Newsmakers

When her grandmother died at the age of 99, artist Mae Colburn ’10 and her parents were left with the question of what to do with the matriarch’s massive collection of vintage wool skirts. Sorting through the collection—spanning decades and ranging in colors, plaids, and styles—they were inspired to archive it. “Because I studied art history,” says Colburn, who majored in art history and visual culture at Bard, “research, writing, and archiving [have] always been a really big part of what I do, with a focus on textiles in both art and fashion.” Colburn’s mother is a clothing historian and her dad is a photographer so the project spoke to their collective skills. Together the family has catalogued and photographed 632 vintage wool skirts. The physical archive is in Colburn’s Brooklyn studio—which is occasionally open to the public for viewing—and the digital archive is online.

A new book of poetry by alumna Juliana Spahr ’88 was featured in the Washington Post. Christopher Kondrich included Spahr’s most recent collection, Ars Poeticas, in a list of four books of poetry that “help restore nuance to our chaotic world.” Kondrich describes Ars Poeticas as a collection about poetry’s ability to respond to social and environmental crises. “We can’t help but wonder what poetry could ever add to the efforts to address [issues like] climate change and right-wing populism. With Ars Poeticas, the answer, despite Spahr’s reservations, is a tremendous amount.” Spahr has published nine books of poetry, the first in 1994. She was the recipient of the OB Hardison Poetry Prize from the Folger Shakespeare Library in 2009.

Denise Markonish CCS ’99, chief curator of Mass MoCA, has been named the new chief curator of the Madison Square Park Conservancy, the nonprofit entrusted by the City of New York to operate Madison Square Park, which functions as a public garden, urban forest, wildlife habitat, and public art exhibition space. In June she will begin her new job stewarding the art program for the 6.2-acre park, which is used by 60,000 people daily, reports the New York Times. As a leader of Mass MoCA’s curatorial program since 2007, Markonish has worked with artists including Nick Cave, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Glenn Kaino, Teresita Fernandez and Jeffrey Gibson (Bard artist in residence) on commissions often the size of a football field, experience that is invaluable in approaching the large-scale work of the park. “I’ve built my career on doing large-scale commissions,” Markonish said. “And to do so now in such a public place and thinking outside the box of the walls of a museum will be an amazing challenge.”

When the recent Los Angeles wildfires burned down the Altadena home of artist Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio ’12, his brick fireplace and chimney were the only structures left standing. “I began thinking about the resilience of these chimneys,” Aparicio told Hyperallergic. “I’m always looking at symbols that can hold both sides of an emotion: resilience and trauma.” In his first painting since the fires, Aparicio collaborated with Bay Area artist and activist David Solnit and a group of about two dozen volunteers to create a protest painting made with paint that was mixed by Solnit using pigments made from ash and charcoal collected at Altadena burn sites. Aparicio’s black-and-white painting depicts his chimney and fireplace standing among charred ruins and belching dark black smoke. The words “Invest in Communities, Not Fossil Fuels” are printed in both English and Spanish. Environmental activists assert that oil and gas companies have directly contributed to climate change–fueled disasters, like wildfires, that are devastating communities. Aparicio’s painting was unveiled at a Pasadena rally calling for CalPERS, the nation’s largest public pension fund, to fully divest from fossil fuels. An identical painting was unveiled the same day at another rally in front of the Chevron oil refinery in Richmond in northern California.

Alexandra “Sasha” Skochilenko ’17, Bard and Smolny College alumna and Russian artist who was imprisoned in 2022 for opposing the war in Ukraine, will speak at Bard College Berlin on Monday, April 7. Her talk, How a Bachelor’s Degree in Liberal Arts and Sciences Helped Me in Jail, which will take place from noon to 3 pm EDT and be accessible via Zoom, will be moderated by her academic advisor, Ilya Kalinin, of Smolny Beyond Borders and visiting scholar at Bard College Berlin and Humboldt University. Skochilenko had been imprisoned in March 2022 for the act of placing anti-war leaflets, disguised as price tags, on goods in a grocery store in Saint Petersburg. In 2024, she was released along with other political prisoners as part of a larger prisoner swap between Russia, the United States, and several European countries. She is a 2025 recipient of the Bard College Award.

In her talk, Skochilenko will discuss her studies in anthropology at Smolny College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and how this experience shaped and strengthened her anti-war stance. She will also reflect on her courtroom speech which explored the value of life and reconciliation in times of war and conflict, and how these ideas helped her survive imprisonment. 

Read more about Sasha Skochilenko ’17:

https://opensocietyuniversitynetwork.org/resources/video-collection/case-studies/sasha-skochilenko/

Hancy Maxis ’15, Bard Prison Initiative (BPI) alumnus, spoke with the Hechinger Report about the role that learning math played in his life upon his release. He recalls considering the question of, “Once I am back in New York City, once I am back in the economy, how will I be marketable? For me, math was that pathway.” Maxis completed a bachelor’s degree in mathematics, where he wrote his senior project about how to use game theory to advance health care equity. Maxis later completed a master’s program at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health and is now the assistant director of operations at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, where he worked to guide the hospital’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
 

Bard alumnus Benjamin Barron ’15 was interviewed in W Magazine about All-in, the fashion brand he founded with Bror August Vestbø. All-in is a design studio, magazine, and women’s brand influenced by vintage fashion. “We’re always looking for things that attract us and that we find a bit challenging in some way,” Barron said of the label.

All-In started as a magazine, which Barron and Vestbø continue to publish. Past issues explored themes like fast fashion and the decline of print magazines, and feature photoshoots with mostly thrifted clothes styled by the designers. Their own collections, which are released once a year, are each based on a storyline featuring a female character. For example, their 2023 line was based on a fictional pop star and was inspired by the film Showgirls. “Growth is happening … organically, driven by a fan base of insiders who recognize and prize originality,” writes Alice Cavanaugh for W Magazine.

Filmmaker and Bard alumna Gia Coppola ’09, director and producer of The Last Showgirl starring Pamela Anderson, was honored at the 2025 Kodak Film Awards, which celebrate the artistry of cinematography. Coppola received the Auteur Award—which is bestowed in recognition of extraordinary talent, discernment, and perspective in cinematic arts—for her directorial achievements. The annual Kodak Film Awards, now in its seventh year, recognize acclaimed visual artists who are unyielding in their artistic process and celebrate industry partners who contribute to the support of analog film.

Visiting Artist in Residence and alumna Tschabalala Self ’12 was commissioned to create portraits of the Washington family—father Denzel and sons John David and Malcolm—who were behind the recent movie adaptation of August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize–winning play The Piano Lesson. Denzel, John David, and Malcolm respectively produced (with his daughter Katia), starred in, and directed the film. Rochelle Steiner writes for TheWrap, “In Self’s hands, images of the Washingtons are intertwined with the film’s characters, such that the real and fictional commingle as references that exemplify Black America.” Inspired by and named after a 1984 Romare Bearden lithograph, The Piano Lesson is one of Self’s favorite August Wilson plays. “When looking at the play’s origin within the context of American slavery, the significance of home for the characters in the play and the figures depicted in Bearden’s piece becomes all the more poignant when you realize the legacy of separation, loss and displacement inflicted on their ancestors,” says Self. 

Her newly installed exhibition Tschabalala Self: Dream Girl is on view February 15–April 26, 2025 at Jeffrey Dietch in Los Angeles. 

Suzanne Kite MFA ’18, aka Kite, distinguished artist in residence, assistant professor of American and Indigenous Studies, and director of the Wihanble S’a Center for Indigenous AI at Bard, was profiled in ArtForum’s Spotlight series. The profile focuses on Kite’s performance art and use of technology, particularly the piece “Pȟehíŋ kiŋ líla akhíšoke. (Her hair was heavy.)”, referred to as one of Kite’s “braid performances.” Writer Christopher Green calls Kite one of the “foremost Indigenous artists exploring the capacity of music, video, installation, and [technology] in combination with performance to examine the embodiment and visualization of contemporary Lakȟóta ways of knowing.”

The profile also explains Kite’s goal of making art for Native, Lakȟóta audiences. “Her refusal to legibly encode or concretize her scores for the mainstream destabilizes the ethnographic gaze and its desire to document, categorize, and control Indigenous culture, language, and bodies,” Green writes. Her upcoming Wičhíŋčala Šakówiŋ (Seven Little Girls), a scored performance which will be accompanied by a full orchestra, will be presented at MIT later this year.

Award-winning writers Kelly Link and Jedediah Berry ’99 will give a reading on Monday, March 3, at 4:00 pm in Weis Cinema in the Bertelsmann Campus Center at Bard College.  The event, which is presented as part of Bradford Morrow’s Bard course on innovative contemporary fiction and is cosponsored by the literary magazine Conjunctions, will include a Q&A with the authors and is free and open to the public.

Kelly Link is known for her novel The Book of Love, and for her multitude of short stories, including the acclaimed collection Get in Trouble, which spans genres including fantasy, horror, and magic realism. Jebediah Berry ’99 is the author of The Naming Song, The Manual of Detection, and The Family Arcana, a story told in the form of cards.

“What a special joy to welcome back my former Bard student, Jedediah Berry, to speak with my students and give a public reading alongside one of my favorite writers and longtime Conjunctions contributors, Kelly Link,” said Morrow, professor of literature at Bard College and the founder and editor of Conjunctions. “As I wrap up my own years at Bard and my Innovative Contemporary Fiction Reading series, I think of how many students have gone on to successful careers in the literary world, and I hope my current students will be inspired by Jed’s triumphs as a writer. Both Kelly Link’s The Book of Love and Jedediah Berry’s The Naming Song were just named two of the five finalists for the prestigious Los Angeles Times Book Award in Sci-Fi/Fantasy for 2025. It will be wonderful to congratulate them both in person at Bard.”

Kelly Link is the author of the collections Stranger Things Happen (Small Beer Press), Magic for Beginners (Random House), Pretty Monsters (Speak), Get in Trouble, and White Cat, Black Dog, and the novel The Book of Love (all Random House). Her short stories have been published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, The Best American Short Stories, and Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards. She has been a MacArthur Fellow, a recipient of a World Fantasy Award, Nebula Award, and Hugo Award, and a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize. She is the cofounder of Small Beer Press and coedits the zine Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and owns Book Moon, an independent bookshop in Easthampton, MA.
 
Jedediah Berry ’99 is the author of The Naming Song (Tor Books), his most recent novel which is a finalist for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His first novel, The Manual of Detection (Penguin Press), won the Crawford Award and the Hammett Prize and was adapted for broadcast by BBC Radio 4. His story in cards, The Family Arcana (Ninepin Press), was a finalist for a World Fantasy Award. With Andrew McAlpine, he cowrote the Ennie Award-winning tabletop adventure game setting, The Valley of Flowers (Phantom Mill Games). Together with his partner, writer Emily Houk, he runs Ninepin Press, an independent publisher of fiction, poetry, and games in unusual shapes.

Bard alums Josephine Sacabo ’67 and Dalt Wonk ’65 talk to The Reading Life host Susan Larson about their new book New Orleans 1970–2020: A Portrait of the City. Sacabo and Wonk, who are married, reminisce about their first arrival in New Orleans from France 55 years ago and life in the French Quarter during the 1970s. For their first collaboration in nearly 15 years, writer Wonk and photographer Sacabo assemble a selection of their best journalist work to create an indelible chronicle—in words and images—of the Crescent City during its past half century of quiet instances and cultural watershed moments.

Christine Sun Kim MFA ’13, artist and music/sound faculty member in Bard’s MFA program, was profiled in the New York Times, which covered her new survey show at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The exhibition, All Day All Night, encompasses her entire artistic output to date, featuring works that range from early 2010s performance documentation to her 2024 mural Ghost(ed) Notes, which has been recreated across multiple walls at the Whitney. Using musical notation, infographics, and language—both in her native American Sign Language (ASL) and written English—Kim’s work takes the form of drawings, videos, sculptures, and installations that often explore non-auditory, political dimensions of sound. Kim, who was born deaf, knows “how sound works, and what the expectations around it are,” she told the New York Times. “So why wouldn’t I use that in my work instead of rejecting it outright? Sound isn’t part of my life, but when I found sound art, it became really interesting to me as a medium.”

For Further Reading:

https://www.vulture.com/article/the-exhilarating-anger-of-christine-sun-kim.html

https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/fine-art/christine-sun-kim-all-day-all-night-review-lines-of-communication-at-the-whitney-airdigital-77dacfeb

https://robbreport.com/shelter/art-collectibles/in-the-studio-with-christine-sun-kim-1236164748/
 

Visual artist and director Martine Syms MFA ’17 spoke with The Believer about her art practice, excerpted in McSweeney’s. She discusses her creative process, prioritizing, and how projects change as they move from an idea to their final form. “In art, I love an unknown; it’s great,” Syms says. “That’s the whole point to me: I don’t know what it’s gonna look like, I don’t know what it’s gonna be, I just have this weird idea in my head: let’s see where it takes me.”

Introducing the interview, Claire L. Evans describes Syms as “mov[ing] through mediums and ideas like a freeway moves through neighborhoods.” After graduating from the Art Institute of Chicago, Syms founded Dominica Publishing, earned her graduate degree at Bard, and was a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow. Her first movie, The African Desperate, was shot at Bard and satirizes art school. 

At the 68th annual Obie Awards, the American Theatre Wing presented Assistant Dean of Students Corey Sullivan ’03 and other members of his arts collective, Theater Mitu, the Ross Wetzsteon Award for sustained innovation in the field. Theater Mitu was originally formed through Sullivan’s collaborations as an undergraduate at Bard.

In 2001, then an undergraduate, Sullivan began collaborating with visiting artists on a production for Bard’s Theater and Performance Program. Their work together continued beyond the show’s run, and soon after, Sullivan joined the group in forming an interdisciplinary arts collective called Theater Mitu. Since then they have worked together to push the boundaries of theater through innovative productions, global research and education initiatives, programs supporting emerging artists, and the creation of their Brooklyn-based performance and technology center, MITU580.

Theater Mitu will be in residence at the Boston Museum of Science and Arts Emerson in spring 2025 to present Utopian Hotline, a project developed in partnership with the SETI Institute and Arizona State University’s Interplanetary Initiative. Part telephone hotline, part vinyl record, and part live performance, Utopian Hotline uses real voicemails left on a public hotline to create a moment of community—inviting audience members to re-imagine our shared future. Inspired by the 1977 NASA Voyager mission, which launched a vinyl-style recording of sounds found on Earth into space, as well as the uncertainty surrounding the Covid-19 pandemic, this immersive performance begs the question: “If we were to send another message into the distant future, what message would we send?”

Last summer, Theater Mitu premiered (HOLY) BLOOD! at their Brooklyn space, MITU580. Part live-scored silent film, part irreverent midnight movie, the piece created an original live soundscape merged with manipulated fragments of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s cult-classic film Santa Sangre. Projected across a shattered landscape of screens and sculpture, accompanied by explosive blood choreography enclosed in glass booths, the work remapped a story of circuses, blood cults, madness, and forgiveness. 

For more information on the company’s work, visit www.theatermitu.org

A Lien, directed by brothers David and Sam Cutler-Kruetz ’13, has been nominated for an Academy Award in the category of best live-action short. The 15-minute fictional film centers on the oppressive and harrowing experience of one New York City family’s immigration process as it follows Oscar and Sophia Gomez and their young daughter who show up for Oscar’s green card interview. The film’s festival run garnered prizes including the Special Jury Award from Salute Your Shorts 2024 and the Grand Prize Narrative Awards from the Washington Film Festival 2024. Bard alums Tara Sheffer '13 (producer), and Blair Maxwell ’13 (costume designer) also worked on the film.

Ephraim Asili MFA ’11, associate professor and director of film and electronic arts, has been selected as one of 50 artists to receive a 2025 United States Artists (USA) Fellowship. Each year, individual artists and collaboratives are anonymously nominated to apply by a geographically diverse and rotating group of artists, scholars, critics, producers, curators, and other arts professionals. USA Fellowships are annual $50,000 unrestricted awards recognizing the most compelling artists working and living in the United States, in all disciplines, at every stage of their career. 

“My approach to filmmaking is both hybrid and experimental. My films often alternate between essayistic or observational documentary form, narrative fiction, and self-reflexive gestures which foreground how the film medium itself, and the filmmaker using it, frame lived experience,” says Asili.

Ephraim Asili is an African American artist and educator whose work focuses on the African diaspora as a cultural force. Often inspired by his quotidian wanderings, Asili creates art that situates itself as a series of meditations on the everyday. He received his BA in Film and Media Arts from Temple University and his MFA in Film and Interdisciplinary Art at Bard College. Asili’s films have screened in festivals and venues all over the world, including the New York Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, The Berlinale, and the International Film Festival Rotterdam. Asili’s 2020 feature debut The Inheritance premiered at the 2020 Toronto International Film Festival and was recently the focus of an exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art where it is a part of their permanent collection. In 2021 Asili was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. During the summer of 2022 Asili directed a short film Strange Math along with the 2023 Men’s Spring/Summer fashion show for Louis Vuitton. In 2023, Asili was the recipient of a Harvard Radcliffe Fellowship, and in 2024 Asili was awarded a grant from Creative Capital. 

Sancia Miala Shiba Nash '19 and Drew K. Broderick MA ’19 of kekahi wahi also won a 2025 United States Artists fellowship. kekahi wahi was instigated in 2020 by filmmaker Sancia Miala Shiba Nash and artist Drew K. Broderick. The grassroots film initiative is committed to documenting transformations across the Hawaiian archipelago and sharing stories of the greater Pacific through time-based media. 

Nikkya Hargrove ’05, a member of the Bard College Alumni/ae Association Board of Governors and Lambda Literary Nonfiction Fellow, was interviewed by Bomb magazine about her memoir, Mama. In the book, Hargrove tells the story of her decision to adopt her newborn baby brother Jonathan after their incarcerated mother died, and how she set out, with her wife Dinushka, to create the kind of family she never had. “I think the calling to be Jonathan’s mother was nothing short of spiritual,” Hargrove said. “The drive to take Jonathan was to keep him out of a broken system and try to protect him as much as I could from my mother’s mistakes. I wanted to be his constant. I didn’t want him to worry about who would be there for him. And, knock on wood, at 18, he just figured it out. And it feels amazing, you know, to have him reflect back at us what we’ve been trying to do as his parents.”

Bard Distinguished Artist in Residence and Assistant Professor of American and Indigenous Studies Kite MFA ’18 was profiled in the multimedia hub I Care If You Listen. The piece focuses on Kite’s two-day residency at the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer (EMPAC) where she led seven students through a workshop on dreaming, then let them create and perform their own visual scores based on their dreams. ​​“It’s great to get to work with the students here,” Kite said. “Wrangling crazy ideas, organizing them into something sensible, being sensitive to your audience’s needs, and being careful with time, being self aware—those are all skills I can share.”

Kite joined Bard in 2023 and has worked in the field of machine learning since 2017. She develops wearable technology and full-body software systems to interrogate past, present, and future Lakȟóta philosophies. She is also the director of the Wihanble S’a Center for Indigenous AI at Bard. I Care If You Listen describes her work as “[uniting] scientific and artistic disciplines through custom worn electronic instruments, research, visual scores, and more… rooted in Lakota ways of making knowledge, in which body and mind are always intimately intertwined.”