Newsmakers

JSTOR, the online resource that gives access to more than 12 million journal articles, books, images, and primary sources, is now available in 1,000 prisons spread across four continents. Led by Stacy Burnett ’20 MBA ’23, alumna of the Bard MBA in Sustainability Program and the Bard Prison Initiative, the JSTOR Access in Prison Initiative now connects more than 500,000 incarcerated people to the digital equivalent of a college library. “Creating more equitable learning environments inside prisons is the best way to pay forward my own prison-based education,” Burnett said. “We have proven that through understanding, collaboration, and creativity, we can create workable solutions that deliver meaningful digital equity and information literacy for incarcerated people.”

“The Harlem Renaissance has been a part of my lexicon since birth,” said Bard alumna Xaviera Simmons ’05 to the New York Times. Simmons, along with five other artists, were invited by the Times to reflect on the legacy of the Harlem Renaissance. Recent works by Simmons pay homage not only to artists like Jacob Lawrence, but to those whose contributions were either diminished or erased by history. Simmons’s work They’re All Afraid, All of Them, That’s It! They’re All Southern! The Whole United States Is Southern! elevates and recontextualizes the work done by the artist Gwendolyn Knight, Jacob Lawrence’s wife, who cowrote the labels that accompany Lawrence’s famous Migration Series. Simmons’s piece recontextualizes Knight’s work and words in order to emphasize that “the text, which you don’t really pay much attention to, is just as critical” as the visuals.

Produced in conjunction with the Ohio Innocence Project, a nonprofit organization at the University of Cincinnati College of Law, the opera Blind Injustice explores the impact of wrongful convictions on the incarcerated and their families. Blind Injustice, which the New York Times calls “a spirited call for reforms to the American criminal justice system,” is based on interviews with exonerees conducted by librettist and Bard alumnus David Cote ’92, who found it a challenge to give the proper attention to each real-life account. “Any one of these cases would have been a full-length opera,” Cote told the Times. Appropriately, “about 40 percent of the libretto is verbatim,” Javier C. Hernández wrote.

Bard College is proud to be included on the list of U.S. colleges and universities that produced the most 2023–24 Fulbright students and scholars. Each year, the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs announces the top producing institutions for the Fulbright Program, the U.S. government’s flagship international educational exchange program. The Chronicle of Higher Education publishes the lists annually.
 
Seven graduates from Bard received Fulbright awards for academic year 2023–24. Getzamany “Many” Correa ’21, a Global and International Studies major, and Elias Ephron ’23, a joint major in Political Studies and Spanish Studies, will live in Spain as Fulbright English Teaching Assistants (ETAs). Biology major Macy Jenks ’23 will be an ETA in Taiwan. Eleanor Tappen ’23, a Spanish Studies major, will be an ETA in Mexico. Juliana Maitenaz ’22, who graduated with a BA in Global and International Studies and a BM in Classical Percussion Performance, was selected for an independent study–research Fulbright scholarship to Brazil. Bard Conservatory alumna Avery Morris ’18, who graduated with a BA in Mathematics and a BM in Violin Performance, won a Fulbright Study Research Award to Poland.  Evan Tims ’19, who was a joint major in Written Arts and Human Rights with a focus on anthropology at Bard, received a Fulbright-Nehru independent study–research scholarship to India. Additionally, Adela Foo ’18 won a Fulbright Study Research Award to Turkey through Yale University, where she is a PhD candidate in art history.

“As an institution, Bard College is proud and honored to be included in the list of Top Producing Fulbright Institutions for 2023-2024,” said Molly J. Freitas, Ph.D., associate dean of studies and Fulbright advisor at Bard. “We believe that Fulbright's mission to promote and facilitate cross-cultural exchange and understanding through teaching and research is in perfect alignment with Bard's own institutional identity and goals. We wish to extend our congratulations to our newest Fulbright awardees and reiterate our gratitude to the faculty, staff, and community members who have supported these students during the Fulbright application process and throughout their time as Bard students.”

“Fulbright’s Top Producing Institutions represent the diversity of America’s higher education community. Dedicated administrators support students and scholars at these institutions to fulfill their potential and rise to address tomorrow’s global challenges. We congratulate them, and all the Fulbrighters who are making an impact the world over,” said Lee Satterfield, Assistant Secretary of State for Educational and Cultural Affairs.

Fulbright is a program of the U.S. Department of State, with funding provided by the U.S. Government. Participating governments and host institutions, corporations, and foundations around the world also provide direct and indirect support to the program. 

Fulbright alumni work to make a positive impact on their communities, sectors, and the world and have included 41 heads of state or government, 62 Nobel Laureates, 89 Pulitzer Prize winners, 80 MacArthur Fellows, and countless leaders and changemakers who build mutual understanding between the people of the United State and the people of other countries.  
 

A high school student is assigned a five-paragraph essay on the subject: “Is Shakespeare’s Othello racist?” Her tutor, Milo Cramer ’12, wants to guide her toward a nuanced argument, but their tutee just wants an A. This and other scenes from tutoring sessions serve as the subject of Cramer’s one-person show School Pictures, a hybrid musical monologue that recently had its New York premiere at Playwrights Horizons. School Pictures was excerpted on an episode of This American Life, where host Ira Glass says of Cramer’s work: “There’s just something in the intentional roughness and sincerity of what they’re doing that kind of matches the rawness of these kids and their feelings—and of Milo’s reactions to them.”

At the 66th annual GRAMMY Awards ceremony, the Recording Academy honored the 2024 GRAMMY winners. Among them, Bard Composer in Residence Jessie Montgomery won Best Contemporary Classical Composition, her first GRAMMY award, for her composition “Rounds.” Bard Conservatory of Music’s Graduate Vocal Arts Program alumna Julia Bullock MM ’11 also won her first GRAMMY award, winning Best Classical Solo Vocal Album for her album Walking in the Dark. Artistic Director of the Graduate Vocal Arts Program Stephanie Blythe is featured on the album Blanchard: Champion, which won for Best Opera Recording. 

Jessie Montgomery’s “Rounds” is a composition for piano and string orchestra inspired by the imagery and themes from T.S. Eliot’s epic poem Four Quartets, fractals (infinite patterns found in nature that are self-similar across different scales), and the interdependency of all beings. 

Julia Bullock’s Walking in the Dark was recorded with her husband, conductor and pianist Christian Reif, and London’s Philharmonia Orchestra. The album combines orchestral works by American composers John Adams and Samuel Barber with a traditional spiritual and songs by jazz legend Billy Taylor and singer-songwriters Oscar Brown, Jr., Connie Converse, and Sandy Denny.

The Metropolitan Opera’s recording of Terence Blanchard’s Champion, an opera about young boxer Emile Griffith who rises from obscurity to become a world champion, was conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin and featured a cast including mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe as Kathy Hagen. 
The GRAMMYs are voted on by more than 11,000 music professionals—performers, songwriters, producers, and others with credits on recordings—who are members of the Recording Academy. 

Further Reading:
Jessie Montgomery’s “Rounds” Wins 2024 GRAMMY Award for Best Contemporary Classical Composition

Julia Bullock Wins First Grammy Award with Walking in the Dark, Her Solo Album Debut

The Metropolitan Opera wins 2024 Grammy Award for Best Opera Recording for Terence Blanchard’s Champion

Visiting Assistant Professor of Music Sarah Hennies; New Red Order, an Indigenous art collective whose core contributors are Bard alumni Adam Khalil ’11 (Ojibway) and Zack Khalil ’14 (Ojibway); and Trisha Baga MFA ’10 have received 2024 United States Artist (USA) Fellowships in the disciplines of Music and Visual Arts. Hennies, New Red Order, and Baga are among this year’s 50 awardees, encompassing artists and collectives spanning multiple generations, who are dedicated to their communities and committed to building upon shared legacies through artistic innovation, cultural stewardship, and multifaceted storytelling. USA Fellowships provide $50,000 in unrestricted money to artists across 10 creative disciplines. In addition to the award, current fellows have access to financial planning, career consulting, legal advice, and other professional services as requested. 

Sarah Hennies is a composer based in Upstate NY whose work is concerned with a variety of musical, sociopolitical, and psychological issues including queer and trans identity, psychoacoustics, and the social and neurological conditions underlying creative thought.

New Red Order is a public secret society facilitated by core contributors Adam Khalil (Ojibway), Zack Khalil (Ojibway), and Jackson Polys (Tlingit) that collaborates with informants to create exhibitions, videos, and performances that question and rechannel subjective and material relationships to indigeneity. 

Trisha Baga is a Filipino-American artist working in stereoscopic 3D video installation, paint, clay, consumer grade electronics, and community performance. Compelled by an interest in what they call “the stuff that makes things stick together,” Baga recombines objects and images into scenarios that address issues related to the environment, technology, and identity.

Representing a broad diversity of regions and mediums, the USA Fellows are awarded through a peer-led selection process in the disciplines of Architecture & Design, Craft, Dance, Film, Media, Music, Theater & Performance, Traditional Arts, Visual Art, and Writing.