Newsmakers

Bard alumna Sonita Alizada ’23, a Rhodes Scholar and human rights activist, was profiledin Forbes magazine. Born under Taliban rule, Alizada faced the threat of child marriage at the ages of 10 and 16 before finding her voice through music. She has since performed on global stages and collaborated with artists and organisations that share her mission, and she has also addressed world leaders and worked with NGOs such as the UN, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International to push for change. “Today, Sonita’s message is simple but profound: never underestimate the power of your voice,” writes Mandeep Rai for Forbes. “Dreams, she insists, are the ultimate weapon. Her journey is more than a story—it is a committed call to action, urging women to support one another and the world to take responsibility for girls in Iran, Afghanistan, and beyond.”
 

Works by two Bard College alumni/ae, Ei Arakawa-Nash MFA '07 and Lotus L. Kang MFA ’15, will be featured in the 2026 Venice Biennale, which will run from May 9 to November 22. Arakawa-Nash, a performance artist and member of Fac Xtra Retreat (FXR), a collective of seven LA–based Asian American artists, will represent Japan at the Biennale. He is collaborating with other FXR members on a performance project coproduced by the Getty Center and the Japanese Foundation for the Biennale’s Japan Pavilion. “Ei Arakawa-Nash and FXR bring together irreverence, generosity, and collective experimentation in ways that feel both intimate and expansive,” said Sarah Cooper, performance programs specialist at the J. Paul Getty Museum. “These performances contribute to the wider story of Asian diasporas in Greater Los Angeles … while embodying his distinctive alchemy of humor and truth that unsettles fixed roles, challenges social and institutional norms and honors the multiplicities we all hold.”

Sculptor Lotus L. Kang MFA ’15 has been commissioned to produce a major new installation for the inaugural Bulgari Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Kang’s artistic practice utilizes sculpture, photography and site-responsive installation to communicate themes drawn from industrial and architectural forms, familial and social histories, poetry, and non-human figures. “Known for her complexly layered environments that meld organic, structural and metabolic languages, Lotus L. Kang’s works give poetic form to reflections on themes spanning inheritance, impermanence, memory, and translation,” writes ArtDaily. “Working fluidly between sculpture, photography and site-responsive installation, she frequently draws on unfixed, unstable materials and forms in her practice, giving evocative, often expansive shape to questions of ‘becoming.’” 

Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts is a graduate program for interdisciplinary study in the visual and creative arts. Bard MFA takes place over two years and two months, with students in residence on campus during three consecutive summers, and two winter sessions of independent study completed off campus.  

Actress and Bard alumna Lola Kirke ’12 was profiled in the New York Times following her role in the 2025 film Sinners and the release of her book Wild West Village: Not a Memoir. Kirke discussed her childhood in New York City and her family relationships, as well as her work since moving to Nashville in 2020 including her country album Trailblazer. Kirke says all of her work is about embracing the imperfect. “‘Should I conform? Or is what makes me special the ways in which I don’t conform? I am much more interested in the latter,” she says.

Kirke studied in the Film and Electronic Arts Program at Bard, which encourages interest in a wide range of expressive modes in film and electronic arts including animation, narrative and non-narrative filmmaking, documentary, performance, and installation practices. The program emphasizes imaginative engagement and the cultivation of an individual voice that has command over the entire creative process.

Diya Vij ’08, Bard alumna and a vice president at Powerhouse Arts, has been named as the Mamdani administration’s leader of New York City Department of Cultural Affairs. Vij, who was profiled in the New York Times, is a veteran of creative communities throughout the city and was praised by Mamdani as a “visionary and deeply thoughtful leader who understands that art is not ornamental to this city—it is essential to it.” The New York City Department of Cultural Affairs is the largest municipal funder of culture in the country, supporting 1,000 nonprofit cultural organizations and providing $245 million in funding in the last fiscal year to give access to art and culture for all New Yorkers. “I’m excited to apply my political lens to strengthening the systems that make open, accessible, and sometimes radical cultural activities possible,” Vij said. 

Mira Dancy ’01, painter and Bard College alumna, was featured in the Financial Times in an article about how artists are still navigating the effects of the Los Angeles fires a year later. Dancy spoke about how for her, the devastation of the fires is an artistic dividing line. The paintings in her studio were damaged permanently, and she vividly remembers the hills glowing red around her house, which was left uninhabitable after the disaster. “There is just no way I can go back to work on a painting that I was making before the fire,” Dancy told the Times. “My whole world changed.” Her latest exhibit, Mourning’s Orbit, opens at Night Gallery during Frieze week, and takes emotional stock of the last year while her family had to relocate between hotels and homes for nearly a year. The paintings reference places that had been damaged in the fires which she has visited in the aftermath, yet relay an element of hope despite the devastation. “I feel that these paintings are a little bit of an antidote to those images of burned houses,” Dancy says.