NDN Collective Changemaker Fellowship,” Two Bulls said. “The fellowship will support my work as an artist and educator in my rural tribal community on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in western South Dakota. It means a great deal to me to receive such tremendous support and acknowledgment from an Indigenous-run organization like NDN Collective; I feel like I’m on the right path in the work that I am doing.”

Thrift 2 Fight cofounders Masha Zabara ’21 and Jillian Reed ’21 both studied music at Bard’s Conservatory of Music. However, it was their shared mission to support grassroots social justice organizations that brought them together. Recently profiled in the Times Union, Thrift 2 Fight originated as a yard sale in 2020 to raise donation funds in support of the Black Lives Matter movement and has since expanded into a sustainable business model—raising and redistributing almost $65,000 to date through secondhand clothing sales. In 2022, Thrift 2 Fight opened its Tivoli storefront, staffed by volunteers from Bard College as well as Camp Ramapo, and hosts many community events including free clothing swaps and “Art Is How I Fight” gallery shows for artists who are currently incarcerated. 

Further reading:
Thrift 2 Fight Cofounder Jillian Reed ’21 Wins $10,000 Davis Projects for Peace Grant

Lisa Kereszi ’95, photographer and Bard College alumna, is launching Mourning, a new monograph that explores family grief through photographs. In 2018, Kereszi’s father passed away, less than a year after she lost her grandmother. She asked family members to install a trail camera so she could view her father’s grave plot—after the headstone had tipped over and required re-mounting—which automatically generated photos she could view every day. In this way, she was able to regularly experience visiting her father’s grave through thousands of images taken over a seven-month period, despite being hundreds of miles away. The resulting Mourning is an intimate and lovingly created album, with 112 of those photographs as testimony of her grieving process. 

Mourning is available for presale through August 1 at the collaborative publishing platform Minor Matters Books, and will include an essay by curator and writer Marvin Heiferman. 

Kereszi, a photography major at Bard, first became interested in visiting cemeteries to make photographs after photographer Stephen Shore showed her Walker Evans’s famous 1936 picture of a desolate grave in Alabama. In publishing Mourning, she is collaborating for the second time with Bard alumna Michelle Dunn Marsh ’95, with whom she worked previously on Joe’s Junk Yard, 2012 by Damiani Books. Marsh founded Minor Matters Books with the aim of creating a publishing platform that makes its audience co-publishers of photo book titles, enabling production support solely through pre-sales, rather than through traditional means.
 

Gabriel Kilongo ’15, Bard alumnus and founder of the art gallery Jupiter Contemporary in Miami, was interviewed by Artnet News about the founding of Jupiter and its upcoming exhibitions. “With the help of Martin Peretz and Leon Botstein, I went to Bard College on a full scholarship to study art history,” Kilongo told Artnet. “While there, I was introduced to many facets of the art world, and it immediately clicked.” In March 2022, he founded the gallery with the intention of highlighting and fostering emerging artists. “Our focus is to identify, exhibit, and develop artists who are off-the-beaten-path, and offer a breath of fresh air to the discourse of the art industry.” The next exhibition planned for Jupiter Contemporary will be a solo show featuring new work by Yongqi Tang, showcasing the broad scope of her practice in paintings, drawings, and sculptures.

The New York Times profiled the “singular, tender, euphoric, hypnotic opera” Stranger Love and its collaborators, composer and Bard alumnus Dylan Mattingly ’14 and librettist Thomas Bartscherer, Bard’s Peter Sourian Senior Lecturer in the Humanities. The Times also reviewed the opera, naming it a Critic's Pick, calling it “an earnest exercise in deep feeling that takes sensations and stretches them from the personal to the cosmic, and goes big in a time when contemporary music tends to go small.”

Stranger Love premiered on Saturday, May 20, 2023—its only planned performance at the time of writing. Writer Zachary Woolfe tracked the project from its envisioning 11 years ago to its final incarnation: a six-hour, three-act production to be staged at Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. Contemporaneous, which Mattingly cofounded with David Bloom ’13 as an undergraduate at Bard, will play, with Bloom conducting. Whether Stranger Love will have a future performance after this weekend is unclear, though “Mattingly has dreamed of doing it at the Park Avenue Armory in New York.” Regardless, Mattingly and Bartscherer are at work on their next collaboration, the ambitiously titled “History of Life.”

Choreographer Joanna Haigood ’79 is the recipient of a 2023 Rainin Fellowship for her work in dance. Now in its third year, this fellowship annually awards four visionary Bay Area artists working across the disciplines of dance, film, public space, and theater with unrestricted grants of $100,000. An initiative of the Kenneth Rainin Foundation and administered by United States Artists, the fellowship funds artists who push the boundaries of creative expression, anchor local communities, and advance the field. Fellows also receive supplemental support tailored to address each fellow’s specific needs and goals, including financial planning, communications, and marketing help and legal services. The 2023 Fellows were nominated by Bay Area artists and cultural leaders and selected through a two-part review process with the help of national reviewers and a panel of four local jurors. Haigood is the artistic director of Zaccho Dance Theatre and was a recipient of a Bard Charles Flint Kellogg Award in Arts and Letters.

Haigood is a choreographer and site artist who has been creating work that uses natural, architectural, and cultural environments as points of departure for movement exploration and narrative since 1980. Haigood’s stages have included grain terminals, a clock tower, the pope’s palace, military forts, and a mile of urban neighborhood streets in the South Bronx. Her work has been commissioned by arts institutions including Dancing in the Streets, Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, Walker Arts Center, the Exploratorium Museum, the National Black Arts Festival, and Festival d’Avignon. Haigood has had the privilege to mentor many extraordinary young artists internationally at the École Nationale des Arts du Cirque in France, the Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance in England, Spelman College, and many more, including members of her company Zaccho Dance Theatre. Her honors include the Guggenheim Fellowship, USA Fellowship, New York Bessie Award, and the Doris Duke Artist Award.

Filmmaker Ephraim Asili MFA ’11, who is associate professor and director of the Film and Electronic Arts Program at Bard, has been selected as a member of the 2023–2024 cohort of Harvard Radcliffe Institute Fellows for his work in the arts. During their fellowship year, this international cohort will work on projects that “contend with the urgent, the beautiful, and the vast: from reckoning with the challenges of climate change to creating digital models of iconic Italian violins to detecting distant galaxies.” Asili has been named a Radcliffe-Film Study Center Fellow, an honor which includes a stipend of $78,000 plus an additional $5,000 to cover project expenses. Radcliffe-Film Study Center Fellows are provided studio or office space, use of the Film Study Center’s equipment and facilities, and access to libraries and other Harvard University resources during the fellowship year.

The Harvard Radcliffe Institute Fellowship Program annually selects and supports artists, scholars, and practitioners who bring both a record of achievement and exceptional promise to the institute. A Radcliffe fellowship offers scholars in the humanities, sciences, social sciences, and arts—as well as writers, journalists, and other distinguished professionals—a rare chance to pursue ambitious projects for a full year in a vibrant interdisciplinary setting amid the resources of Harvard. The 2023–2024 fellows represent only 3.3 percent of the many applications that Radcliffe received.

What began as a Senior Project is now Don’t Call Me Home, a new book by Alex Auder ’94 chronicling her relationship with her mother, Viva, the larger-than-life personality and Warhol superstar. “Don’t Call Me Home is fully cooked, wicked in its humor and often heartbreaking,” writes Penelope Green in a profile of Auder for the New York Times. Auder began the manuscript while a student at Bard, but put it away for years, returning to the project in 2019. The memoir explores her life with Viva and their bohemian lifestyle in the Chelsea Hotel. Auder ultimately sees the book as a “feminist story.” “It’s about women!” Auder said. “Strong women, crazy women, women in love, women in rage, women in despair, birth, desire, sex, single mothers, friendships only women can have, women trying to make art and raise a family at the same time, women trying to do it all and failing. Women enduring … each other.”

Speaking with Terry Gross on Fresh Air, Auder was asked about her relationship with Gaby Hoffman ’04, her half-sister and fellow Bard alumna, for whom Auder “became like a second mother,” and her father Michel Auder, photographer and filmmaker, whose film of Auder’s birth features in the memoir. When Auder was three, she asked to watch the film. She permitted to do so, and her reaction itself was caught on film. The experience of watching herself watching herself being born was difficult for Auder to sum up in words. “It’s a long video, with the camera just trained on my face watching the video,” Auder said to Gross. “And you can see every expression sort of across my face as each moment in the birth video happens.”

While Don’t Call Me Home is in part a reflection on the difficulties of Auder’s relationship with her mother, it is also an ode to the woman, for whom Auder holds a great deal of love and admiration. “She was a trailblazer,” Auder said to the Times. “Ahead of her time in many respects. Too ahead of her time in the sense that she was considered crazy before she was revered. She was outspoken when being outspoken was not hip. Nude, when nudity was not hip. Raging against the machine before the machine created a platform, the internet, from which to be raged about.”

Three Bard College alumni/ae—Beatrice Abbott ’15, Megumi Kivuva ’22, and Tobias Golz Timofeyev ’21—have been awarded competitive National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowships for the 2023 award year. The NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) aims to “ensure the quality, vitality, and diversity of the scientific and engineering workforce of the United States” and “seeks to broaden participation in science and engineering of underrepresented groups, including women, minorities, persons with disabilities, and veterans” through selection, recognition, and financial support of individuals who have demonstrated the potential to be high achieving scientists and engineers early in their careers.

Beatrice Abbott ’15, who majored in political studies at Bard, has won a fellowship for the field of social sciences. She is a master’s student in geography at the University of Kentucky. Her research interests include evidence/forensics, critical migration studies, critical cartography and geographic information systems (GIS), and visual culture.

Megumi Kivuva ’22, who majored in Spanish studies and computer science with a concentration in Experimental Humanities at Bard, has won a fellowship for the field of STEM education and learning research. Kivuva is a PhD student in computing education at the University of Washington. Their research “aims to broaden participation in computing education for Black and refugee students,” and they “use community participatory research to understand the barriers to accessing computing education and codesign interventions to make computing education more accessible to these communities.”
 
Tobias Golz Timofeyev ’21, who majored in mathematics at Bard, has won a fellowship for the field of mathematical biology. He is a PhD student in mathematical sciences at the University of Vermont. The fellowship will allow him to focus on his research project, "Decoding Parallel Processing in the Brain using the Connectome Eigenfunctions." 

As the oldest graduate fellowship of its kind, the GRFP has a long history of selecting recipients who achieve high levels of success in their future academic and professional careers. The five-year fellowship period provides a three-year annual stipend of $37,000 along with a $12,000 cost of education allowance for tuition and fees, as well as access to opportunities for professional development. NSF Fellows are anticipated to become knowledge experts who can contribute significantly to research, teaching, and innovations in science and engineering. Each year, the NSF receives more than 12,000 applications to the GRFP program, which has awarded fellowships to its selected scholars since 1952.