Newsmakers

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/

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.

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.
 

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.”

Amber Esseiva (CCS Bard ’15) to Receive CCS Bard Alumni Award

Awardees to be Honored at CCS Bard’s Spring 2025 Gala

The Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (CCS Bard) announces Gridthiya Gaweewong as the recipient of its 2025 Audrey Irmas Award for Curatorial Excellence.

Currently the artistic director of the Jim Thompson Art Center in Bangkok, Gaweewong has dedicated her career to championing contemporary Thai artists and developing a curatorial practice addressing the social transformation faced by artists from Thailand and beyond following the Cold War. An independent panel of leading curators, artists, and museum directors selected Gaweewong to receive the annual award, which is accompanied by a $25,000 prize and was launched in 1998 to honor the outstanding achievements of curators who bring innovative thinking, bold vision, and dedicated service to the field of exhibition-making.

“Gridthiya’s curatorial approach, which subverts institutional narratives in lieu of artist-led and personal perspectives, embodies the innovative contributions to the curatorial field CCS Bard aims to recognize with this award,” said Tom Eccles, Executive Director of the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College.

In addition to Gaweewong, CCS Bard recognizes curator and educator Amber Esseiva (Class of ’15) with the 2025 CCS Bard Alumni Award. As Acting Senior Curator at the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University (ICA at VCU) and former Curator-at-Large at The Studio Museum in Harlem, Esseiva develops exhibitions that center emerging, mid-career, and underrecognized artists. Established in 2023, CCS Bard awards this $10,000 prize to honor outstanding graduates who demonstrate sustained innovation and engagement with exhibition-making, public education, and research in the field of curation.

Gaweewong and Esseiva will accept their awards at CCS Bard’s Spring 2025 gala celebration and dinner on April 7, 2025. The event, which is chaired by the CCS Bard Board of Governors, will be held in New York City at The Lighthouse at Pier 61.

“I’m deeply honored to receive this award and thank the esteemed committee. This milestone manifests the collaborative efforts of my family, friends, artists, mentors, and vibrant art community in Thailand, the region, and beyond,” said Gaweewong. “It inspires me to curate passionately, trusting art’s power to foster resilience and meaningful societal change."

“It brings me so much joy to receive this recognition from CCS Bard, an institution that has had such a profound impact on my work and career. It was at CCS that I first developed my passion for collaborating with artists and colleagues to produce new works of art,” said Esseiva. “To be acknowledged by so many talented alumni I admire, is both humbling and truly meaningful to me.”

The Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (CCS Bard) announces Gridthiya Gaweewong as the recipient of its 2025 Audrey Irmas Award for Curatorial Excellence.

Bard alumnus, restaurateur, and sommelier Chase Sinzer ’11 has been awarded the Michelin Guide New York 2024 Sommelier Award, alongside Ellis Srubas-Giammanco, who is the wine director of Sinzer's raw bar restaurant Penny, which he opened earlier this year in New York City. After serving as wine director of the two-Michelin star restaurant The Chef's Table at Brooklyn Fare, Sinzer opened Claud and Penny, overseeing both wine programs. In conversation with Michelin Guide, Sinzer discussed sustainability in their wine menus, wines worth splurging on, and the advice he has for aspiring sommeliers. “Seek out as much wine as humanly possible to develop your own style,” says Sinzer. “So when someone asks a question, you've accumulated an encyclopedic notion of the aesthetics and business of wine that you have a quick, formulated idea of what your wine list represents to you and what you want people to get from it.”

Artist and Bard alumnus Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio ’12 has been recognized by ARTnews as a 2024 Emerging Artist of the Year. For his first solo museum presentation, which took place earlier this year, Aparicio was selected by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles to take over part of its sprawling Geffen Contemporary location for the relaunch of its “MOCA Focus” exhibition series, which featured works he made between 2016 and 2023 alongside three site-specific commissions. “In Aparicio’s work there is a commitment to experimentation and to pushing materials to their limits, only to show us new ways of seeing and thinking,” ARTnews wrote of the exhibition. “This is the beginning of an incredibly promising career.” His work explores the visual and conceptual po­­ssibilities of globally ubiquitous raw materials and products of Indigenous knowledge of Latin America. In recent years, Aparicio has produced large scale rubber casts that document the social and economic relationships between Latin America and the United States through specific use of material, multiplicity of site and metaphorical gestures.

On Monday, December 2, Bard College Margaret and John Bard Society members, staff, and students gathered in New York City for this year’s annual luncheon. This special occasion is dedicated to honoring and celebrating our esteemed donors who have made generous contributions through their estate plans. Their commitment to Bard College’s mission through future planning is not only inspiring but instrumental in defining the experiences and opportunities Bard can offer its students. Bard is deeply appreciative of the generosity and foresight that the members of the Margaret and John Bard Society have.

“This special annual gathering celebrates the generous alumni/ae, family, and friends who have chosen to support Bard through planned giving. Their commitment and philanthropy play a vital role in shaping the future of Bard College, ensuring that Bard can continue to provide a transformative education for generations to come. It’s a time to connect, share stories, and inspire each other with the legacy of support helping fulfill Bard's mission,” said Vice President for Development and Alumni/ae Affairs Debra Pemstein.

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 interviewed by News10 NBC for an article about how Indigenous engineers and artists are using artificial intelligence for cultural preservation projects. Of the 4,000 Indigenous languages worldwide, it is estimated that one dies every two weeks with its last speaker, according to data from the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. AI can be a valuable tool in the initiatives designed to preserve those languages and other aspects of Indigenous culture and creative practices, such as the art which Kite is using machine learning to create. “My question is simple: How do we create ethical art with AI by applying Indigenous ontologies?” Kite said. “I try to resist Western personification of AI and instead dig into the hyperlocal, grounded and practical frameworks of knowledge that American Indigenous communities provide.”

Bard alum Rob Brunner ’93, politics and culture editor at the Washingtonian magazine, writes about how Tom Stoppard’s Tony Award–winning play Leopoldstadt—which follows the story of the Merz family, a wealthy, deeply assimilated family of Viennese Jews, from the cultural heyday of Vienna’s pre-war period, through two world wars, and their terrifying aftermath—made him finally confront his own family's tragic history. Brunner’s grandparents, also Viennese Jews, fled their beloved city in 1938, shortly after the Nazis annexed Austria, evaded the Gestapo through a chance meeting, secretly crossed the French border into Paris, and miraculously received two American refugee visas on August 31, 1939, one day before Hitler invaded Poland and started World War II. The rest of his grandparents’ Viennese family, like most of the Merz family in Stoppard’s play, did not survive. “None of it felt like it belonged to me. That was a delusion that I held onto for too long . . . ” writes Brunner of his family’s Holocaust story. “But had the cousins survived, they would have been my family, my son’s family. They would have come over for Thanksgiving dinner; I might have been friends with their children. Their loss isn’t some abstraction, I have finally come to realize. It’s my loss, too.”

In an article for National Geographic, science writer and Bard alumna Elizabeth Royte ’81 explores the life cycles and habitats of rattlesnakes, and the various conservation efforts to protect them. More than 50 species of rattlesnakes occur exclusively throughout the Americas, and Royte notes that though there may be pockets where they thrive, the fate of most of the venomous snakes is grim. “From southwestern Canada to central Argentina, people continue to capture them for the pet or skin trade, swerve to flatten them as they warm themselves on roads, and chop up their habitat with subdivisions, pipelines, and cell towers,” she writes for National Geographic. “Timber rattlesnakes, once abundant, have been extirpated in a number of northern US states and Ontario, and they’re threatened or endangered in pockets throughout their broad US range. Several other species are categorized from generally threatened to critically endangered.”

Pulitzer-winning investigative journalist and Bard alumnus Ronan Farrow ’04 spoke to NPR and the Guardian about his new HBO documentary, Surveilled, in which he delves into the shadowy world of surveillance and the private companies that sell powerful commercial spyware technology. The documentary “records the emotional toll, scope and threat potential of a technology most people are neither aware of nor understand,” writes Adrian Horton for the Guardian. “It also serves as an argument for urgent journalistic and civic oversight of commercial spyware—its deliberately obscure manufacturers, its abuse by state clients and its silent erosion of privacy.” Farrow addresses how the lack of regulations surrounding this technology has wide reaching implications for political and social abuse. “In the film, I am motivated by having come face-to-face with surveillance and understanding how intrusive that is, how devastating it can be personally and invasive,” Farrow told NPR. “But also, more consequentially, how much it shrinks the space for the free flow of information and the expression of dissent.”

Artist and Bard alumna Martine Syms MFA ’17 was interviewed in PIN-UP magazine. In conversation with Jordan Richman, Syms discusses how her upbringing in Los Angeles impacted her interest in film, how media shapes culture and identity, her experiences with museums and art institutions, and the origin of fictional versions of herself in the forms of an AI model and the character in her semi-autobiographical sitcom She Mad. “At this point, the real and fictional Martines are very different,” Syms told Richman. “But in 2015, I was pulling from my own life experience because I was exploring representation. I was envisioning a fictionalized version of my own life in the traditional sitcom format, which was somewhat outdated in 2015, but which I felt was being reinscribed on Instagram.” Syms describes how the real and fictional Martines diverged several years later with her project Intro to Threat Modeling, “Which I made in 2017, when I started working with AI and AR. I had just finished this complicated AR app when ARKit dropped. It became much easier. I already had a 3D model of myself that I kept improving. I was learning ARKit and Blender with it. Teenie, which is what I call the model, became its own thing.” 

Bard alumnus Titus Ogilvie-Laing ’13, a beekeeper who maintains hives on New York City rooftops, was featured in the New York Times. “At the Empire State Building, on a roof of Madison Square Garden and on a terrace adjacent to the Chrysler Building, thousands of veritable worker bees have been turning nectar into honey,” writes Patrick McGeehan for the New York Times. On a recent warm day as he tended to hives belonging to the Danish Consulate, Ogilvie-Laing “blew smoke from silver canisters to calm the bees before opening the hives. Using metal tools shaped like small crowbars, they pried frames out of the wooden hive boxes. Each frame was covered with hundreds of bees and filled with combs brimming with raw honey.” Ogilvie-Laing, who also works part time in the photo and video department of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, beekeeps for the Queens-based company Best Bees, which manages hives in a variety of locations around the metropolitan area, including in Long Island City, the MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, and Madison Square Garden. 

Daniel Terna ’09 ICP ’15 was profiled in Artsy Artist’s “Artists On Our Radar,” an editorial series featuring five artists who made an impact in the past month through exhibitions, gallery openings, and other events. Terna’s latest exhibit The Terrain is on view at the Jack Barrett Gallery in Tribeca until December 14. The Terrain features Terna’s photographs of political events from 2017 to the present, including the Women’s March and the Global Climate Strike, along with day-to-day photographs from his own life. The Terrain was also reviewed by the New York Times, which writes that Terna's photography contains “narrative restraint... [it] keeps admitting how hard it is to really know another human being.”

Terna has exhibited at the BRIC Arts Media Biennial, MoMA PS1’s film program, and the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, among others, and will exhibit at the Smithsonian Museum’s National Portrait Gallery in May 2025. His photography is focused on intergenerational relationships, combining personal narratives with his outside perspective on current events. Of Terna’s 2023 photo Monastery, taken near the Dachau concentration camp where his father was imprisoned, Artsy writes, “The peaceful scene is transformed by its context, invoking the weight of memory and survival.”

On Monday, November 11, 2024, Bard College will host a Veterans Day event to rededicate the Old Gym at Bard as Memorial Hall in honor and remembrance of alumni/ae, faculty, and staff who have served the country in armed services. Dedication and remarks by Malia Du Mont ’95, vice president for strategy and policy and chief of staff at Bard, will take place at 11 am at 39 Henderson Circle Drive on Bard’s Annandale campus, followed by a reception at 11:30 am in Schwab ’52 Atrium in the Franklin W. Olin Humanities Building. The event will close with a talk given at 3 pm in Barringer House by Dev Crasta ’09, a clinical psychologist who works with veterans in the mental health field. The event is free and open to the public. Please register here.

The event is the culmination of efforts to honor Veterans Day which began last year, when Du Mont asked Bard archivist Helene Tieger ’85 to unearth the College’s veterans-related material. They discovered a 100-year-old handmade service flag, with dozens of stars representing students and alumni/ae of Bard who served during World War I, and learned that the building at the center of Bard’s campus, known as the Old Gym, was built in honor of those Bardians. A new sign at Memorial Hall will be unveiled at the event on Monday to share this history with the Bard community.

“I am looking forward to unveiling the new sign, reacquainting the Bard community with this important history, and helping our colleagues and students understand the role that Bard has played in enabling military service to our nation, in support of democracy and in defense of the US Constitution, throughout the institution's history,” said Du Mont, who is also leading plans to turn a room in the building into a permanent exhibition space where items about the military service of current and past members of the Bard community will have a permanent display in the center of the college’s campus.

Bard’s Center for Indigenous Studies (CfIS) hosted a convening in Venice to consider how Indigenous aesthetics, futurity, and arts intersect with global practices and modernism. The name of the convening, “if I read you/what I wrote bear/in mind I wrote it,” from a poem by Layli Long Soldier MFA ’14 (Oglala Lakota), gathered Native and non-Native poets, academics, artists, musicians, curators, teachers, and students to address the interdisciplinary, transnational nature of Bard Artist in Residence Jeffrey Gibson's (Mississippi Choctaw/Cherokee) work in the US Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale Arte.

“The convening as a whole felt like an energizing disco, a kaleidoscopic exploration of Native identities in all their rich dualities, contrasts, and dichotomies: familiar and unfamiliar, past and future, joy and sorrow, detailed and monumental,” wrote Sháńdíín Brown (Navajo) for Hyperallergic.
  
The three-day event hosted luminaries of Native American and Indigenous studies and cutting-edge performers. Panels on beads, materiality, economies of labor and trade, aesthetics, poetry, performance, silhouette, and color also celebrated contemporary Indigenous artists, writers, and activists while examining the continued segregation of Indigenous voices in conversations regarding taste making, trade, modernity, and power. Several Bard College faculty and staff participated including Christian Ayne Crouch, dean of graduate studies, associate professor of history and American and Indigenous studies, and CfIS director; Brandi Norton (Iñupiaq), CfIS curator of public programs; Melina Roise, CfIS program coordinator; and Dinaw Mengetsu, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of the Humanities and director of the Written Arts Program.

Further reading:
The Art of Jeffrey Gibson Shines in Venice (ICT)

Rock band Hello Mary, including bassist Mikaela Oppenheimer ’25, were profiled in a backstage photo essay in Rolling Stone. Alongside images of their October 24 concert at Bowery Ballroom in New York City, Rolling Stone spoke to the band about the significance of headlining a show at the Bowery and their journey through pre-concert nerves. Oppenheimer, shown in the photoset playing bass and also doing homework backstage, says the adrenaline from shows makes her “energized for 10 minutes—then I’m ready to sleep [for] a long time.”

Hello Mary was formed in 2019 and released its first EP, Ginger, in 2020. Their latest album, Emita Ox, was released this year on September 14. Rolling Stone calls the album “excellently moody,” and fellow band member Stella Wave agreed, “there’s definitely a different mood on this album … it’s darker and more subtle.” The band ended this touring season on November 3, and now are taking time to put together their next project.
 

On Monday, November 4, at 5 pm, Bard College will host a screening and discussion for the public premiere of the Open Society University Network’s (OSUN) documentary film, A Poll to Call Our Own: The Bard Voting Story. The screening will be followed by a discussion with key actors, including Bard alumni/ae Sarah deVeer ’17, Jonian Rafti ’15, Seamus Heady ’22 (producer/director), lawyer Yael Bromberg, Bard Vice President for Civic Engagement Erin Cannan, and Bard Vice President for Academic Affairs Jonathan Becker. The event will take place at the Weis Cinema in the Bertelsmann Campus Center. It will also be broadcast as a webinar. Register in advance for this webinar here.

The short film A Poll to Call Our Own: The Bard Voting Story chronicles the quarter-century fight at Bard over student voting rights, a period during which Bard students and administrators, with the support of groups like the Andrew Goodman Foundation and the New York Civil Liberties Union, won four lawsuits—three state and one federal—to protect students’ right to vote locally and to secure a polling place on the Bard campus. Bard’s experience helped inspire New York State to pass a law in 2022 mandating polling places at or near college campuses that have 300 or more registered on-campus voters.

The film was produced as an open educational resource for the course, Student Voting: Power, Politics and Race in the Fight for American Democracy. The course, which is supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and OSUN, is collaboratively taught by faculty from Bard, North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University (North Carolina A&T), Prairie View A&M University, and Tuskegee University. Students meet virtually weekly to discuss issues in the course, including case studies which explore histories of student voting at each institution. By the end of the project, there will be a film and written case study for each campus, chronicling their fight for student voting rights.

A Poll to Call Our Own: The Bard Voting Story contains interviews with key players in the fight for a polling place, including current and former students, key administrators, and legal counsel, as well as archival footage of students being harassed at a local poll site and speaking before the Red Hook Town Board about the need for a polling place on campus. It is accompanied by a written case study.

Director and producer Seamus Heady ’22 said: “Our film reveals the powers which have worked, often quietly, to stand between youth voters and the polls. Nobody goes out of their way to silence meaningless voices. It is my hope that youth everywhere, who may feel dubious about the power of their votes, take this film as an affirmation of the significant role they play in our democracy. Bard as an institution has committed significant resources to bring attention to local municipal injustice, which could otherwise go unnoticed. I believe all universities owe it to their students to do the same.”

Bard College President Leon Botstein, who was a litigant in two of the cases, said: “This film illustrates Bard’s belief in the inextricable link between education and democracy. I am proud to have served as a litigant with Bard students and administrators in our successful campaign to secure a polling place on campus and to advocate for a law mandating polling places on college campuses in New York State with 300 or more registered voters. As trust in institutions and faith in democracy wanes in the United States, particularly amongst American youth, it is more important now than ever to fight for justice and change through securing for all citizens the right to vote.”

Bard’s Vice President for Academic Affairs, Director of Bard’s Center for Civic Engagement, and Professor of Political Studies Jonathan Becker said: “The film covers many of the critical milestones of Bard’s long fight over student voting rights. It effectively captures how successive generations of Bard students mobilized with the support of the Bard administration and partnered with organizations like the Andrew Goodman Foundation and the New York Civil Liberties Union to fight for their democratic rights. It is a testament to the capacity of higher education institutions to serve as civic actors in an America whose democracy is increasingly under threat.”

Bard student Sierra Ford ’26, who is the head of Election@Bard and an Andrew Goodman Ambassador, said: “It is incredible to be a part of a legacy of rich voter advocacy at Bard. What a privilege it has been to join my peers, administration, and mentors in realizing an electorally engaged community.”

Bard Vice President for Civic Engagement Erin Cannan said: “The Bard student voting story is a reminder to all of us that fair elections require vigilance and engagement of young people. And that the fear of ‘over enfranchising’ students cannot be a reason for election officials to act illegally. This work is never finished.”

Assistant Producer at OSUN Maria Pankova said: “Working on this case study was an opportunity for me to learn more about Bard College’s history and the culture of civic engagement on campus. As a Bard graduate, I felt closer to my alma mater, knowing the full extent of voting activism taking place there and administration advocacy for students’ rights.”

In conversation for Bomb magazine, Bard alumnae and visual artists Adriana Farmiga MFA ’04 and Fawn Krieger MFA ’05, who lectured together at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for nearly a decade and now both teach at the Cooper Union School of Art, discussed Farmiga’s new body of work. The AVATAR series features scaled up wooden plywood sculptures described by Farmiga as masks or protest posters, currently on view at Marisa Newman Projects gallery in New York. “A mask allows an individual to lose or transcend their identity, while protest posters serve to signal one’s belief systems or demands,” Farmiga told Krieger. “Both function as barriers between the individual and the world; both peddle in anonymity and identification. In my hybridized version, the scaled-up form of the protest poster on a stick also assumes the role of a mask or shape of a sentient being.”

Valve Turners, a documentary feature film directed and produced by Steve Bonds-Liptay MS ’10, premiered and won the Climate Action Award in this year’s Climate Film Fest. Valve Turners follows a small group of activists from the Pacific Northwest as they turn the valves and halt the flow of five oil pipelines entering the United States from Canada to spotlight the climate emergency. Facing felony charges, they defend their actions as necessary in light of decades of political inaction and urgent warnings from climate scientists. The film festival called Bonds-Liptay’s feature “riveting and incisive.” Bonds-Liptay graduated from Bard’s Graduate Programs in Sustainability with a masters degree in environmental policy. 

The 2024 Dance Magazine Awards honor Bard alumna Joanna Haigood ’79, alongside George Faison, Liz Lerman, Mavis Staines, Shen Wei, and Mikhail Baryshnikov, whose work with Baryshnikov Arts earned him the Chairman’s Award. From its first year in 1954, the Dance Magazine Awards have been given annually in appreciation of the artistry, integrity, and resilience that dance artists have demonstrated over the course of their careers. The theme for this year’s awards is “the stage and beyond”—the dancers, choreographers, and educators recognized are invested in work that often transcends the proscenium.

“Since 1980 Joanna Haigood has been creating work that uses natural, architectural, and cultural environments as points of departure for movement exploration and narrative,” says the Dance Magazine Awards statement. “Her stages have included grain terminals, a clock tower, the pope’s palace, military forts, and a mile of neighborhood streets in the South Bronx. Her work has been commissioned by many arts institutions, including Dancing in the Streets, Jacob’s Pillow, the Walker Art Center, the National Black Arts Festival, and Festival d’Avignon. Haigood has had the privilege to mentor many extraordinary young artists at the École Nationale des Arts du Cirque, the Trinity Laban Conservatoire, Spelman College, Stanford University, the San Francisco Circus Center, and Zaccho Studio.”

Brandon Blackwood ’13, Bard alumnus and designer, has been named in TIME magazine’s TIME100 Next list for 2024, which highlights influential figures who are shaping the future of business, entertainment, sports, politics, science, health, and other fields. “As one of few preeminent Black designers, Blackwood represents changemakers who lead by example with fearlessness, innovation, and a steadfast embrace of inclusivity,” writes Elaine Welteroth for TIME. “His influence extends beyond the runway, inspiring a new generation of designers to merge style with substance. The B on his bags not only honors their namesake—it also reflects his brilliance across every design, collection, and work of art he offers to this world.”

Bard alumni/ae Rosa Polin ’16 and Ryan Rusiecki ’20, graduates of the photography program, have been featured in Cultured magazine’s Young Photographers 2024, a list highlighting the next generation of image makers who have dedicated themselves to photography as an art form. “I try to use photography the same way I try to live the rest of my life,” said Polin ’16, who blends realism and the uncanny in intimate imagery. “I am trying to find my voice. It’s all a big mixture of shame, curiosity, fear, playfulness, boredom, irony, sadness, lust, humor, and empathy.” For his environmental photography, Rusiecki ’20 has revisited the same subject each year, watching its transformation under imminent threat. “The subject of my practice — the Hudson River estuary — is a globally rare habitat that is under threat by rising sea levels and climate change,” he said. “I have only been able to photograph the estuary after having spent four years of repeated return, and multidisciplinary research, to understand its nuances and visual fragility. I consider the estuary a friend.”