Bardian - Winter 2024

Bardian BARD COLLEGE WINTER 2024

Family and Alumni/ae Weekend, October 27–29, 2023, showcased nearly every program on Bard’s 1,000-acre campus, including tours of Montgomery Place, the Bard Cemetery, and Blithewood; athletic events; concerts; and opportunities to meet faculty and take a (quiz-free) class.

Cover: Performance artist Eric-Paul Riege (Diné) engages with a series of his soft sculptures of oversized Diné earrings during opening weekend of Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art, and Self-Determination since 1969 at the Hessel Museum of Art. Curated by Candice Hopkins (Carcross/Tagish First Nation), CCS Bard Fellow in Indigenous Art History and Curatorial Studies, the exhibition celebrated the partnership established in 2022 with Forge Project to provide dedicated programming on key topics and methods in Native American and Indigenous studies throughout the Bard network. (See page 26).

OFFICE OF DEVELOPMENT AND ALUMNI/AE AFFAIRS Debra Pemstein Vice President for Development and Alumni/ae Affairs 845-758-7405, pemstein@bard.edu Jane Brien ’89 Director of Alumni/ae Affairs 845-758-7406, brien@bard.edu

OFFICE OF ADMISSION Mackie Siebens ’12 Director of Admission bard.edu/admission admission@bard.edu 845-758-7472

issuu.com/bardian

ADMITTED STUDENTS DAY SATURDAY, APRIL 13, 2024

1-800-BARDCOL alumni@bard.edu alums.bard.edu #bardianandproud

Admitted students are invited to explore Bard’s beautiful campus, speak with current students, meet with faculty, attend panel discussions on life inside and outside the classroom, and much, much more. For information and to register, visit bard.edu/admission/admitted.

@bardalumni @bardcollege

©2024 Bard College.

Published by the Bard Publications Office.

A good-faith effort has been made to supply complete and correct credits; if there are errors or omissions, please contact bardianmagazine@bard.edu.

Printed by Quality Printing, Pittsfield, MA. Please direct Class Notes submissions to alumni@bard.edu

Photos, this page and front cover, by Karl Rabe

Bardian WINTER 2024

Fisher Center at 20, photo by Karl Rabe

Rematriart, photo by Karl Rabe

Welcome to the Jungle (Sarah Dunphy-Lelii)

FEATURES FISHER CENTER AT 20 2

WELCOME TO THE JUNGLE 30

REMATRIART 26

163RD COMMENCEMENT 36

ON AND OFF CAMPUS 8

ALUMNI/AE PROFILES

Illinois, photo by Maria Baranova

BOOKS BY BARDIANS 42 CLASS NOTES 48 IN MEMORIAM 55

CREATIVE DISRUPTION 16 Stacy Burnett ’20 MBA ’23 WITNESS 18 Emily Schmall ’05 BIOTECH HUMANIST 23 Dawn Mattoon ’94

THE HEART OF ASIAN STUDIES 56

A ROLE TO PLAY 24

Li-hua Ying

Youssef Kerkour ’00

FISHER CE AT 20

NTER

By James Rodewald ’82

The Fisher Center isn’t quite old enough to drink, but from its first days it has been a place that makes you think. And feel. And see. It has been, from the beginning, an experiment. Could a world-class performing arts center present performances of neglected works to a public that may not have known what it was missing? Could such a place not only coexist with the College’s teaching programs but benefit from the interdisciplinary cross-pollination? What alchemy would arise from this bubbling cauldron of creativity? In 2003, the Fisher Center was, in the words of its artistic director and chief executive Gideon Lester, “A blank canvas, a story waiting to be discovered.” That story is still just beginning—rebirth and renewal are in the Fisher Center’s DNA—and two decades on, the 20th Anniversary Season: Breaking Ground is a celebration of the artists, audiences, students, faculty, and communities that have written the story so far, and that will imagine it into the future.

Henri VIII Directed by Jean-Romain Vesperini American Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Leon Botstein Alfred Walker as Henri VIII Amanda Woodbury as Catherine D’Aragon Lindsay Ammann as Anne Boleyn Photo by Stephanie Berger

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Highlights of the 20th-anniversary season included Camille Saint-Saëns’s 1883 opera Henri VIII, which enjoyed wide popularity in the 40 years following its premiere, but sank into the shadows as a result of the changes brought about by the rise of modernism in the arts. The American premiere of Henri VIII, which did not occur until its centennial, and its concert performance at the Bard Music Festival in 2012, led to revivals in Boston and Brussels. The New York Times called the opera “an ideal project for Leon Botstein, Bard’s president, the music director of the American Symphony Orchestra and a leading guide to lesser played corners of the repertory,” and praised this year’s production as, “well staged and excitingly sung . . . a grand and compelling, often thrilling work that deserves a more frequent spot on

stages.” The Times also included Henri VIII in its roundup of the best classical music performances of 2023.

An honored guest at one of the performances of Henri VIII was Frank Gehry, the legendary architect who designed the Fisher Center. His presence amplified the experimental, adventuresome, and even iconoclastic nature of the Fisher Center project. The building is unexpected, striking, and energetic on the outside, with its forest backdrop and swirling metal roof above an expansive glass entryway, while inside all is elegance and warmth.

Though the building has aged well, the College’s needs have grown, which is why ground will soon be broken on a building, designed by Maya Lin, that will provide studio space as well as a home for Fisher Center LAB, the

commissioning program for professional artists (see Bardian, Spring 2023). The Fisher Center project is more important than ever. As the Times pointed out in its Henri VIII review, “There are ever fewer companies and presenters, even in a cultural center like New York, doing works like this, let alone in full, thoughtful stagings; Botstein, and his annual opera production at Bard, seem more invaluable by the year.”

This year’s Bard Music Festival, Vaughan Williams and His World, was the 33rd (before the Fisher Center was built, the festival’s orchestral concerts took place outdoors under a tent, leading Botstein to lament, in 2000, “The larger concerts are pretty soggy”).

The first evening kicked off with a bit of audience participation, with the sold-out crowd joining the Bard Festival Chorale

Sir John in Love. American Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Leon Botstein; Bard Festival Chorale, James Bagwell, choral director; Alison Moritz, director; Brandie Sutton as Anne Page; Joshua Blue as Fenton; Craig Colclough as Sir John Falstaff.

Photo by Stephanie Berger

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SummerScape 2023

in singing “Come Down, O Love Divine” (1906), a hymn set by Ralph Vaughan Williams for inclusion in a hymnal he edited at the behest of a group of leftwing Anglo-Catholic clergy and laymen.

As Vaughan Williams wrote in 1912, “The composer must not shut himself up and think about art. He must live with his fellows and make his art an expression of the whole life of the community.”

The Bard Music Festival closed with a semi-staged production of Vaughan Williams’s Falstaff-themed opera Sir John in Love. The work’s first professional staging took place in April 1946 and it was revived in 1958, but beyond three studio recordings (the BBC in 1956, EMI in 1975, and Chandos in 2001), further professional performances have been rare.

Frank Gehry in Sosnoff Theater. Photo by Karl Rabe

Ya Tseen, the electro-soul music project of artist Nicholas Galanin (Lingít/Unangax̂), transfixed a sold-out Spiegeltent crowd.

Galanin’s ongoing performance White Carver was part of CCS Bard’s Indian Theater (see page 26).

Photo by Maria Baranova

galan.in

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Woven throughout SummerScape, the summer-long party that is the Spiegeltent celebrated 50 years of hip hop with LayeRhythm, a collective of DJs, MCs, musicians, and dancers; vibrated to the electro-soul of Ya Tseen, led by Lingít/Unangax̂ artist Nicholas Galanin and copresented with the Center for Indigenous Studies at Bard; swooned to the country-tinged vocals of Lola Kirke ’12; shook to the hot jazz of The Hot Sardines; funked with art-rock, new-wave goddess Nona Hendryx (aka Mama Funk) and the Nasty Gals; and danced ’til dawn with the artists of Illinois at the After Hours Hot For You Disco.

This season was dedicated to the founders of the Fisher Center, whose vision has made possible extraordinary artistic experiences— past, present and future. Leadership support for the 20th-anniversary season was generously provided by László Z. Bitó ’60 and Olivia Cariño Bitó, Annie and Jim Bodnar, Mayree Clark and Jeff Williams/Silverleaf Foundation, Jeanne Donovan Fisher, Alison L. Lankenau, Lawrence and Geraldine Laybourne, the Martin and Toni Sosnoff Foundation, and Felicitas S. Thorne.

Those artists had come straight from the world premiere of a SummerScape commission. Illinois saw Tony Award–winner Justin Peck transform Sufjan Stevens’s 2005 cult concept album of the same name into a full-length theatrical performance with a cast of virtuosic dancers, singers, and musicians in a narrative crafted with Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury. Sold out crowds were taken on a journey through the American heartland, from campfire storytelling to the edges of the cosmos. This was the Fisher Center at its experimental best, bringing art to the community and the community to art. “All of these projects are research, which is why they belong in a college,” Lester told the Times.

“What these artists are doing is investigating something, experimenting, creating something in a new way.”

The Fisher Center has been creating, supporting, and presenting those experiments for 20 years. And it’s just the beginning.

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SummerScape 2023

Illinois, photo by Maria Baranova

The Fisher Center’s 20th Anniversary Concert and Celebration on October 21, 2023, included a talk by designer Maya Lin (top right); a rare performance of Béla Bartók’s The Wooden Prince (bottom),

by The Orchestra Now (TŌN) led by Leon Botstein; and the Sosnoff stage debut of Lisa Fischer, accompanied by Grand Baton and TŌN conducted by James Bagwell (top left).

Photos by Chris Kayden

ton.bard.edu

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DAVIS PROJECT FOR PEACE GRANT Ariha Shahed ’26 won a $10,000 Davis Foundation Projects for Peace grant for her project Train Track to Right Track: Supporting Bangladeshis Who Call the Railway Tracks Their Home.

Shahed will partner with BRAC Bangladesh, a nongovernmental organization that works to help people “graduate” from extreme poverty. Using the Project for Peace funds, she will connect families to essential social protection programs to help them improve their economic situations, keep their children in school, and access necessary healthcare.

GILMAN SCHOLARSHIPS

Ariha Shahed ’26, photo by Nour Annan HRA ’24

AFTER CHINUA ACHEBE The groundbreaking Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe (1930–2013), Charles P. Stevenson Jr. Professor of Languages and Literature at Bard College from 1990 to 2009, was best known for his debut novel, Things Fall Apart (1958). He went on to write numerous other books, including works of fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and children’s books, and received more than 30 honorary degrees and many awards. On September 22, 2023, Bard honored Achebe’s memory with a daylong event—After Chinua Achebe: African Writing and the Future— that began with a performance by Assistant Professor of Dance Souleymane Badolo and culminated in the unveiling of a plaque and dedication of a room in Stevenson Library. In between, Distinguished Professor of Literature Nuruddin Farah and Legrand Ramsey Professor of Anthropology John Ryle discussed the postcolonial generation of African writers; John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of the Humanities Dinaw Mengestu and Teju Cole (former distinguished professor of literature and now Gore Vidal Professor of the Practice of Creative Writing at Harvard) spoke about “Writing beyond Africa: The African Imagination in the Diaspora”; and musician-activist DJ Switch and former Bard College Berlin faculty member Fatin Abbas (now a lecturer at MIT) engaged with “Activism and the Word: Writing, Speech, and Song in African Arts and Culture.”

Penguin Random House generously provided 150 copies of Chinua Achebe’s African Trilogy (Penguin Classics, 2017)—which is made up of Things Fall Apart, No Longer at Ease, and Arrow of God—as well as vital support for the day-long symposium.

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Last December, five Bard College students were awarded Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarships. They receive up to $5,000 (or up to $8,000 if they also receive the Gilman Critical Need Language Award) to apply toward their study abroad or internship program costs. Written arts major Havvah Keller ’24 won a $4,000 Gilman scholarship to study in Valparaíso, Chile. Philosophy and German Studies joint major Bella Bergen ’24 and art history and visual culture majors Elsa Joiner ’24 and Sasha Alcocer ’24 were awarded $5,000 Gilman–German Academic Exchange Service scholarships to study at Bard College Berlin. Asian studies and global and international studies joint major Kelany De La Cruz ’24 received a $5,000 Gilman scholarship, a $5,000 Fund for Education Abroad scholarship, and a $5,000 Freeman-ASIA scholarship to study in Taipei, Taiwan. All five spent the spring semester abroad and are back in Annandale and excited to be working on their Senior Projects. In May, three more students were honored with Gilmans: piano performance and economics dual major Nita Vemuri ’24 was awarded a $3,000 Gilman scholarship, which she will use to study in Paris, France, next January. Dance major Zara Boss ’25 received a $3,000 Gilman scholarship to study at Sophia University in Tokyo, Japan, for the spring 2024 semester through the Council on International Educational Exchange (CIEE). Boss also received a $5,000 FreemanASIA award, which provides scholarships for US undergraduates with demonstrated financial need to study abroad in East or Southeast Asia. And historical studies major Chi-Chi Ezekwenna ’25 won a $3,000 Gilman scholarship to attend Kyung Hee University in Seoul, South Korea, from fall 2023 to spring 2024. The Gilman Program, which was established in 2001, is sponsored by the US Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs and is supported in its implementation by the Institute of International Education.

From left: Jesse Shipley, Ngozi Achebe, Chidi Achebe ’92, Christie Achebe, Leon Botstein, Nwando Achebe, photo by Karl Rabe

writtenarts.bard.edu

A BRONX TALE

NEW PROGRAMS In an increasingly data-driven world, there is a crucial need for the high-level skills necessary to manage, understand, and creatively harness information. These skills are important not just for employment but also for a democratic and pluralistic society to survive, let alone flourish. Citizens will have to identify and navigate questions of representation, fairness, and the power dynamics encoded in the seemingly neutral digital sphere. In response to student demand for expanded instruction in these areas as well as the increasing availability of data relevant to numerous areas of study, the College has created an interdisciplinary Data Analytics concentration (DA). The concentration will provide students in all disciplines with the computational skills to do data analysis, modeling and simulation, and data visualization, and more generally to understand the concept of data-driven decision making and predictions about the future. DA, which will focus on the use of data analysis to understand existing aspects of society, was conceived as a complement to existing majors, and each DA student’s work will culminate in a Senior Project in their major that incorporates a significant data analysis component.

Opening ceremony for Bard High School Early College Bronx. Daniel Weisberg, Leon Botstein, and Janet Peguero stand in the center, cutting the ribbon, photo by Danny Santana Photography

In partnership with Montefiore Einstein and the New York City Department of Education, Bard has opened its first campus in the Bronx. Bard Early College Bronx, which opened in September 2023, expands access to exceptional and inclusive academic and career pathways. Students will gain a strong foundation in the liberal arts and sciences and an introduction to biomedical science and research while earning an associate in arts degree from Bard College—and 60 transferable credits—alongside their New York State Regents diploma. The school, which is tuition-free and will ultimately serve up to 500 students (with 90% of those seats committed to students from the Bronx), is led by Principal Siska Brutsaert, an accomplished scientist who has been a New York City public school educator for more than a decade.

A recent study by Education Trust–New York, a statewide education policy and advocacy organization, found that Bard’s two other New York early colleges have the highest on-time bachelor’s degree completion for lowincome students of all public high schools in the state.

Bard College Berlin (BCB) students can now pursue a bachelor’s degree in Artistic Practice and Society (APS).

The program, which was launched in the Fall 2023 semester, includes a broad-based curriculum in the humanities and social sciences. APS majors examine the ways that understandings of art have been shaped historically and continue to transform, completing courses at the foundational and advanced levels in visual and performing arts, photography, and film as well as elective courses in a host of other fields, such as architecture, ceramics, sound, and dance.

They also acquire familiarity with historical and current artistic movements and institutional transformations, and are encouraged to contribute to new approaches to curation.

APS, like BCB’s two other BA programs—Economics, Politics, and Social Thought and Humanities, the Arts, and Social Sciences—provides ample opportunity for civic and social engagement.

BROTHER ALIVE Zain Khalid was awarded the 2024 Bard Fiction Prize for his debut novel, Brother Alive (Grove Press, 2022), which also won the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award and the Community of Literary Magazines & Presses Firecracker Award for fiction, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize for best first book in any genre, and was shortlisted for the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction. During the fall 2024 semester Khalid will be in residency at the College, where he will continue his writing, meet informally with students, and give a public reading. The Bard Fiction Prize, which was established in 2001, is intended to encourage and support young writers of fiction and provide them with an opportunity to work in a fertile intellectual environment.

Zain Khalid

dataanalytics.bard.edu

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ART OF THE ARCHIVE Renowned curator and critic Robert Storr, who was a member of the Bard faculty from 1999 to 2008, curator at the Museum of Modern Art between 1990 and 2002, and dean of the Yale School of Art from 2006 to 2016, has gifted his library and archive to the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College (CCS). The 25,000-volumes include literature covering topics in 20th-century art history, artist monographs, periodicals, and exhibition catalogues. The collection also includes studies produced by artists who worked with Storr, who says he hopes the archive can offer “pieces of the puzzle” for rising experts in the field, ones he says they aren’t likely to find in standard texts on modern and contemporary art or online. Tom Eccles, executive director of CCS and founding director of the College’s Hessel Museum of Art, called the gift “a gamechanger.”

CCS also recently acquired the papers of distinguished scholar and art historian Eddie Chambers, the first in a series of archival acquisitions dedicated to an initiative cofunded by the Marieluise Hessel Foundation called Black Exhibition Histories. The Chambers collection spans the late 1970s to the 2010s and includes rare publications, invitations, flyers, press, photographs, and manuscripts primarily documenting British Black and Caribbean artists from the African Diaspora.

Two recent gifts to the Stevenson Library have also greatly enhanced students’ ability to conduct original research. Carla Sayers Tabourne ’69 donated more than 1,000 books about the global Black experience, including volumes of history, drama, poetry, fine arts, and literature, many of which are signed first editions. The collection, which was given to her by noted bibliophile Clarence Leroy Holte, her best friend’s father, is housed in the new Carla Sayers Tabourne ’69 Reading Room in Stevenson Library. After Associate Professor of Chinese Li-hua Ying died, in January (see p. 56), her husband, Charles Chao, donated her library to the College.

The collection focuses primarily on modern Chinese literature and literary criticism, but includes some surprises, like a complete punctuated set of the Chinese dynastic histories. Also included are books on Tibetan history, literature, and culture that relate to Ying’s most recent research project.

Robert Storr seated in his home library, photo by Andrew Moore

Suki Kim, photo by Joanna Eldredge Morrissey, courtesy of MacDowell

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ccs.bard.edu

WORDS SPEAK LOUDLY Investigative journalist, novelist, and essayist Suki Kim is the recipient of the 2023–24 Keith Haring Fellowship in Art and Activism from the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College and Bard’s Human Rights Project. Kim has been traveling to North Korea since 2002, contributing groundbreaking reporting on the country to publications including the New York Review of Books, Harper’s, New Republic, and New Yorker. Her writing has earned her a PEN Open Book Award for her novel The Interpreter (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux; 2003), Guggenheim Fellowship, Open Society Fellowship, Fulbright US Scholar Award, Berlin Prize from the American Academy in Berlin, and Harvard Radcliffe Institute fellowship. Kim’s New York Times bestseller Without You, There Is No Us: Undercover Among the Sons of North Korea’s Elite (Crown, 2014) was based on her experience living among the country’s future leaders in Pyongyang for six months as a visiting English instructor during the final year of Kim Jong-il’s reign. The Haring Fellowship represents the longstanding commitment by Bard College and the Keith Haring Foundation to support scholarship and creative practices at the intersection of art and activism.

OBJECTS AS SUBJECT Bard Graduate Center (BGC) in New York City continues to bring to the public critically acclaimed projects on the decorative arts, design history, and material culture. BGC exhibitions emerge from classroom teaching and faculty research, and offer visitors cutting-edge perspectives on objects—from the mundane to the extraordinary—and their stories.

SIGHTLINES on Peace, Power & Prestige: Metal Arts in Africa, on view through December 31, 2023, features leading contemporary artists in conversation with historic African metal arts.

Sculptures, photography, weavings, metal work, and multimedia installations by Radcliffe Bailey, Sammy Baloji, Sharif Bey, Lubaina Himid, Bronwyn Katz, Kapwani Kiwanga, Abigail Lucien, Tsedaye Makonnen, Otobong Nkanga, Julia Phillips, Zohra Opoku, Nari Ward, and Amanda Williams create “sightlines” with staffs and figures by the Mande smiths of Mali; regalia of the Edo chiefs of Nigeria; sacred objects of the Tusian, Gan, and Lobi peoples of Burkina Faso; ceremonial swords, gold weights, and personal adornment of the Akan people of Ghana; currencies, ceremonial staffs, and weaponry from Congo; and other extraordinary works in metal drawn in part from Peace, Power & Prestige, curated by Susan Cooksey at the University of Florida’s Harn Museum of Art. BGC invited writer and critic Jessica Lynne, novelist Maaza Mengiste, composer JJJJJerome Ellis, and choreographer Okwui Okpokwasili to share their own ways of seeing the exhibited artworks through time, form, and space—and visitors can join them at special events in December to experience their sightlines live.

Opening February 23 and running through July 7, 2024, Sonia Delaunay: Living Art showcases more than 200 objects secured from major international lenders, illuminating Delaunay’s kaleidoscopic output through all periods of her career from the early Parisian avant-garde of the 1910s to the spirited 1970s. Delaunay (1885– 1979) was one of the most influential French artists of the 20th century. Her remarkably diverse and interconnected body of work focused on the primacy of color and a synthesis of the arts. Painter, artisan, and designer, she embraced modernity and harnessed the creative power of collaboration in the realms of fashion, textiles, interiors, books, mosaics, and tapestries. The exhibition traces a lifetime of creative expression and presents an innovator who transcended conventional artistic boundaries and devotedly lived her art.

Radcliffe Bailey, Ebo’s Landing, 2013 Steel, photograph on steel, glass lantern, cotton, and mixed media ©Radcliffe Bailey. Courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York City

Sonia Delaunay, Mosaïque horizontale, 1954 Glass tiles set in cement Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne, Paris ©CNAC/MNAM, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY. Photo by Audrey Laurans. ©Pracusa

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AN-MY LÊ AT THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART A major exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, Between Two Rivers/Giũa hai giòng sông/Entre deux rivières, is the first to present An-My Lê’s photography alongside her film, video, embroidery, and sculpture. Lê, Charles Franklin Kellogg and Grace E. Ramsey Kellogg Professor in the Arts, is well known for her engagement with conflict of all sorts, and with the ways that warfare and other forms of violence, exclusion, and terror are depicted and mythologized (see Bardian, Spring 2011). As Holland Cotter wrote in the New York Times, “with poetic attention to politics and landscape, she meditates on the meaning of perpetual violence, war’s environmental impact, and the significance of diaspora.” The show opened November 5, 2023 and runs through March 9, 2024.

Above: Black Cats, Fuck Communism, from the series dô-mi-nô, 2021 Left: New Orleans, from the series Delta, 2011 ©2022 An-My Lê, courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery

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NEW FACULTY Alma Guillermoprieto has joined the faculty as distinguished visiting professor in the Division of Languages and Literature. A Mexican reporter and writer, Guillermoprieto began her Englishlanguage career in journalism in 1978, and broke the story of the 1981 El Mozote massacre by the army in El Salvador. She has written extensively about Latin America for the New Yorker, New York Review of Books, and National Geographic Magazine, among others; and has published eight books, including The Heart That Bleeds and Looking for History.

The Bard Dance Program has partnered, with French cultural institution Villa Albertine to bring choreographers and performers Marcela Santander and Volmir Cordeiro to the dance faculty in Annandale for the fall semester. Next June, Bard dance students will have the opportunity to attend the international dance platform CAMPING at the CN D in Pantin, France, where they will work with choreographers from around the globe, perform their own choreographic projects, and develop teaching practices.

Elías Beltrán ’17 has joined the Bard Prison Initiative (BPI) faculty. Beltrán, who is completing his PhD in comparative literature at Cornell University, is the first BPI alumnus to join the BPI faculty. His research focuses on postcolonial and decolonial trauma as well as the history and culture of the Caribbean and its literature. He has taught at Cornell, and worked at the Bard Microcollege at Brooklyn Public Library in its early years.

Jace Clayton is the new director of graduate studies at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts and joins Bard’s Studio Arts faculty as an assistant professor. Clayton, an artist and writer based in New York City, is also known for his work as DJ/rupture. Recent projects include They Are Part, a solo exhibition at MassArt Art Museum, and the Julius Eastman Memorial Dinner, a touring performance piece for grand pianos, electronics, and voice.

Sucharita Kanjilal, assistant professor of anthropology, is a former journalist from Mumbai, India. Her research combines approaches from economic anthropology, anthropology of media, digital anthropology, anthropology of food, and theories of affect, while highlighting feminist, postcolonial, and anticaste epistemologies.

Sucharita Kanjilal

Nathanael Aschenbrenner has joined the Division of Social Studies as assistant professor of history. He is a historian of crosscultural contacts in the late medieval and early modern Mediterranean; coeditor of The Invention of Byzantium in Early Modern Europe (Dumbarton Oaks Press, 2022); has published articles on the history of scholarship, Byzantine oratory, and late medieval politics; and is working on a monograph about political and ideological competition over the legacy of the Roman Empire in the Mediterranean world titled Empire Beyond Rome: Antiquity, Legitimacy, and Power in the Mediterranean, 1200–1550.

Soonyoung Lee joins the faculty as visiting assistant professor of Korean literature, language, and culture. Her appointment, which is supported with funding from the Korea Foundation, is the first step toward building a Korean Program at Bard and part of a broader effort to expand the Asian Studies Program. Lee’s areas of research and teaching interests include contemporary Korean literature and film, Korean popular culture, East Asian film, Cold War studies, trans-Asian cultural studies, critical race theories, and postcolonial studies.

Walid Raad is distinguished visiting professor of photography in the Division of the Arts for the 2023–24 academic year. Raad works across installation, performance, video, and photography to explore how historical events of physical and psychological violence affect bodies, minds, culture, and narrative.

International exhibitions include Documenta, the Istanbul Biennial, Vienna Biennale, Whitney Biennial, and Venice Biennale. He has had one-person shows at the Hamburger Bahnhof (Berlin, Germany), Museo Reina Sofia (Madrid, Spain), Whitechapel Art Gallery (London, England), and Carré d’Art (Nîmes, France).

Nathanael Aschenbrenner, photo by Anna Bilyk ’27

Youssef Ait Benasser, assistant professor of economics, earned their BA in political science from Sciences Po Paris, MSc in economics and public policy from École Polytechnique, and PhD in economics from University of Oregon. A native of Rabat, Morocco, Benasser’s research centers on empirical assessments of recent trends in international trade policy and their impacts on the global flow of goods and money.

Youssef Ait Benasser

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FACULTY RECOGNITION Professor of Literature Hua Hsu won a 2023 Pulitzer Prize for his memoir Stay True, which also won the National Book Critics Circle award for autobiography. Hsu is a staff writer at the New Yorker and author of A Floating Chinaman: Fantasy and Failure Across the Pacific (2016) and the forthcoming essay collection Impostor Syndrome. He is a contributor to CBS News’s Sunday Morning and serves on the governance board of Critical Minded, a collaboration between the Ford Foundation and the Nathan Cummings Foundation. He was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in criticism in 2018 (New Yorker); was a finalist for the James Beard Award for Food Writing in 2013 (for “Wokking the Suburbs,” Lucky Peach); and his work has been anthologized in Best Music Writing (2010 and 2012) and Best African American Essays 2010.

Hua Hsu, photo by Caleb Lee Adams/Stills.com

Valerie Barr, photo by Shaunessy Renker ’23

Filmmaker Ephraim Asili MFA ’11, associate professor and director of the Film and Electronic Arts Program at Bard, has been awarded a JustFilms grant through the Ford Foundation.

Asili will use his grant for Don & Moki: Organic Music Society, exploring the collaborative and communal art practice developed by jazz multi-instrumentalist, theorist, and educator Don Cherry and his wife and primary collaborator, visual artist Moki Cherry.

Asili also was named a 2023–24 Harvard Radcliffe Institute Film Study Center Fellow. Radcliffe fellowships offer scholars in the humanities, sciences, social sciences, and arts as well as writers, journalists, and other distinguished professionals the chance to pursue ambitious projects for a full year in an interdisciplinary setting.

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Valerie Barr, Bard College’s Margaret Hamilton Distinguished Professor of Computer Science, has been elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Barr, who has been a national leader in efforts to broaden participation in computing and connect the field to a wide array of liberal arts disciplines, was honored for “distinguished contributions to computer science education, and to increasing the diversity in the computing fields.” Last year, David and Rosalie Rose Distinguished Professor of Science, Mathematics, and Computing Felicia Keesing became the first Bard faculty member to be honored with this AAAS distinction.

More than 3.5 percent of this year’s Guggenheim Fellows are Bardians. Professors Felicia Keesing, Laura Larson, and Jordan Weber as well as alumnae Jessica Segall ’00, Sasha Phyars-Burgess ’10, and Martine Syms MFA ’18 are among the 171 recipients of 2023 fellowships, chosen by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation from a pool of nearly 2,500 applicants. Keesing (David and Rosalie Rose Distinguished Professor of Science, Mathematics, and Computing) was recognized for her research on the ecology of infectious diseases; Larson (Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts photography cochair) and PhyarsBurgess for their work in photography; and Weber (visiting artist in residence), Segall, and Syms for their work in the arts.

Daniel Mendelsohn, Charles Ranlett Flint Professor of Humanities at Bard, has been awarded the rank of Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French Minister of Culture, Rima Abdul Malak. The honor is bestowed upon those who have distinguished themselves by their creativity in the cultural spheres, or by their support for the distribution of knowledge and works that form the wealth of French cultural heritage.

Tania El Khoury, director of the Center for Human Rights and the Arts and distinguished artist in residence in the Theater and Performance Program, is one of 11 recipients of a 2023 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts. Honorees receive $75,000 and a residency at CalArts, which administers the award program on behalf of the Herb Alpert Foundation. The annual awards, which were established in 1994 by legendary trumpeter, A&M Records cofounder, and philanthropist Herb Alpert and his wife, Grammy-winning singer Lani Hall, recognize and fund risk-taking midcareer artists in the fields of dance, music, film/video, theater, and visual arts.

Tania El Khoury, photo by Nour Annan HRA ’23

The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts has awarded a Curatorial Research Fellowship of $50,000 to collaborators Susan Aberth, Edith C. Blum Professor of Art History and Visual Culture, and Gilbert Vicario CCS ’96, chief curator of the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM).

The fellowship will support research for a 2024 exhibition (tentatively titled Messengers of the New Age) at PAMM, which will examine metaphysical and esoteric impulses that influenced a cohort of artistic and academic individuals in the Americas in the 20th century, with a focus on women, queer, and marginalized artists. Aberth was also awarded a 2023 Nancy B. Negley Artists Residency. She was in residence at the Dora Maar House in Provence, France, this fall along with longtime collaborator Tere Arcq, the leading scholar on Spanish-born Mexican artist Remedios Varo.

They worked on Cauldrons & Curanderas: The Magical Relationship of Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo, an illustrated historical account of the magical and artistic works produced by the two artists working together.

The Terra Foundation for American Art awarded a $71,000 exhibitions grant in support of a spring 2024 exhibition curated by Bard College Professor of Art History and Visual Culture Tom Wolf at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at SUNY New Paltz. The temporary-loan exhibition, which is based on extensive original research by Wolf into histories of cross-cultural inspiration and influence among the artists Miguel Covarrubias (Mexican), Isami Doi (Japanese Hawaiian), Aaron Douglas (African American), and Winold Reiss (German American), is scheduled to open February 3, 2024.

Souleymane Badolo performing at the opening of After Chinua Achebe: African Writing and the Future symposium, Bard College, September 2023, photo by Karl Rabe

Souleymane Badolo, assistant professor of dance, and American and Indigenous Studies Program Assistant Professor Kite (aka Suzanne Kite MFA ’18) have won 2023 Creative Capital “Wild Futures: Art, Culture, Impact” Awards, which fund the creation of “experimental, risk-taking projects that push boundaries formally and thematically, venturing into wild, out-there, never-before-seen concepts, and future universes real or imagined.” Badolo, who has been on the Bard faculty since 2017, is a dancer and choreographer, and founder of the Burkina Faso–based troupe Kongo Ba Téria, which fuses traditional African dance with Western contemporary dance. Kite, an Oglala Lakota performance artist, visual artist, and composer, also won a 2023 United States Artists Fellowship in Media, which supports her ongoing artistic and professional development and comes with an unrestricted $50,000 cash award.

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STACY BURNETT ’20 MBA ’23

CREATIVE DISRUPTION When Stacy Burnett ’20 MBA ’23 received her letter of acceptance to the Bard Prison Initiative (BPI), she didn’t want to open it.

She’d just found out that five other people from her unit were admitted, and with only 10 or so slots available, she was worried about her odds. “I opened it in private in my cell later and just sobbed,” she recalls. “I knew my whole life was about to change for the better, and you can’t say that very often when you’re in prison. I knew that I was joining something much bigger than me.”

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Burnett thrived in BPI, honing a talent for writing and discovering new interests along the way. Although initially resistant to taking a required course on public health, Burnett soon realized that the field was a good match for her: she could channel her passion for topics like the environmental impact of microplastics into actions that would actually create change. She also became the resident research maven, helping her classmates learn how to navigate JSTOR, a digital library of academic articles and journals. Before her

Photo by Samuel Stuart Hollenshead

sentence was up, Burnett was offered work release, which essentially would have allowed her to leave prison six months early; she turned it down because it would have meant missing out on a semester of school. “That was a crystallizing moment for me,” she says.

“I was actively investing in my future, and not what was right in front of me.”

After her 2019 discharge, Burnett continued her coursework while participating in BPI’s Public Health Fellowship. Before she could finish her undergraduate degree, however, she accepted a position as a public health adviser for New York City Health and Hospitals, the nation’s largest municipal health care delivery system. That was two days before the agency took over the city’s COVID-19 response. By then, the virus had devastated Burnett’s neighborhood, and she was eager to help save lives. “I was built for this moment,” she thought, “and I can do something.”

She paused her studies and threw all of her energy into the work, leading COVID exposure investigations and creating animalquarantine policies that would come to serve as nationwide models. Soon, the mayor’s office appointed her to the elite team of professionals tasked with reopening the city’s public schools. “It was audacious to think that you could open the largest school district in the country during a pandemic,” she says. The team was initially provided with minimal structure. “We had nothing, we didn’t even have computers. We did have some really strong leadership, and we had all these public health resources, but nothing was working together. And then they gave us a couple of MBAs from the mayor’s office to try to help us scale.” At first, Burnett didn’t see how outside officials with a business background could contribute. “But then I saw that within a week we had computers; we were talking to each other,” she recalls. “We had infrastructure.”

The experience led Burnett to consider pursuing an MBA of her own. “I don’t want to

be on the back end cleaning up a mess,” she says. “A lot of this stuff is preventable. Who’s building it? Who’s choosing what we invest in? That’s where I want to be.” The Bard MBA in Sustainability seemed like a perfect fit, though Burnett was nervous that her incomplete undergraduate work would prevent her from being admitted. It did not— she graduated in May, with a master’s as her first academic degree.

She also parlayed her reputation as BPI’s “JSTOR Queen” into a job that she loves so much that she can’t believe she gets paid for it. In 2022, when the database advertised for a manager of JSTOR Access in Prison, Burnett was busy with her public health position, but friends kept suggesting she apply. “I really just wanted to send JSTOR a love letter, because I could not have gotten through my time without it,” she says. That love letter won her a job offer.

Burnett feels as if she has come full circle. JSTOR originally designed the incarcerated scholar access tool for BPI in 2007, and the two organizations have worked together over the years to refine the model.

Two years ago, the technology was only available to a few programs clustered mostly in the northeastern United States; thanks in part to Burnett’s work, the tool is now available to nearly 500,000 people on four continents. “JSTOR opened up my whole world when I was in prison, and so the idea that I have an opportunity to take what started at BPI and advance that and make it available to everyone who’s incarcerated is incredible,” she says.

Burnett continues to focus on the future.

While in the MBA program, she and Charlene Reyes, a peer from BPI, hatched the idea for Just2Disrupt, which would employ formerly incarcerated people as mentors for newly released citizens. They presented their business plan at the Mid-Hudson Regional Business Plan Competition and won first place in their category. Burnett hopes they can share the blueprint nationwide and

bpi.bard.edu

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encourage other communities to adapt Just2Disrupt to fit their own situations.

Another idea she’s developing is an academic journal for incarcerated and formerly incarcerated scholars. Burnett notes that while many people who have been impacted by the justice system go on to contribute to scholarship in a variety of fields, that part of their history isn’t always known.

“People need to see us in those spaces before they start challenging us to do more, be more,” she says. “They’ll invest more if they see the latent potential.”

True to her polymath nature, Burnett is also considering a PhD in economics. She knows firsthand that prisons are a uniquely rich environment for improvement and experimentation. “They are smaller, totally self-contained systems,” she says, which makes them ideal places for testing alternative solutions to various problems, and “no one’s really studying them in a multidisciplinary way.” While others might see this lack of interest as a reason not to dig deeper, Burnett sees only opportunity.

“There’s no prison economist out there,” she says. “So why not?”

—Linnea Marik ’13

The Bard Prison Initiative (BPI) works to redefine the availability, affordability, and expectations typically associated with higher education in America. Since 2001, BPI has created groundbreaking opportunities for college within America’s prison systems. To learn more, visit bpi.bard.edu.

Bard’s MBA in Sustainability focuses on the integrated bottom line: economic success, environmental integrity, and social equity. The program fully embraces a sustainability vision, placing futurethinking students at the forefront of a massive shift in how we do business.

For more information, visit gps.bard.edu/academics/mba-insustainability.

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EMILY SCHMALL ’05: WITNESS When the COVID-19 pandemic began, many foreign correspondents left their posts and went home. Emily Schmall ’05, however, chose to remain in New Delhi, where she worked as a journalist for the Associated Press (AP). “I decided that it was my ethical obligation to stay, that what I had signed up for in India was to be a witness,” she says.

“And at that time, I was leading a team of local reporters, and they didn’t have the option to leave.”

Such principles and respect for journalistic integrity have defined Schmall’s career since her days as a Bard undergraduate, when she received a formative piece of advice from a fellow student journalist. It was 2002, and Schmall had spent seven months reporting for the Bard Free Press in the wake of the September 11 attacks. By the end of her first year, Schmall was offered the position of editor in chief. “The editor at the time explained to me that when you’re a journalist, it’s who you are all of the time,” she recalls. “You can’t just protest on a Saturday and then on a Monday go back to being a reporter. You can’t have these dual identities. You’re always on. You’re always going to be this outsider, not quite involved in the things you’re covering, but there, present for them.” Schmall took his words seriously, thinking through what she wanted her place to be before deciding, as she remembers, “Yes, that is the role I want. I don’t need to be the activist. I don’t need to be the protagonist. I want to be the witness.”

After spending a semester in New York City in the Bard Globalization and International Affairs Program, Schmall returned to Annandale and received a Trustee Leader Scholar Program (TLS) fellowship in 2004. Her TLS project, conceived with Mariel Fiori ’05, became the Spanish-language publication La Voz, which still thrives and continues to be run by Fiori.

Schmall grew up in DeKalb, Illinois, though she spent her summers in Brooklyn, New York, starting when her mother took a

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sabbatical from Northern Illinois University to teach at Brooklyn Law School. While on the East Coast, they visited relatives in Rhinebeck and the Hudson Valley— introducing Schmall to Bard at a young age.

Though she has only childhood memories of her father, who passed away when she was 7, Schmall knew he was a journalist. He reported for the Newhouse News Service, UPI, and AP in the ’60s and ’70s, and when her mother gave her a book of her father’s news clippings, the writing’s relevance and style blew her away.

Schmall began her journalism career after graduation, working at the Miami Herald and Forbes. She earned a degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 2009, and got a job offer from Bloomberg News to work out of Mexico City, though she soon decided to take a chance and go freelance. As opportunities arose, she took them: a year in Liberia working as the project manager of an NGO turned into a gig in Buenos Aires writing for the New York Times.

She remained the witness throughout, using the tools she learned at Bard and Columbia to find her own voice and interests across a range of topics and environments.

In 2014, after four and a half years as a freelancer, Schmall joined the AP as a staff writer. They offered her a correspondent

emilyschmallonline.blogspot.com

position in Fort Worth, Texas, where she won awards for her reportage on Hurricane Harvey, coverage of the Ebola epidemic, and as part of a team investigating schoolhouse sexual assaults. In 2018, the AP sent her to India, and after weathering the pandemic in New Delhi, she took a job as a foreign correspondent for the New York Times.

While in India, Schmall lost a friend, K., to suicide. She writes about the experience in her essay “My Friend Helped Me Carry My Burdens. His Proved Too Heavy,” published in the Times in December 2022. It is one of her only published stories written in the first person; it focuses on K., how they became friends and remained close through COVID lockdowns, and how his mental health struggles as a young Indian related to larger gender and cultural norms in the country.

When speaking of her writing process, Schmall notes that she is at her best—feeling and thinking “most clearly and most viscerally”—through writing. After her friend’s tragedy, she used her blog as a space to process her grief and share some of the letters she had continued writing to him. “I’ve never experienced anything like that kind of response from any other piece of writing,” she says, describing the outpouring of messages from people around the world who felt seen by her story. “It made me feel like it had been worthwhile to mine my own grief and my own loss, because it made people feel slightly less alone in theirs.”

Schmall had her first child earlier this year and is now back in Chicago. She recently coauthored a six-part series for the Times, India’s Daughters, that explores the gendered expectations young Indian women confront while pursuing their dreams for the future.

With this work, Schmall returns to young Indians navigating the gender and cultural norms of their country, and continues her project of witnessing and connecting through writing.

—Megan Brien ’19

lavoz.bard.edu

Photo by Smita Sharma

CAROLYN LAZARD ’10: MACARTHUR FELLOW

Red, 2021 10:15 minutes Two-channel video Courtesy of the artist

Interdisciplinary artist Carolyn Lazard ’10 has been named a 2023 MacArthur Fellow. Lazard, who uses the experience of chronic illness to examine concepts of intimacy and social and political dimensions of care, is one of 20 recipients of this year’s prestigious “genius grant” awarded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Lazard’s work has been exhibited in solo and group shows at such venues as the Museum of Modern Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Walker Art Center; Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania; MoMA PS1; Museum für Moderne Kunst; Whitney Museum of American Art; and the Venice Biennale. Lazard also writes about their experience of chronic illness and the limitations of biomedical understandings of health. Their publication Accessibility in the Arts: A Promise and a Practice (2019) details specific ways that museums and other cultural spaces can meet the needs of disabled communities.

Red, above, was created for a solo exhibition at Kunstverein Braunschweig, one of Germany’s most important art institutions.

The piece is a response to so-called “flicker films” made by avant-garde filmmakers of the ’60s, and in particular Tony Conrad’s The Flicker, which starts with a warning that viewing the movie could trigger photosensitive epilepsy. In Red, Lazard, who studied avant-garde film at Bard, alerts the viewer to the upcoming strobe effect with an on-screen countdown. The physiological effects of flashing lights can be dramatic and uncomfortable, and also hypnotic and hallucinatory. Likewise, aesthetic beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but so is existential danger.

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ALUMNI/AE ACCOLADES Anne Bogart ’74, theater and opera director and cofounder of the artistic ensemble SITI Company, won a 2023 Obie Award for Lifetime Achievement. Bogart was honored by the Obie judges for her 30 years of work with SITI, which has created more than 50 productions, presented at venues around the world, and pushed the boundaries of contemporary theater through innovative approaches to actor training, collaboration, and cultural exchange. Last year, Bard’s Fisher Center presented the world premiere of SITI’s reimagining of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, codirected by Bogart and Tony Award–winner Darron L West. The work, commissioned by the Fisher Center, was the final production in SITI Company’s 30th anniversary “Finale Season.”

Choreographer Joanna Haigood ’79 was one of four recipients—across the disciplines of dance, film, public space, and theater—of a 2023 Rainin Fellowship, which comes with an unrestricted grant of $100,000. The artistic director of Zaccho Dance Theatre, Haigood has been creating work that uses natural, architectural, and cultural environments as points of departure for movement exploration and narrative since 1980. Her work has been commissioned by arts institutions including Dancing in the Streets, Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, Walker Arts Center, Exploratorium Museum, National Black Arts Festival, and Festival d’Avignon. Haigood’s honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, USA Fellowship, New York Bessie Award, Doris Duke Artist Award, and Bard’s Charles Flint Kellogg Award in Arts and Letters.

Jackson Polys, Adam Khalil ’11, Diya Vij ’08, and Zack Khalil ’14 at The World’s UnFair. Courtesy of Creative Time, photo by Cesarin Mateo.

Diya Vij ’08, curator of Creative Time, has been awarded a $75,000 single-exhibition grant from the Teiger Foundation to support “New Red Order: The World’s Unfair.” New Red Order is an Indigenous art collective cofounded by Adam ’11 and Zack Khalil ’14 (see page 26).

The foundation also supported Sohrab Mohebbi CCS ’10 and SculptureCenter, where he is director, with a three-year programming grant of $150,000.

Photographer Lisa Kereszi ’95, whose work is in the collections of many major museums, is one of 20 artists working in painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, video, craft, and new media to receive a 2022 Biennial Grant from the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation. The unrestricted award of $20,000 gives artists the opportunity to produce new work and push the boundaries of their creativity. Her two most recent books are Mourning (Minor Matters, founded by Michelle Dunn Marsh ’95), a photographic response to the loss of her father five years ago, and IN (Roman Nvmerals, cofounded by former Bard Photography Program Visiting Artist Michael Vahrenwald), an experimental artist book produced in collaboration with her family from pictures they made during pandemic lockdown.

Lisa Kereszi ’95, Hand with magnolia bloom, CT, 2020

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For the fifth time in seven years, Bard is on the list of United States colleges and universities that produced the most Fulbright students. Five Bardians received 2022–23 Fulbright awards: Evan Tims ’19 was selected as a Fulbright independent study-research grant recipient to India, where he will conduct ethnographic research on perceptions of Kolkata’s water future among distinct communities along the Hooghly River. Juliana Maitenaz ’22, a Conservatory student who graduated with a BA in global and international studies and a BM in classical percussion performance, received an independent studyresearch Fulbright Scholarship to Brazil. Elias Ephron ’23 was selected as a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant (ETA) to Spain. Ephron was a political studies and Spanish studies joint major, a writing tutor in the Bard Learning Commons, and winner of a PEN America Fellowship and the Bard Center for the Study of Hate Internship Scholarship.

Eleanor Tappan ’23, a Spanish Studies major who received her TESOL certification and began tutoring in a local elementary school last fall, will go to Mexico as a Fulbright ETA. Macy Jenks ’23, a biology major who also studied Mandarin and East Asian culture, was selected as a Fulbright ETA Scholar to Taiwan.

Jenks tutored writing in the Learning Commons, biology at BPI, and as a STEAM Fellow in Kingston.

Tobias Timofeyev ’21 (left), photo by Karl Rabe; Megumi Kivuva ’22, photo by Chris Kendall ’82

Three Bardians were offered 2023 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowships, which aim to do no less than “ensure the quality, vitality, and diversity of the scientific and engineering workforce of the United States.” They are Tobias Timofeyev ’21, a PhD student in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at University of Vermont; Megumi Kivuva ’22, a PhD student in information science at University of Washington; and Bea Abbott ’15, who is studying for her master’s in geography at University of Kentucky, College of Arts & Sciences. The five-year fellowship seeks to broaden participation in science and engineering of underrepresented groups, including women, minorities, persons with disabilities, and veterans, by providing three years of financial support inclusive of an annual stipend of $37,000.

Susan D’Agostino ’91, a mathematician and technology reporter at Inside Higher Ed, has been selected as one of four Spencer Education Journalism Fellows for the 2023–24 academic year at Columbia Journalism School. D’Agostino is the author of How to Free Your Inner Mathematician (Oxford University Press, 2020) and her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Washington Post, Scientific American, Wired, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and Chronicle of Higher Education, among other publications. She has previously been recognized with fellowships from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University, National Association of Science Writers, Council for the Advancement of Science Writing, and Heidelberg Laureate Forum Foundation. As a Spencer Fellow, D’Agostino will examine the acceleration of artificial intelligence applications in universities, including the potential risks and benefits posed to students and society.

The American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded Luke Haaksma ’21 a $7,500 Charles Ives Scholarship for continued study in composition.

Haaksma, a composer and filmmaker, began graduate studies at the Yale School of Music last fall. He is a past winner of a Diana Wortham Theatre Emerging Artists Fund scholarship, for piano performance, and an Ione M. Allen Music Scholarship. At Bard, Haaksma studied composition with Joan Tower, George Tsontakis, and Lera Auerbach; piano with Blair McMillen; and hammered dulcimer with David Degge.

He was the Conservatory’s Joan Tower Composition Scholar and was awarded the Sidney Peterson Prize for “exceptional service in the spirit of the late experimental filmmaker.” Haaksma was a 2021 National Hammered Dulcimer Championship finalist.

Clockwise from top: Evan Tims ’19; Juliana Maitenaz ’22, Macy Jenks ’23; photos by Chris Kendall ’82 Elias Ephron ’23, Eleanor Tappan ’23; photos by Nour Annan HRA ’23

Ariana Perez-Castells ’15 is this year’s winner of the Newsweek Alumni Prize from the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY. Perez-Castells, a graduate of Newmark’s bilingual program, is particularly interested in reporting—in English and Spanish—about health, the environment, and labor. She joined the Philadelphia Inquirer in May as a general assignment business reporter.

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LOVE IS IN THE ARIA

David Bloom ’13 conducting Stranger Love, photo by Craig T. Mathew/Mathew Imaging

Stranger Love, a six-hour opera by composer Dylan Mattingly ’14 and librettist Thomas Bartscherer, premiered May 20, 2023, at Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. The work was commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, conducted by David Bloom ’13, and directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz. Mattingly, executive and coartistic director of the new-music ensemble Contemporaneous, dedicated 10 years to the score, which he completed in 2017. Bartscherer, Peter Sourian Senior Lecturer in the Humanities at Bard, has collaborated previously with Contemporaneous—which was founded at Bard in 2010 by Mattingly and Bloom—including on Long After Hesiod, a spoken-word text written for and performed with Stacy Garrop’s String Quartet No. 3, and narration for Mattingly’s composition The Bakkhai.

The four-hour first act of Stranger Love tells the story of a couple, Tasha, a fiction writer, and Andre, a theologian, who meet, fall in love, and face and overcome Threat from Without (temptation) and Threat from Within (doubt). In the 80-minute second act, dancers revisit the story. And in the third and final act (20 minutes, but who’s counting?)

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the music tells the tale. Contemporaneous were “the stars of the purely instrumental third act,” wrote the New York Times. “As the score ritualistically stretches a kind of communal love to the cosmos, one melody begins to spread out as well, until, in the final seconds, it unfurls slowly, ending before it reaches its last note.”

For its part, the San Francisco Chronicle described the performance as “full of sumptuously beautiful music, sinuous choreography, splashy visual effects and a world-encompassing aesthetic ranging from the interpersonal to the cosmic.” The reviewer also acknowledged that the piece “represented a historic triumph of aspiration and persistence over realistic thinking.” Stranger Love may not be the last such ambitious triumph. Mattingly and Bartscherer are working on an evening-length performance titled History of Life, an excerpt of which premiered at Roulette in New York City last year, that grafts the Homeric oral poetry tradition onto Charles Darwin’s travels in the Galapagos Islands.

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DAWN MATTOON ’94: BIOTECH HUMANIST Despite being one of the few women leading a biotechnology company, Dawn Mattoon ’94 still thinks of herself as a work in progress.

Recently named the CEO of Mercy BioAnalytics, she has spent years ensuring that the people she surrounds herself with are those who know her, challenge her, and push her to do and be better. Much of that grounding came from the friends Mattoon made at Bard, who have remained her vital soul connections during the past 30 years.

“Spending time with them brings me tremendous joy, and without them and the memories we’ve created over the years, I could never be where I am now,” she says.

These memories can be traced back to the Western Slope of Colorado, where Mattoon grew up, surrounded by rocky hillsides and a thriving ecosystem. “My love for discovery and curiosity about the world around me has been there since my younger days,” she says. As a child, she was encouraged by her parents to tinker with microscopes and chemistry sets, and she found a creative spark from playing with snakes, spiders, and the slew of local microorganisms she was surrounded by.

As high school drew to a close, Mattoon knew she had to start thinking about college and her next life steps. As the eldest child in her family, she would be the first to go to college, which meant that the decision had to be a deeply considered one. “I had two nonnegotiables: no sororities and fraternities, and enough scholarship money to pay for college,” Mattoon recalls. One fall day in 1989, she and her family planned an informal tour and stopped by Bard’s campus. “There’s no question about it, it was love at first sight,” she laughs.

Mattoon has a vivid memory of receiving her acceptance letter from Bard. Her mother, who’d read the letter beforehand, steamed and resealed it, and brought it to her at school.

“When I opened it, a whole new future opened up. That letter changed the trajectory of my life

Photo by Laura Bortolin

in every way.” Mattoon also received Bard’s Excellence and Equal Costs Scholarship, which satisfied her second requirement.

Mattoon’s experience at Bard was one of molding. Calling the early ’90s the College’s golden era, she believes that the education, teaching, and mentorship she received at Bard shaped her interests and strengths, enabling a critical process of self-discovery. Mattoon took a range of required classes while on a premedical-school track. But by the spring of

her senior year, she knew a change was imminent. “I realized I was very excited about attending medical school, but in no way excited about actually practicing medicine,” she says.

Mattoon took a deferral from medical school and, after leaving Bard, taught highschool biology for three years. That experience had a profound impact on her. Teaching young people was a great way to learn how to create compelling narratives. “The kind of storytelling you do as a teacher is all about engaging with a group of stakeholders,” she says. “This turns out to be pretty similar to

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pitches you make to a board of directors or to a large team of employees. The fundamental principles are the same.”

Over the next decade, Mattoon completed her PhD and postdoctoral work at Yale University, studying epidermal growth factor receptor and platelet-derived growth factor receptor protein signaling. Her investigations were rewarded. In 2005, just a year after joining the research and development staff at Invitrogen—whose protein biology, molecular biology, and cellimaging and analysis products help scientists conduct biological and biomedical research— Mattoon was recognized as one of the company’s best new scientists.

By 2020, Mattoon was senior vice president for research products at Quanterix, a company fueling scientific discovery through ultrasensitive biomarker detection. She applied for and ultimately won a $20 million contract with the National Institutes of Health to develop and commercialize Quanterix’s first FDA-authorized diagnostic tests for COVID19. “Emory University adopted our test early in the pandemic for their student and faculty testing,” says Mattoon. “Last year my daughter started at Emory, and she took our test last fall. Not many parents can say that!”

As Mattoon steers Mercy BioAnalytics into its next era, focusing on early cancer detection, she is deeply thoughtful about the current state of trust in science, having witnessed the fraught discourse between government, scientists, and the public during the pandemic. The way forward hinges upon “collective trust, and that comes with accepting each other’s humanity,” according to Mattoon. “Once we bridge that gap, we will see meaningful change and renew that public confidence. Helping that happen will always be my goal.”

—Prabarna Ganguly ’13

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YOUSSEF KERKOUR ’00

A ROLE TO PLAY

From left: Ben Miles as Caulaincourt, Joaquin Phoenix as Napoleon, Scott Handy as Marshal Berthier, Youssef Kerkour ’00 as Marshal Davout, and John Hollingworth as Marshal Ney plan for battle in Apple Original Films’ Napoleon. Columbia Pictures, photo by Aidan Monaghan.

Opposite: Significant Other, Youssef Kerkour as Sam and Katherine Parkinson as Anna. Quay Street/ITV Studios.

Growing up in Rabat, the capital of Morocco, Youssef Kerkour ’00 loved to sing and dance.

His mathematics professor father steered him toward sensible professions, while his British schoolteacher mother secretly encouraged his artistic side. So he came to Bard to study psychology, but soon fell in love with theater, leading Professor Frank Oja to give him a grade of “M” (for “missing”) and tell him, “As a psychiatrist, I think you’re an actor—you need to just commit to it.”

Commit to it he did. His first professional parts were small, and tended toward the criminal and terroristic—not surprising for a tall, bearded Moroccan in a post–9/11 world. “Those cliché roles are the way into the industry for all of us from an ethnic or minority background,” says Kerkour.

“But if you’re being typecast, you are at least being cast, and that means you’re in the conversation. You’re working, and you actually get to decide things later on. My thesis on how to survive as an actor is to reach a position where you can say ‘no.’ I had to take every job that came my way. Not all of them made me happy, but sometimes to achieve a goal you

might have to feel like you’re losing right up until you reach the goal.”

Kerkour can now be seen in Ridley Scott’s blockbuster film Napoleon as French military commander Louis Nicolas Davout, whom Leo Tolstoy describes in War and Peace as “unable to express his devotion to his monarch except by cruelty,” and “one of those men who purposely put themselves in most depressing conditions to have a justification for being gloomy.” The Little Corporal, for his part, praised Davout as “one of the most honest and impeccable warriors in France.”

Kerkour’s psychology studies may have served him well after all.

Kerkour previously worked with Scott in the award-winning 2021 film House of Gucci, playing the late Iraqi billionaire Nemir Kirdar, who took control of the fashion house in 1993.

He is best known in the UK, however, as Sami Ibrahim in the sitcom Home. Sami is a Syrian refugee who stows away in a family’s SUV on their return from a vacation in France and quickly becomes an important part of their lives. Kerkour was nominated for a BAFTA Award for his work in the show, which was

instagram.com/youssefkerkourofficial

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created in response to the growing antiimmigrant sentiment in the lead up to the Brexit vote. “Home was one of the first times a mainstream outlet let me play against my casting type and it very much opened the door for other roles where I’m not killing people or getting killed!” he says. The show is bighearted, humanizing, smart, nuanced, and unafraid to dive into messy and complex places—a bit like Kerkour himself.

And speaking of messy, Significant Other, Kerkour’s follow-up to Home, kicks off with his character waiting for the bucketload of pills he’s swallowed to take effect when he’s interrupted by a neighbor who thinks she’s having a heart attack. So no, not your typical rom-com. Loneliness is painful, and bad decisions are often disastrous, but the characters slowly share some of their vulnerabilities, allowing honest emotions to surface. Inevitably, they soon run from their feelings, often straight into a brick wall. We need art as well as science—not to mention laughter—to help us through all this human messiness. Kerkour is making his contribution.

No more Ms for him, he’s A-list now.

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REMATRIA

by James Rodewald ’82

RT

It is remarkable how far a little support—or the removal of arbitrary barriers—can go toward changing the world. Native American artists have been making important, compelling, brain-shifting, heart-moving art for millennia, but recent months have seen welcome and long-overdue mainstream attention paid to artists working today as well as to the fascinating history of contemporary Indigenous art. Bard and Bardians are playing a significant role in this work.

Jeffrey Gibson, artist in residence at Bard College, will represent the United States at the 60th Venice Biennale Arte in 2024. Gibson, a member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and of Cherokee descent, is one of the first Indigenous artists to represent the US at the prestigious event. Next year’s Biennale is being curated by Adriano Pedrosa, recipient of the 2023 CCS Bard Audrey Irmas Award for Curatorial Excellence. Gibson told the New York Times: “The last 15 years of my career have been about turning inward and trying to make something I really wanted to see in the world.

Now I want to expand the way people think about Indigeneity.” He is working on a multimedia installation called the space in which to place me, referring to a poem by 2023 Charles Flint Kellogg Award in Arts and Letters recipient Layli Long Soldier MFA ’14 (Oglala Lakota). The Venice Biennale Arte will take place from April 20 to November 24, 2024.

Gibson also recently conceived and edited An Indigenous Present (Big NDN Press/ DelMonico Books), a “monumental gathering of more than 60 contemporary artists, photographers, musicians, writers, and more, showcasing diverse approaches to Indigenous concepts, forms and mediums.” With text by Philip J. Deloria (Dakota), professor of history at Harvard University and recipient of a 2019 honorary doctor of humane letters degree from Bard College; Adam Khalil ’11 (Ojibwe); Zack Khalil ’14 (Ojibwe); Kite, aka Suzanne Kite MFA ’18 (Oglala Lakota); and Long Soldier and an interview with CCS Bard Fellow in Indigenous Art History and Curatorial Studies Candice Hopkins CCS ’03 (Carcross/Tagish First Nation), the book is one more illustration

of the College’s commitment to and engagement with Indigenous culture. The Times said that Gibson’s book “challenges the outsider’s destructive fascination with Indigenous cultures, inverting and inviting it into a new perspective authored by Indigenous artists themselves.”

Gibson isn’t the only Bard faculty member receiving public recognition for work in this area. Hopkins curated what Holland Cotter of the Times described as “a frisky intergenerational group show of some 30 Native American artists” at CCS Bard’s Hessel Museum of Art. Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art, and Self-Determination since 1969 opened June 24, 2023, and ran through November 26. The exhibition, organized in conjunction with Columbia County–based Forge Project, a Native-led initiative centered on Indigenous art and decolonial education, features more than 100 works and traces the legacy of experimentation in the Native arts community beginning in the 1960s and continuing to the present day. “This exhibition marks a critical contribution to contextualizing contemporary Indigenous art as part of a larger artistic movement whose history has been understudied and overlooked,” said Tom Eccles, executive director of CCS and founding director of the Hessel Museum. “This groundbreaking presentation provides a new framework for the interpretation of Indigenous contemporary art, a field of study that we look forward to continuing to advance with new research and curatorial innovation.”

One of the cofounders of Forge Project, Zach Feuer, was cocurator, with Natalie Ball (Black/Modoc/Klamath), of Young Elder, an exhibition of the work of four young Native artists on view at James Fuentes Gallery in Manhattan last fall. (For a profile of Fuentes ’98 see Bardian, Summer 2022.) Andrea Carlson (Ojibwe), Sonya Kelliher-Combs (Inupiaq/Athabaskan), Tyrrell Tapaha (Diné), and Nico Williams (Anishinaabe/Aamjiwnaang First Nation) showed recent work that references or applies Indigenous material and pictorial traditions as they are considered and carried on in the current day.

Dexter and Sinister, 2023 (animatronic tree and beaver sculptures) New Red Order, The World’s UnFair, September 15 – October 22, 2023, Queens, New York Photo by Cesarin Mateo, courtesy of Creative Time

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This page and opposite: Opening reception, Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art, and Self-Determination since 1969, photos by Karl Rabe

Dare Turner BGC MA ’17 (Yurok), who was named the Brooklyn Museum’s first fulltime curator of Indigenous art last July, is another scholar continuing this work. Turner, who curated Stripes and Stars: Reclaiming Lakota Independence at the Baltimore Museum of Art in 2020, will be tasked with developing exhibition programming as well as growing and researching the Brooklyn Museum’s North American Indigenous art collection, already one of the foremost of its kind, with more than 13,600 items dating primarily from 1100 BCE to 1500 CE. The collection includes works from the Hopi, Zuni, and other Pueblo groups in Arizona and New Mexico; the Pomo, Maidu, and Hupa of California; the Kwakwaka’wakw, Haida, and Heiltsuk Nations of the Pacific Northwest; a group of early 19th-century Eastern Plains works acquired at Fort Snelling, Minnesota; and works of the Osage Nation after the tribe’s removal to Indian Territory in Oklahoma.

The Khalils’ New Red Order, a “public secret society of informants and collaborators dedicated to rechanneling desires for indigeneity towards the expansion of Indigenous futures,” launched The World’s UnFair in September. The month-long “immersive spectacle,” installed in a vacant lot in Long Island City, Queens, was curated

by Diya Vij ’08 of the nonprofit public arts organization Creative Time and included hundreds of tribal flags (reminders of Indigenous sovereignty), a five-channel video installation documenting evidence of colonization in the US (such as street names and sports mascots), and the first “Give It Back Gathering,” a conversation among “settlers who have gone through the process of land return” (“rematriation”). Visitors were invited to reflect on displays on Indigenous people featured at previous New York World’s Fairs—the 1939 and 1964 editions were held in Queens—where “Indigenous people were often dehumanized or romanticized in exhibits used to dispossess them of their lands and legitimize colonial plunder.” In stark contrast to the prevailing narratives of

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scarcity used to scare people into acceptance of an increasingly unfair status quo, New Red Order reminds us that: “The landmass here is enormous. And its ecological capacity to sustain life is immense if we care for these resources correctly.” That’s a big if, but The World’s UnFair is an invitation to “reverse these nation building models and become accomplices in the process of decolonization.”

The Khalils will receive László Z. Bitó Awards for Humanitarian Service at Bard’s 2024 Commencement.

Like many institutions working in the public sphere, in 2020 Bard College issued a land acknowledgment in recognition of the forced removal of the original stewards of the land on which we study, work, and play (bard.edu/dei/resources). For most organizations, that was where the work seemed to end. Bard, however, sought to do more, including securing funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for “Rethinking Place: Bard-on-Mahicantuck,” a three-year project which proposes a Native American and Indigenous Studies approach to a revitalized American Studies curriculum

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(see Bardian, Spring 2023) and undertakes an expansive understanding of land acknowledgment that goes beyond addressing a single institution’s history in regard to Native peoples. The second Rethinking Place Conference took place October 12–14, 2023, in Annandale, and included the inaugural Electa Quinney Lecture on October 14. Columbia University Professor of Anthropology Audra Simpson (Kahnawà:ke Mohawk)—who researches and writes about Indigenous and settler society, politics, and history—spoke on “Savage States: Settler Governance in an Age of Sorrow.”

Systemic injustice won’t be remedied overnight. The marginalization of Native and Indigenous culture has been a loss for us all, but the beauty, creativity, humor, and profound thinking reflected in Indigenous art is a generous gift. As Diné artist and sheep herder Tyrrell Tapaha says, “Every layer of our culture, language, and history has a role in living a well-balanced life.” In a world that feels increasingly out of balance, those layers seem more important than ever.

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WELCOME TO THE JUNGLE

Morning

Rainforest chimpanzees, and the human cultures they inspire, are vanishing. In August 2016, Associate Professor of Psychology Sarah Dunphy-Lelii traveled 7,200 miles from Annandale to Kibale National Park in western Uganda for five months of remote tent living, binoculars in hand (see Bardian, Fall 2017). Dunphy-Lelii recently returned to the field, supported by a Franklin Research Grant, for two months of observation (pen in hand), with the goal of writing a series of short-form creative nonfiction pieces. In this article— adapted from Motionless Long Enough, which she wrote for Terrain.org—she describes the Ngogo community of chimpanzees—with more than 200 individual chimpanzees it is the largest in the world—and the researchers who sleep, eat, and work in the forest in order to record their lives as “a breathing, blended archive of the ancient and the modern, stories ready and unfolding.”

Ngogo Field Site

The tin roof that arches rusty over 12 crates of empty bottles also covers a table for collecting skulls, a sticky wall chart of trails, and a murky tangle of cords and tape that keep the field radios alive. When rain hits the water cistern, hot metal flexing in the chill makes a hollow pinging, eerily rhythmic.

We watch as a snake climbs straight up its corrugated side before C. comes with a stick to fling it into the forest. It holds on briefly, makes a lunge toward porch safety, and we realize how many must already be here, watching our piles of rice and nuts, curled in our boots.

After breakfast I pour hot water into our old, bare frying pan to soak before the scraping begins. I lose a thin sheet of egg this way each morning. Even when it is not my day for dishwashing, I wash this pan because it is only me eating the eggs and the cleaning of it is annoying. Or would be if it weren’t done squatting in the morning sun at the base of the cistern with the smell of mist rolling up and over and pairs of hornbills floating together in the air currents through the valley. I can hear chimpanzees down there today, welcoming each other to a bursting tree of figs or simply welcoming themselves to the joy of it in the early light.

All photos by Sarah Dunphy-Lelii

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If I sit in silence, motionless long enough, an ensuku will nose out of the undergrowth on her own quiet business, oblivious and delicate, a miniature rust-colored deer with trembling feet and fluttering nose. Butterflies also come, blue and red, to drink the salt that coats my skin. Monkeys drop onto lower branches and hang their heads to gape at me with their white coin noses and their red tails longer than their bodies. I worry snakes will come, or elephants, unwelcome always, and I whistle a few bars or stand to stretch my arms above my head. The chimpanzees don’t mind this and carry on sleeping, inspecting each other’s faces and thighs with determined fingers, trumpeting their shameless gassiness.

Each day I stagger back into camp covered in sweat and dirt, desperate to take off my boots and lift my feet. The Ugandans who have done the same work as me return later, having stopped along the way to find firewood. They arrive with 10-foot-long branches over their shoulders to drop by the cook shed before they rest. S. comes now to bring our meal, then to the cook shed to make his own, smoke leaking out into the clearing and through the soaked air.

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There is a woman here called Blessing who is just that, with her slow grin and her claims to love her work. She has a cousin called Monday, and I love this family for the hope they see in tiny faces. There is also a bird here called the go-away bird. The field guide says this is the sound of its call, but I don’t hear it. It could be anything, really, though now that I know it the bird does sound less welcoming than it could. The white-bellied and grey versions of it, the guidebook tells me, do a “wonderful, drawn out gu’ way and also a loud harsh pinched and interrogatory descending Wherrrrrr?” I find I can’t manage to be both interrogatory and descending.

Where is the sea, I say, starting high and ending low, and this does not seem a question at all. The bare-faced go-away bird, who in the next sentence is described as having a black face, though I don’t know if this means skin or feathers, makes instead a “rather surprised corrr! and… a loud insane cackling duet.”

After a few tries I can make a surprised corrr! but would need another go-away bird for the second part. Then there is the wagtail. It comes to wait hopefully for bread crusts that break off while I eat because there is no toaster, and balancing a single slice atop the gas burner makes blackened fragile zones.

There is a bit now on the porch floor that I’ve managed to step on twice already this morning, but it ignores this and instead bobs and wags as it watches me with one eye.

I have my hood up over hair still damp from the shower. I balance on this chair with my legs folded up under me so the ants can’t get to my skin. Moments ago I discovered, pushed into the folds of my luggage, a small lotion sample that I’d gotten on the plane, and I smell like a girl for the first time in months.

As I write, a fuzzed caterpillar labors up the table leg, taking an unusually long time I’d say, though I can’t say how much time is usual for this.

The word for grasshopper is encenene (en-say-NAY-nay), a Bantu word, shared by the local languages. A. says there is a call that people use to announce the grasshoppers’ arrival. I ask for a demonstration; to my astonishment L. does a sudden, throaty call, and we all cheer. In grasshopper season, 32

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people with trucks and lights will go out into the fields at night and attract millions for large-scale sale, drawing them off from small fields and gardens, leaving local people far fewer. If someone (a woman or a child) does collect some and give them to you, you thank her with gifts of salt, sugar, and coffee. If your wife makes you a sauce with grasshoppers or termites, you buy her a dress.

A. tells me that local tradition frowns on women who eat bananas or eggs, or who whistle (which I have done most every day since I arrived; he does not mention this). He is fascinated to hear that we sometimes cook pigs in holes in the ground for parties at home—he has never heard of such a thing. I’m saving Louisiana crawfish boils for another slow morning. During dinner, in the pitch black that falls by then, a scientist from Texas roars up in a jeep and parks between my tent and the shower shed. They will begin work in the forest immediately, he announces, and return at daybreak to sleep in their vehicles.

To be in the forest at night is a kind of insanity and we eye him as we chew. It has to be dark, he says, because he’s scouting herpetofauna.

What a word. And what a mission, to go looking for snakes at the very hour when the one defense you have against them—seeing— doesn’t work.

I am sitting with Jackson, sharing one tree’s narrow canopy in refuge from the unending rain. We avoid each other’s gaze, but I watch in my periphery how the mist settles on the hairs of his cheek. He sighs and settles one wrist on his knee; he glances upward without moving his head. And then, in a way that is both sudden and also somehow gradual, the earth beneath us rolls. I feel the disoriented queasiness of one unused to earthquakes but do not yet understand; we both reach our arms out to touch rough bark on either side.

Our eyes connect—Jackson alpha of two hundred others, and me alpha of none—and he shows his teeth in a tiny, momentary grimace of fear. We are close together because I’d been forced off my earlier root-perch by a three-year-old. She’d peered with narrowed eyes down from the relative warmth of her mother’s belly and stamped her feet, waving

one arm loosely in my direction, rightly certain of the clarity in her message. I didn’t move and she shook a branch; I was immediately soaked. Then she threw a stick down. Another entry for the RAINCIV file— random acts of incivility.

Ali is seven years old and bored. His is the oldest mother in all of Central and West, and he will be her last. She curls in the crotch of a tree in the rain with a nasty cough today, a recluse even in the best of times, and with only one foot—the other lost to a poacher’s snare. Lita is no match for Ali’s bounding readiness, his hustling from vine to branch to vine when he should be napping, trying the view of me from between his legs, over one shoulder, beneath an extended arm, resting his chin so deep it brushes his round belly. He presses the soles of his two feet together and purses his lips as I fork rice into my mouth. I put one leg through the strap of the binoculars by my side in case he should suddenly find them appealing. Red monkeys arrive to the neighboring tree and sit quietly among the figs; Ali scratches his elbow as he watches them, and I do too, and we all wait for old Lita to do something.

A mile to the west, Yoyo is all alone.

His eldest brother was killed. His mother, Cecilia, the new baby, and his brother Benny died in the influenza epidemic four years ago.

His younger sister, Joya, has left for a new community somewhere unknown and will never return. But he is making his way, following and listening and no longer a child, his face darkening, growing lined and ambitious. He steps over a stream on two flat rocks and then checks his feet before continuing uphill, sauntering southward in the afternoon heat, moments before the rain begins.

Jolie is never alone, her days full of three tumbling and needful children. Zawinul is only 11 but big for his age, his shoulders strong and his gaze serious. It touches me to see him here with his little sisters instead of with the big males, maybe because food is scarce and the war makes everyone afraid. On his rear end linger traces of soft white hair, the marker of childhood, and he sits quietly as his mother holds his face to clean his eyes and cheeks.

Beryl and daughter

Younger Kabi and the tiny new one, yet unnamed, dangle their hands together and lay against their mother’s thighs. For an hour the only sounds are beetles rolling dung, parrots arguing, and the sighs of a small family.

Julianne is lovely, everyone thinks so, with a dark thoughtful face and a bit of white on her chin. The day before yesterday her infant died, no one knows why, and today she continues to carry the tiny body with her everywhere. I glimpse her near the flat rocks just after noon and pick up the follow until I’m able to flag down A. as he searches nearby. The baby’s hands and feet are so pale they look like wax, and he hangs so limply. She carries him on her back, with one of his arms tucked between her chin and shoulder to secure him.

She climbs a tree and keeps him cradled while she eats. As she descends, she hurries to get away from me and he falls off. She picks him up, places him on her back, and pins the tiny arm again. I don’t see his face—I don’t want to—just the back of his head. I guess he will soon begin to smell, and disintegrate, and she will let him go.

In Rutooro, the local language, my three biggest fears in the forest begin with the same four letters. Enjoki, bees, who come for the figs carpeting the forest floor, pungent with decay, and who drive me insane with their nasal hum in my ear. Until they fall suddenly silent, and I know they’ve found a cuff or hem to creep into, stinger brushing my bare skin, searching

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nook and cranny for home and with the fury of thousands if cornered. Enjoca, snakes, invisible and silent, watching from above and below and carrying death in their face. Enjojo, elephants. The fear of snakes and bees pales beside the fear of elephants, because snakes themselves have fear and wish to be alone; bees you can hear coming and are, anyways, very small. Forest elephants are silent when they want to be, and it is not in their nature to flinch. They rumble their irritation before they charge, but rainfall and monkey chatter prevent me from hearing them. I can’t see farther than 10 feet, and in this terrain, I can move no faster than a shuffle. Even if I could sprint full-out, they are much faster than me, very aggressive, and extremely large. My

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Elephant footprint

impulse to sing as I move, so I am not a surprise, is not the right thing because my noise would annoy them. I hope they become aware of me as I simply walk, quietly and steadily in a straight line. They will not get out of my way, no, but they may pause and become visible, or they may rumble. Though they may pause in such a way that I unknowingly pass between a mother and her calf, and then I would get no warning.

The toilet paper brand given to buzungu, white people, here in field camp is EuroSilk Jumbo. It’s a fitting enough description of me.

Lumbering through the forest, my thin skin a map of raised welts from thorns and ants, I crash down ravines with my heavy rubber boots and two compasses. I trip uphill all day long on slopes too steep to halt the lurch when a foothold tears loose and my shoulder hits the ground. Or I fall through a rotted tree trunk into a hole I panic-pray is not filled with snakes or the piglets of an angry, tusked mother. I imagine many times each day that I will slip gracefully between two saplings, and then I do not—the brim of my hat catches a long thorn, the cord on my bag another, a surprise root bulge pitches me forward into an invisible web strung between the slim trunks, an oversized jungle spider clinging to my face as I flail. Thistles an inch long pierce my clothing, ticks virtually invisible trek silently up my thighs, vines like steel cables wreck my shins as I plummet into a rain-slick descent. I spread a raincoat before I sit and roll, wet and uncomfortable, on the slope, digging in my heels for balance, knees to my chin, shooing bees from my cuffs.

The chimps don’t do it this way. They move lithe and silent, and are never out of breath. I go through, they go under. I drop things everywhere, they have nothing to drop.

I give up trying to cool my skin and wear long sleeves pulled tight every moment I step offtrail. This doesn’t help with the thorns or biting ants, but it helps some with the rashes, tiny poisonous plant hairs, oils, caterpillars.

Chimps are without clothing but do have long hair everywhere except their faces and the soles of their feet, wildly advantageous in the

battle against all of the above. On their heads the hair is short, so they need no hat to keep it from snagging on every branch like mine does. Their feet are different, more like our hands, so they grasp everything they step on.

Most of all, they walk comfortably on all fours and so are vastly more stable, much faster moving uphill, and don’t constantly need to crouch. But when they do crouch, they can get almost flat and needn’t limbo-squat, dragging their ears through the millipedes and burrs that collect beneath downed trees. They don’t walk on the palms of their hands but instead their knuckles, saving that soft expanse from injury and the wrist from ache. They are perfect, reclining with a sigh into the ginger, cracking nuts with wide flat teeth. I am not made for here, stranded a hundred feet beneath rosy fruit, requiring tools that exhaust me to carry.

When he was a child and the moon passed between the earth and the sun, D.’s grandmother filled their widest basin with water and set it in the courtyard. Together they watched the eclipse on its calm surface, side by side, without raising their eyes to the sky. I say that I once watched a partial eclipse from my own porch with special cardboard glasses for both me and my elderly cat, and Blessing nods like this is the only way, to shield the gentle eyes of everyone you love, even when they don’t know to ask not to see.

On the day I accompany B. to catalog the leaves of trees ancient and remote, he points to the mitragena. It is used locally to rid yourself of worms, the bark boiled and the cloudy water drunk. I ask if the worms then come out and B. says no, at least not so that you can recognize them, and I am sorry I asked. B. points out a deadly snake soon after, near my stumbling feet, and then checks the batteries in my radio. And we are still alive, because of each other.

Halfway back to camp D. nods to a tree under which a student died four months ago from an elephant who was too close and young. They were both young, alone together in the forest, with no language to share. We move past one after the other, breathing hard from the steep rough of the trail. I straddle a

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tree fallen across the path and now my thighs are soaked. We all three sink into the cloudy grey mushrooms on the far side and struggle out, adjusting our pack straps. Each silent and sweat-soaked journey home is a lesson and a celebration, a trial and a victory.

To shower, I crouch in the rusty tin shed under a hose attached to a bag full of rainwater that had been sun-warming on a grassy mound since dawn. The water lasts only a couple minutes, even when I halt the flow between soaping each body part; there is no water pressure, just the thin stream of gravity.

The water running over me itself went running into the catch basin, raining down through the channel of a rusty corrugated roof littered with dead insects and lizard and bird poop. My limp towel hangs on the nail farthest from the resident wasps’ nest, its papery sides flaking in the shudder from the squeaky door when I enter and depart. I watch a dramatic death struggle between a green-headed lizard and a too-large cockroach. The cockroach hisses and raises up on stiff legs, the lizard darts in for a crushing bite, the cockroach retreats, then advances, the lizard crushes him again then skuttles away, the cockroach, armor damaged, flails under a leaf. The battle moves under the porch, and I can’t see how it ends.

When I walk down the jeep trail at dusk through the shin-high grass, I step over soccer balls of elephant dung, needled with stalks, softly disintegrating in the heat. If I am very lucky, a family of striped mongoose will be using the trail for their evening stroll too, rounding a curve gossiping among themselves, tiniest babies swinging from their mothers’ mouths. I was not believed once when I said I’d seen them, but they’d crossed a puddle as they fled and their little footsies feathered the soft rim with miraculous proof.

And they are miracles, these forest lives, plunging forward morning after morning whether or not we are witness to their reunions and their quarrels, their adventure and rest, their hungers and births and sleep.

Each day loved fiercely by the one who’s got a hold of it, as I love mine even in the rain, all of us do, who are alive.

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163RD COMM

MENCEMENT Photos by Karl Rabe

On May 27, 2023, Bard College President Leon Botstein conferred 392 undergraduate degrees and 172 graduate degrees. The Commencement address was given by US Senator Reverend Raphael Warnock of Georgia.

“What is it that the world needs? My answer is, in the words of Howard Thurman, ‘Ask not what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive.’ Because what the world needs is people who have come alive. In other words, I challenge you to find your passion. I challenge you to find that thing in the world that feels like such a deep moral contradiction that you cannot be silent. You have to express yourself; you have to stand up and try to make the world better.

Find anything that you would do for free except that you have to pay the rent or the mortgage.

And chase after it with all of your might. Pursue the good life. Find your life’s project. Jesus put it this way—you invited a preacher—Jesus said, ‘If you seek to save your life, you’ll lose it. But if you would lose your life,’ he said, ‘for my sake, you’ll find eternal life.’ In other words, the way to find yourself is to give yourself over to something bigger than yourself. And if your life’s project can be completed in your lifespan, I submit to you that is too small. You ought to find a life project that is bigger than your lifespan and seek to continue the important work.”

—Reverend Raphael Warnock, United States Senator

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HONORARY DEGREES US Senator Reverend Raphael Warnock of Georgia, horticulturist George Ball ’73, Indiana University School of Medicine obstetrician and gynecologist Caitlin Bernard, Olympic track star and activist John Carlos, acclaimed writer Sandra Cisneros, Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in US History at the University of California, Los Angeles Robin D. G. Kelley, and Arthur Ross Director of the Center on US-China Relations at Asia Society Orville Schell received honorary doctor of humane letters degrees. An honorary doctor of science degree was awarded to MIT professor Barbara Liskov.

Playwright and actress Anna Deavere Smith accepted an honorary doctor of fine arts degree.

“Advice is a tricky thing. Advice is quite easy to give and also very hard to hear, much less to take. At its best, advice is a cautionary tale.

It reminds us of what we ought to do and suggests what the world could be like if only we would alter our patterns of behavior. But offering unsolicited advice is my obligation in this ceremony. And the advice, or rather admonition, I wish to share with this distinguished and accomplished class is quite simple: resist orthodoxy. Orthodoxies are inevitably reductive, and insist and thrive on conformism. I urge the Class of 2023 to pursue as an alternative to orthodoxy, reasoned empathy. Use the skills of inquiry and the pursuit of learning that you have cultivated in your years in college to comprehend, with some sympathy, those with whom you disagree, even with your fiercest

enemies. Only by imagining the possible reasons others think differently, absorbing new ideas and information, and revising your thoughts and attempting to understand those who oppose your views will the means come into view to persuade, to compromise, or to defeat—with civility and without violence— that which you think is wrong. In the absence of orthodoxy, and with reasoned empathy (even for things we really do not like), we can acknowledge our shared human condition, and embrace the one other habit of life I commend to you: the experience of wonderment. Orthodoxies, tinged as they are with the overt ascetic piety of a puritan cast that is rarely upheld, revile dancing, singing, and laughing. Singing, dancing, and laughing may have come easily to you during your undergraduate years, but as the older adults

gathered here today will readily testify, they get harder to do as life goes on. But never stop dancing, singing, and laughing, and expressing astonishment, joy, and affection.

That should remain a major part of your lives.

And with them will come that treasured gift—the capacity to be kind to strangers. Our collective intellectual and artistic heritage, which this college is determined to protect and share, will be your most reliable ally as you resist orthodoxy, act with reasoned empathy, dance, sing, and laugh, and celebrate wonderment as we, together, embrace the achievements of science, and the riches of literature and all of the arts, for the benefit of all humanity.”

—Leon Botstein, President, Bard College

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FIRST DEGREE The US-China Music Institute of the Bard College Conservatory of Music established a five-year, dual-degree program in 2018. The first two graduates are Sibei (Betty) Wang, far left, who earned a BMus in guzheng performance and a BA in art history and visual culture, and Beitong Liu, left, who earned her BMus is in erhu performance and her BA in global and international studies.

The two-year, interdisciplinary master’s degree program in Human Rights and the Arts, housed in the OSUN Center for Human Rights and the Arts at Bard College, celebrated its first graduates this year (below). Back row, left to right: Hattie Wilder Karlstrom ’20, Garrett Sager, Oscar Gardea, Adam HajYahia, Carol Montealegre-Pinzon, and Nour Annan.

Front row, left to right: Isabella Indolfi, Yiqun (Iris) Luo, and Majd Alrafie. Not pictured: Ali Al Adawy.

Photo by Samuel Stuart Hollenshead

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BARD COLLEGE AWARDS

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Roland J. Augustine (1), activist, humanist, gallerist, and philanthropist; longtime member of Bard’s Board of Trustees; and advocate for access to education for people from areas of conflict, was awarded the Bard Medal, which honors individuals whose efforts and achievements on behalf of Bard have significantly advanced the welfare of the College. The John and Samuel Bard Award in Medicine and Science went to Babacar Cisse ’03, a renowned neurosurgeon and scholar who conducts high-impact research on brain tumors.

Poet Layli Long Soldier MFA ’14 (2), a member of the Oglala Lakota Nation, received the Charles Flint Kellogg Award

in Arts and Letters in recognition of her significant contributions to the American literary heritage. John Dewey Awards for Distinguished Public Service went to Tom Begich ’82 (3), who served three terms in the Alaska Senate with two as the minority leader, and Ting Ting Cheng ’02 (4), director of the Equal Rights Amendment Project at Columbia Law School’s Center for Gender and Sexuality Law. Investigative journalist Katherine Boo, who won a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 2000 for a series of articles in the Washington Post on forprofit group homes for people with developmental disabilities in Washington, DC, received the Mary

McCarthy Award. Bardian Awards, which honor the service of longtime members of the Bard community, were given to Professor of Political Studies Sanjib Baruah, Professor of Studio Arts Laura Battle, Professor of Anthropology and Research Professor and former Dean of the College Michéle D. Dominy, Professor of Studio Arts Ellen Driscoll, Asher B. Edelman Professor of Literature Robert Kelly, Bard High School Early College Manhattan Principal Michael Lerner, Visiting Professor of Writing and Photography Lucy Sante, Artist in Residence Jean Wagner, and Associate Professor of Chinese Li-hua Ying (posthumous).

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BOOKS BY BARDIANS Don’t Call Me Home

by Alexandra Auder ’94 Viking Auder had a ringside seat to the counterculture: her mother, Viva, was one of Andy Warhol’s superstars, and their home was the infamous Chelsea Hotel. Auder was usually the only grownup in the room, yet she thrived. This moving and hilarious portrait of a (unique) family, and vivid depiction of New York City at its seedy best, is a gift.

Off the Deep End

by Giancarlo Granda with Mark Ebner ’82 William Morrow Evangelist Jerry Falwell Jr., who helped Donald J. Trump secure the Republican nomination in 2016, and his wife, Becki, were revealed to have had a years-long sexual relationship with a pool attendant they met at the Fountainbleu Hotel in Miami Beach, Florida. Granda reveals the truth about that relationship and the hidden world of political influence, high finance, and criminal intrigue.

Blotted Lines

by Adhaar Noor Desai, associate professor of literature Cornell University Press Desai’s deeply researched analysis of how Shakespeare and his contemporaries approached poetic composition rebuffs centuries of mythologization about the creative process. The evidence he uncovers of frustration, hesitation, selfdoubt, and insecurity in their writing processes normalizes productive struggle, and should provide solace and inspiration to aspiring poets and those who seek to empower them.

What You Need to Be Warm

by Neil Gaiman, professor in the arts Quill Tree Books In 2019, Gaiman asked his 2.75 million Twitter followers, “What reminds you of warmth?” He wove the responses into a poetic exploration of displacement and flight from conflict through the objects and memories they shared. Illustrated by artists from all corners of the globe, What You Need to Be Warm is about our right to feel safe, whoever we are and wherever we are from. Sales support the United Nations Refugee Agency.

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BOOKS BY BARDIANS

Against Redemption

by Franco Baldasso; assistant professor of Italian, director of Italian Studies Fordham University Press Baldasso explores the competing narratives surrounding Italy’s transition from fascism to democracy, examining authors, works, and memories that were subsequently silenced by Cold War politics. He addresses how Italy worked through national defeat and grappled with its responsibility in World War II and the Holocaust, revealing that the social, racial, and gender biases that characterized fascism survived after its demise.

Code

by Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan ’01 Duke University Press This original and wide-ranging book traces the shared intellectual and political history of computer scientists, cyberneticists, anthropologists, linguists, and theorists across the humanities as they developed a communication and computational-based theory that grasped culture and society in terms of codes.

Interglacial Narrows

by Pierre Joris ’69 Contra Mundum Press This collection is made up of poems written between 2015 and 2021, including an extended version of the Book of U / Le livre des cormorans by Joris and Nicole Peyrafitte; along with “Homage to P.C.,” which gathers Joris’s translations of Paul Celan poems; and finally a diaristic sequence of poems and notes started at the height of COVID in New York City.

Linden Word

by Robert Kelly, Asher B. Edelman Professor Emeritus of Literature Black Square Editions This new collection reflects a year or so of Kelly’s “concentration on the poem as structure, poem as house. Stanza is the key; it means ‘room’ in Italian, each stanza different in shape and function, like the rooms in a house—every room in the house is, must be, different: The kitchen is not the bedroom. So, stanzas serve varied functions, welcome differing guests of meaning and music.”

The Ugly History of Beautiful Things

by Katy Kelleher ’09 Simon & Schuster Science, history, and memoir help Kelleher unveil the fraught histories of makeup, flowers, perfume, silk, and other beautiful objects. We have, she argues, a moral imperative to understand our desires, but we are not evil or weak for desiring beauty. To ethically partake in that beauty, we must know how that beauty came to be, and what price was paid and by whom.

The Best Short Stories 2022 Edited by Valeria Luiselli, Sadie Samuelson Levy Professor in Languages and Literature Anchor This collection includes stories from Distinguished Visiting Professor of Written Arts Joseph O’Neill and 2017 Mary McCarthy Award recipient Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Half of the stories are works in translation, a process Luiselli sees “as a kind of fertile contamination, as a way of putting a language back in movement by allowing the currents of different languages, foreign to one another, to mix and blend.”

Botticelli’s Secret

by Joseph Luzzi, Asher B. Edelman Professor of Literature W. W. Norton & Company A combination of artistic detective story and rich intellectual history, Botticelli’s Secret traces the fascinating path of the artist’s works throughout his lifetime and beyond. This wide-ranging book shows not only how the Renaissance came to life but also how Botticelli’s art helped bring it about—and, most importantly, why we need the Renaissance and all that it stands for today.

Natur und Nation

by Jana Mader, director of academic programs, Hannah Arendt Center for Politics & Humanities Königshausen & Neumann This literary foray through the 19th century examines the ideological transformation of national narratives and the role of the two river landscapes—the Rhine in Germany and the Hudson in the United States—in the construction of national identities. (Published in German.)

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Little Earthquakes

by Sarah Mandel ’03 Harper Mandel, a clinical psychologist specializing in trauma, has written a beautiful and thought-provoking chronicle of her journey with cancer while pregnant with her second baby. Narrative therapy had helped her patients; could that treatment help her navigate her own trauma? Her insights into life, death, trauma, and healing add up to what one reviewer called “a love song to life.”

Alain Locke and the Visual Arts

by Kobena Mercer, Charles P. Stevenson Chair in Art History and Humanities Yale University Press Alain Locke, leading theorist of the Harlem Renaissance, maintained a lifelong commitment to the visual arts. Mercer’s in-depth study of Locke’s writings and art-world interventions focuses on the importance of cross-cultural entanglement, revealing Locke’s vision of modern art as a dynamic space where images and ideas generate new forms under the fluid conditions of diaspora.

Demetrius, Sacker of Cities

by James Romm; James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Classics, director of Classical Studies Yale University Press In this colorful biography, Romm explores Demetrius the Besieger’s vibrant inner life and family relationships to depict a real, complex, and recognizable figure.

The book is a riveting portrait of one of the ancient world’s first political celebrities, telling the fascinating story of his rise and spectacular fall.

Speaking Out

by Esther Schwartz-McKinzie ’89 Gival Press In 19 interviews, LGBTQ+ people and parents of LGBTQ+ people describe their journeys and growth over time. Their words provide connection and suggest pathways—ones to take and ones to avoid—for people who may be struggling with their children or families. Inspired by the author’s daughter, the book pushes back against hateful anti-LGBTQ+ politics and trends.

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Boom Times

by Kit Martin ’08 Anthopper Pubs Begun during the pandemic as a book of poetry inspired by pent up demand and supply-chain snarls, Boom Times soon turned to the Ukraine conflict and the author’s terminal cancer diagnosis. But, as Martin writes, “humor comes most easily from a place of bitterness and hate,” and his book is also a graphic novel and an experiment in text-art interweaving.

Writers and Missionaries

by Adam Shatz, visiting professor of the humanities Verso Shatz interrogates the major figures of 20th- and 21st-century thought and finds within their lives and work the roots of our present intellectual and geopolitical situation. Do writers have an ethical imperative to question injustice? How can one remain a dispassionate thinker when involved in the cut and thrust of politics? And, in an age of horror and crisis, what does it mean to be a committed writer?

Commitment

by Mona Simpson, writer in residence Knopf Moving from Berkeley and Los Angeles to New York and back again, Commitment is a story about family, duty, and the struggles that come when a parent falls ill. Simpson’s resonant novel honors the spirit of fragile, imperfect mothers and explores the underchronicled significance of friends in determining the lives of children left on their own.

Eleanor of Aquitaine, as It Was Said

by Karen Sullivan University of Chicago Press This book invites us to consider what the most fantastical tales about Eleanor of Aquitaine, Queen of France and then Queen of England, reveal about life as a 12th-century noblewoman.

Sullivan reads the Middle Ages not to impose our current conceptual categories on its culture but to expose the conceptual categories medieval women used to make sense of their lives.

The Flowering Wand

by Sophie Strand ’16 Inner Traditions Sharing the culmination of eight years of research into myth, folklore, and the history of religion, Strand leads us back into the forgotten landscapes and hidden secrets of familiar myths, revealing the beautiful range of the divine masculine, including expressions of male friendship, male intimacy, and male creative collaboration.

The Mythmakers

By Keziah Weir ’13 Marysue Rucci Books A young journalist, professionally disgraced and floundering, is at a crossroads: grow up or give up. A mission presents itself, or better, she creates one from the afterglow of a long-ago encounter with an obscure novelist. Hot-button topics abound—appropriation, men behaving badly, women behaving badly—but humanness, in all its flawed beauty, is at the heart of this novel.

Making Money Work for Us

by L. Randall Wray, professor of economics Polity As Wray points out, the only real constraints on public policy are physical resources, technological capacity, and political will—never money. Using Modern Money Theory, he reframes the conversation around money and debt and shows how the US can mobilize its collective resources. A companion volume, Money for Beginners, was illustrated by Heske Van Doornen MS ’18.

Please Wait by the Coat Room

by John Yau ’72 Black Sparrow Press These essays about Black, Asian, Latinx, and Native American artists are for readers interested in the art and artists of color that many mainstream institutions and critics have misrepresented or overlooked. Yau presents a view guided by the artists’ desire for autonomy and freedom in a culture that has deemed them undesirable or invisible, while also proposing the need for an expansive view of identity.

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HOLIDAY PARTY

New York City Bard isn’t just the “Nation’s No. 1 Dinner Party School” (thank you Onion), it’s also a great Holiday Party school! It’s been a few years since the last such soirée, but on December 1, 2023, alumni/ae once again gathered in lower Manhattan to celebrate, reminisce, reconnect with old friends, and make some new ones. If you couldn’t attend this year, we look forward to seeing you next time, or at a Cities Party near you!

DEAR BARDIANS, Last May I returned to Annandale, as I often do, to celebrate all that is Bard.

This year I was joined by more than 70 of my classmates as we toasted our 20th reunion. We had folks join us from as far away as Tunisia and Alaska and from as nearby as River Road. We walked to the waterfall, ate meals in Kline, took in Commencement, sat on blankets at Blithewood, and perhaps stayed up a little too late. It was a perfect Hudson Valley weekend, made all the better by the company I shared.

I also took over as president of the Bard College Alumni/ae Association. I am excited to lead our esteemed alumni/ae body for the next few years,

and want to thank our past presidents for the work they’ve done, especially my predecessor and dear friend, KC Serota ’04. Thank you, KC, for your leadership and commitment, from the hard early days of COVID to the joyful in-person reunions and commencements of 2022 and 2023.

While it’s nice to think back on my days as a student, something sleeping in a dorm room for a weekend certainly encourages, I am more interested in looking to Bard’s future, to our future, which is brighter for the newest additions to our alumni/ae ranks: 392 bachelor’s degrees and 172 graduate degrees were conferred here in Annandale; a combined 506 associate degrees at seven Bard Early Colleges across the country; 24 more at microcolleges in Brooklyn, New York, and Holyoke, Massachusetts; and 69 (associate and bachelor’s) at Bard Prison Initiative programs across six campuses. And looking to Bard’s Class of 2027, in August we welcomed 392 first-year students—representing

Holiday Party photos by Brennan Cavanaugh ’88. Class photo by Samuel Stuart Hollenshead.

Mollie Meikle ’03 photo by Karl Rabe

27 countries and 34 states—to Annandale for the Language and Thinking Program. We also have 10 students who have chosen to spend their first year at Bard’s campus in Berlin, Germany. Gazing even further into the future, last September 125 students inaugurated Bard’s newest early college, BHSEC Bronx.

And of course, there’s all of you!

I look forward to seeing you at next year’s Commencement, when we can once again celebrate proud Bardians like Dan O’Neill ’79, Sandy Zane ’80, Erin Law ’93, Paul Thompson ’93, James Fuentes ’98, Adam Conover ’04, Golden McCarthy ’05, Adam Khalil ’11, and Zack Khalil ’14, all of whom will be receiving Bard College Awards. You do amazing work!

Bardian and Proud, Mollie Meikle ’03 President, Board of Governors, Bard College Alumni/ae Association alumni@bard.edu

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CLASS NOTES 2019 Miriam Roday is attending the London School of Economics Master of Public Policy program.

She continues to work part-time as a research associate at the Institute for Defense Analyses.

2018 Kabir Khanna and Madeleine Johnsson ’20 Levy ’20 met at Bard College—introduced by fellow DJ Lucas Druz ’16, who DJed at Traghaven in Tivoli every Thursday night from 2017 to 2018. After moving to Washington, DC, for different reasons, they decided to pursue their passion for music full time

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in August 2022. Their launch party was a huge success, and they are now the hit duo known as Hast du Feuer, hosting bimonthly parties ranging from 200 to 700 people.

2017 Bridget Bertoldi is in the final stages of her PhD in clinical psychology at Florida State University, and recently started her doctoral internship at the Allenwood Federal Prison in Pennsylvania. Much of the work she’s done at FSU is directly related to work she did in psychology at Bard.

Rosemary Nelis celebrated her first year as the violist of the Cassatt String Quartet, began teaching as adjunct viola faculty at the Cali School of Music at Montclair State University, and taught at Kinhaven Music School.

She also snuck in a trip to Slovenia to visit Sarah Ghandour.

2014 Virginia Hanusik published a photo-essay in the Bitter Southerner, capturing the aftermath of Hurricane Ida in Louisiana.

2013 Fanny Wyrick-Flax joined the faculty of The Juilliard School this fall. She is teaching a yearlong course in Alexander Technique as part of the Music Division.

2012 Lilah Anderson has been gallery director at Drake University’s Anderson Gallery in Des Moines, Iowa, for two years. An exhibition she worked on with Judy Pfaff, Richard B. Fisher Professor in the Arts at Bard, opened September 7 and ran through October 15, 2023. Lilah was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts

Photos by Samuel Stuart Hollenshead. Class of 2013 (bottom left) by Brennan Cavanaugh ’88

grant for an exhibition she organized of a site-specific installation by artists Duane Slick and Martin Smick that opened October 27. She also presented at this year’s Association of Academic Museums and Galleries conference.

Zia Affronti Morter graduated from the registered nursing program at Russell Sage College.

Morgan Green directed the premiere of Fat Ham, the Pulitzer-winning adaptation of Hamlet. The play transferred from Philadelphia to Off Broadway, then to the Broadway stage, and was nominated for a 2023 Tony Award for Best Play. Last year, theater critic David Cote ’92 wrote about its run at the Public Theater for observer.com.

2011 Connor Brown recently earned his doctor of musical arts in music composition at the University of Colorado Boulder.

2008 Ariel Stess had a workshop of her new play Score at New Dramatists in New York City in December 2022. She teaches at Northwestern University, where she is an assistant professor of instruction in the Department of Radio/Television/Film.

2005 Andrew Lyman-Clarke lives in Scarsdale, New York, with his wife, Lauren. He is in his sixth year working at JP Morgan Chase in Brand Video, their in-house video production agency. As a producer/director, he leads projects for many different lines of business.

His video “Autism at Work: A Global Program” was the most viewed video on JPMC’s LinkedIn page, and two recent training videos he directed were the highestrated trainings at the company. He continues to create his own film and TV projects, including the thriller Night Sweats, now available on Amazon and Tubi.

1994

THE WAITING I was waiting for something to arrive. I didn’t know what.

Something buoyed, something sun knocked. I placed my palms up, little pads of butter, expecting.

All day, nothing. Longer than that. My hair grew, fell out, grew. Outside my window, I felt the flick of a tail in September wind. A bobcat sauntered across the grass before me, the black tip of its tail a pencil I’d like to sharpen.

I immediately hushed, crouched, became a crumpled shock of joy to see something this wild, not myself. It turned to look at me, its body muscular in the turning. In its mouth was the tail of a mouse drained of blood, dangling diorama of death.

Sharp eyes looking at me and then, not. Its lack of fear, its slow stroll across the stream’s bridge, fur lacquering its teeth. Sometimes what comes to us, we never called for. How long had I been crouched like that? I stood up, blood rush trumpeting. My arms wrapped themselves around myself, lifted.

It was as if a bank vault had opened and I was just standing there, stealing nothing.

Renée Cramer was named provost at Dickinson College. Renée is proud to be “returning home to the liberal arts.”

1992

Copyright ©2021 by Jane Wong. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 17, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.

Brian Stefans became a full professor of English at UCLA after 15 years of teaching.

In 2021, he published a collection of translations of the verse poems of 19th century French poet Arthur Rimbaud that attempted to create English versions of his poems using the original French meters and (to a degree) rhyme schemes. Brian’s first attempt at translating Rimbaud was for his Senior Project.

Jane Wong ’07 is the author of two books of poetry, How to Not Be Afraid of Everything (Alice James, 2021) and Overpour (Action Books, 2016), and a memoir, Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City (Tin House, 2023). A Kundiman fellow, she is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and fellowships and residencies from the US Fulbright Program, Artist Trust, Harvard’s Woodberry Poetry Room, 4Culture, the Fine Arts Work Center, Bread Loaf, Hedgebrook, Willapa Bay, the Jentel Foundation, UCross, Mineral School, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, Loghaven, and others. Wong grew up in a Chinese American restaurant on the Jersey shore and lives in Seattle. She is an associate professor of creative writing at Western Washington University.

janewongwriter.com

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Stefan Weisman and David Cote were awarded a residency at the Avaloch Farm Music Institute to workshop a climate change–themed opera for mezzo-soprano Hai-Ting Chinn called Meltdown. The three artists previously collaborated on The Scarlet Ibis (2015). Bard Assistant Professor of Music Erika Switzer is the opera’s music director.

1991 Ben Lackey recently took a position as general counsel of GridStor after many years at Avangrid Renewables. GridStor focuses exclusively on large-scale, standalone battery energy storage projects, which enhance grid stability and support greater renewables penetration.

Bennett Lieberman and his family have moved to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where Bennett is the new principal of Jackson Hole High School. Bennett spent 18 years as the principal of Central Park East High School, and a total of 23 years with the New York City Department of Education.

Congratulations are also in order for Bennett’s son Oskar, who graduated from BHSEC Manhattan in June with his associates degree.

1990 Morgen M. Bowers changed the name of her Chatham, New York, law firm to Four Corners Legacy Law to better reflect the new focus of her practice: helping families and business owners get organized so their families are taken care of if they become incapacitated or when they die. It is a holistic model of estate planning, valuing a family’s heritage and traditions as much as its financial assets.

NUMBER OUR DAYS: A PHOTOGRAPHIC ORATORIO

1983 Tim Long had his photo of a Gogodola tribesman from Papua, New Guinea, showcased in the exhibition Le Monde en tête at the Pointe-à-Callière Museum in Montreal in November 2022.

1982 Jamie Livingston ’79 died in 1997, but his magnificent project— documenting each day with a single Polaroid for 18 years—continues to move and inspire (see Bardian, Winter 2018). Number Our Days: A Photographic Oratorio, which premieres April 12, 2024, at the World Trade Center’s Perelman Performing Arts Center, gives Livingston’s Photo of the Day series another new life. Conceived by documentary filmmaker David Van Taylor, the multimedia oratorio features music

by Grammy-nominated composer Luna Pearl Woolf for chorus, orchestra, and soloists. The piece is built around interviews with people in the photos (including several Bardians) and explores the strange alchemy of technology, memory, and community.

For tickets and information, visit pacnyc.org/number-our-days.

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Geoffrey Stein was the 2022–23 artist in residence at the Elizabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University. He worked at the law school one day a week, in a public area outside the library, which allowed him to interact with students, faculty, and staff.

Some of the work completed during the residency was displayed at the library. The residency culminated in an exhibition and interview with the dean on March 27.

1977 Liza Wherry and Ron “Bean” Finell ’76 were married March 28, 2023, at the Scranton Seahorse Inn in Madison, Connecticut. They recently moved into a Tudor home in North Canaan.

1975 Angela Manno, artist and animal/environment activist, had work from her series Icons of Threatened and Endangered Species showcased in the popup exhibition MAYDAY! EAARTH in December 2022 in New York City. The show addressed the climate and biodiversity crises.

Manno’s work has been featured in numerous exhibitions at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Smithsonian Institution, American Museum of Natural History, and is part of the permanent NASA fine art

collection at the Kennedy Space Center.

Roy M. Vestrich has accomplished many things since his early retirement from Castleton University in 2014: he completed his fifth passage sailing between Lake Champlain and Florida in 2023; published two poetry books, River People and The Lost Sonnets; exhibited paintings and photography at galleries in Vermont and Massachusetts; read his poem “The Nonagenarian Forest” at London’s Royal Opera House, Linbury Theatre; and recently has taken on the position of director and chair of the Sir Robert Cohan Dance Legacy CIC in the UK and director of the Sir Robert Cohan Arts Legacy, L3C in the USA.

Photos by Samuel Stuart Hollenshead (top), Chris Kayden (bottom)

1974 David Ossian Cameron retired from the International Brotherhood of Teamsters after serving for 27 years as assistant director of the Rail Conference, director of the Overnite Organizing Campaign, and senior communications coordinator.

David also served on the Biden Transition Team for the Department of Transportation as an expert for the Federal Railroad Administration, Amtrak, and the Surface Transportation Board. He wrote “Sparking the Next Rail Revolution” for the then-incoming Biden Administration and continues to work with the administration, on an ad hoc basis, on highspeed rail.

Susan Mernit has retired from her role as executive director at the Crucible, a nonprofit

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industrial arts school and community located in Oakland, California. The Crucible’s goal is to make industrial arts accessible to everyone, regardless of income, and under Susan’s leadership, it served more than 10,000 youth and adults annually. In her postretirement phase, Susan plans to use her extensive knowledge and experience to consult on grant writing and fundraising for nonprofits in the Bay Area. When not working, she is a passionate hiker and is excited to have more time to explore California with her partner, friends, and family.

1970 Jane Evelyn Atwood was decorated by the République Française for her nearly five decades of remarkable photography.

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1966 Kathryn Stein received the 2023 William S. Hancock Award for Outstanding Achievements in CMC Regulatory Science from California Sharing Science Solutions (CASSS). CASSS members represent the pharmaceutical companies that make biological products, including vaccines and drugs.

Rikki Ducornet’s Phosphor in Dreamland, which was named a best book of the year by both the New York Times and Los Angeles Times, has been reissued by Deep Vellum/Dalkey Archive.

Rikki’s new novella, The Plotinus, is now out with Coffee House Press. Her work has also been widely published abroad.

1964 Jonathan Schwartz retired from his solo law practice a few years ago and continues to live in

Marina del Rey, California, on his 46-foot Chris-Craft powerboat, which he shared with his wife, Joan Schwartz ’64, until her death in 2017.

MILTON AVERY GRADUATE SCHOOOL OF THE ARTS 1991 Lily Prince’s solo show Both Sides Now was at the Carrie Chen Gallery in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, before being installed at The Barrington from June through August 2022. Her work was included in the group show Mountains at Collioure, in White River Junction, Vermont, in spring 2022. Lily’s solo show, The Honey and the Thorn, was at the Window on Hudson Gallery in Hudson, New York, from April through May 2023.

CENTER FOR CURATORIAL STUDIES

2017

2023 Zehra Begüm Kışla will have her master’s thesis exhibition, Extended Structures, travel to the Goethe-Institut New York, opening in September 2024.

Extended Structures surveys the work of Silent University, initiated by artist Ahmet Öğüt, and unitednationsplaza, a collective project founded by artist Anton Vidokle, through a presentation of documentary and archival materials. By pairing these two distinct education projects, the exhibition intends to frame the method of “instituent practices,” seeking to confront institutions not through sharp opposition but rather through the logic of extension and negotiation.

Pat Elifritz is director of analytics and media technology at Superblue, where he continues to explore art, data, and technology. Superblue is a “groundbreaking enterprise dedicated to producing, presenting, and engaging the public with experiential art.”

2016 Patricia M. Hernández is a curator and researcher with a background in social work. She is associate curator of learning at Amant in Brooklyn, New York, and has held positions as assistant curator at Dia Art Foundation and associate director at A.I.R. Gallery, the first artist-run collective in the United States dedicated to feminist practices.

Does your class year end in a 4 or a 9?

If so, see you May 24–26 for Reunion 2024!

Whatever your year, the Bard College Fund needs your support! giving.bard.edu/bcf development@bard.edu alumni@bard.edu

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Photos by Chris Kayden

2011 Nathan Lee was hired as assistant professor of film at Hollins University and published criticism in Art Papers, Film Comment, Lithub, and Broadcast.

2010 Özge Ersoy, who has been working at Asia Art Archive in Hong Kong as public programs lead since 2017, was promoted to senior curator.

2017. The museum operates in three venues and oversees public art in the city.

Florencia Malbrán has published a book titled La prueba del presente (Beatriz Viterbo Editora), an in-depth study of the conditions of contemporary art in Latin America since the turn of the millennium. She is also working as curator of the Colección Eduardo F. Costantini in Argentina.

2009 Christina Linden began as director of academic and public programs at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University in October 2022. “I’ve been excited to work on a variety of programs for both the campus community and the surrounding public. Notably, the Museums of Tomorrow Symposium that took place at Stanford in April 2023 and was organized around a key question: Can technology transform systems of power within culture and its institutions? Museum directors from several continents along with leading artists and experts presented on the role of technology in shaping the power structures that are defining art and culture. Collectively, the presenters and attendees discussed how these changes will shape the future of museums and other cultural institutions. This program was organized by the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University in conjunction with the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and András Szántó LLC.”

2008 Dan Byers will curate the 2024 Icelandic Pavilion at the Venice Biennale featuring artist Hildigunnur Birgisdóttir. Dan is John R. and Barbara Robinson Family Director of the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University.

2007 Markús Þór Andrésson has been chief curator at Reykjavík Art Museum in Iceland since

2005 Kate McNamara opened ODDKIN, a gallery and project space in Providence, Rhode Island, with an exhibition of work by the artist Lucy Kim. ODD-KIN focuses on contemporary art with a commitment to contextualizing pioneering and emerging artists. An exhibition of new work by Polly Apfelbaum opened in September.

LATE ROMANCE and COLLECTED POEMS

2003 After 13 years as a curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, José Luis Blondet was appointed senior curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles last spring.

Ingrid Pui Yee Chu curated Sounds Like Print (cocurated with Edward Sanderson and coorganised with Daniel Szehin Ho) and other projects and programs including Behind Your Eyelid: Pipilotti Rist’s Art in Books (cocurated with Tobias Berger) and Brilliant Trees for the Artists’ Book Library. She also recently served on the team organizing the 5th edition of BOOKED: Hong Kong Art Book Fair at Tai Kwun Contemporary. Recent writing includes More mountains, tracking the transformation of Hong Kong’s art ecosystem for Art Basel; contributions on Danh Vo and Samson Young for the exhibition Myth Makers; and the reader for her independently curated exhibition Breaching Sanctum.

One of America’s greatest poets, Anthony Hecht ’44—who taught at the College from 1952 to 1955 and again from 1962 to 1966—is the subject of a new biography, Late Romance, by David Yezzi (St. Martin’s Press). The book’s appearance coincides with the 100th anniversary of Hecht’s birth as well as the publication of the Pulitzer Prize winner and former poet laureate’s collected poems (Knopf), including the best of the many verses left uncollected at the time of his death in 2004.

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CITIES PARTIES This fall saw an unprecedented number of Bard Cities Parties hosted by alumni/ae, often in venues they own, across the country and across the pond. The gatherings kicked off in Atlanta on September 6, hosted by Jazondre Gibbs ’19 and Tia Landau ’84 at Landau’s bar The Albert. Three weeks later in Philadelphia, Bardians adjourned to Frankford Hall with hosts Hannah Becker ’11 and Val Nehez ’87. In Denver on October 5, Bardians got together at Improper City for beers and banter with hosts Jeff Levy ’67, Vicki Lindner ’66, Rachel Nalecz ’18, and Steven Richards ’72. The following day in Madison, Wisconsin, hosts Lynn Diener ’99 and Ellen Louise Schwartz ’64 welcomed alumni/ae for cocktails and conversation at The Great Dane. The next weekend, Isaac Liberman ’04—with the help of cohosts Jane Brien ’89, Alex Habiby ’18, and Lea Tshilds ’90—made his bar The Hi-Lo Chicago-on-the-Hudson. On November 9, the new Bard NYC space in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, was home to a party hosted by Kathleya Chotiros ’98 and Caia Diepenbrock ’15. On the 14th the pub crawl moved to the Boston area, with Alex Hamme ’19, Jack Hanly ’16, and Travis McGrath ’11 joining friends new and old at Aeronaut Brewing Company. Just a few hours later, in London, England, Julia DeFabo ’14, Gabriel Shalom ’05, and Thoko Soko ’20 hosted a Cities Party at The Last Talisman. And on December 14, Paper Chase Press Chief Executive Officer Nicole Katz ’02— along with cohosts James Fuentes ’98, Sam Gezari ’02, Amanda Phillips ’02, Ana Sharp ’03, and Kate Wolf ’03— welcomed LA Bardians to the company’s campus in Hollywood, California, for the year’s final Cities Parties. For information on future City Parties, visit alums.bard.edu/events.

1999 Tatjana Myoko von Prittwitz und Gaffron received full authorization as a Soto Zen priest. Ceremonies were held at Eiheiji and Sojiji in Japan, the two head monasteries.

Tatjana is also the Buddhist chaplain and a visiting assistant professor of humanities at Bard College.

1996 Independent curator Regine Basha has relocated from New York City to Madrid, Spain, with her son. From there she will work as a consultant to programs and residencies in Spain and other parts of Europe and the Middle East and North Africa regions. She recently helped launch Yto Barrada’s The Mothership and Think Tanger, both in Morocco. Her archive project Tuning Baghdad was recently hosted in Fez and was featured at the Ellipsis across Borders Conference in Sarajevo.

senior speech pathologist. He serves as the head of the voice rehabilitation team.

2011 Julia Bullock premiered a fullscale production of Perle Noire, Meditations For Joséphine at the 2023 Dutch National Opera Forward Festival. The project, which was first workshopped at the Ojai Festival in 2016, was developed in collaboration with director Peter Sellars and composer Tyshawn Sorey.

Bullock first performed songs associated with Josephine Baker in 2014 at a recital in which the songs about exploitation, objectification, and relationship difficulties, as well as the roles she was to adopt during her life, such as that of being an exotic outsider, became its defining motifs. Julia was nominated for a 2024 Grammy Award in the Best Classical Solo Vocal Album category for Walking in the Dark (Nonesuch Records).

CONSERVATORY OF MUSIC GRADUATE PROGRAMS

ADVANCED PERFORMANCE STUDIES

VOCAL ARTS PROGRAM

2016

2021 Countertenor Chuanyuan Liu was a Renée Fleming Artist for the Aspen Opera Theater and VocalARTS 2023 Program, debuting the role of César in Bel Canto, the Jimmy López Bellido and Nilo Cruz opera based on the novel by Ann Patchett. He started his 2023–24 season performing the title role in White Snake Projects’ world premiere of Monkey by Jorge Sosa and Cerise Lim Jacobs. Chuanyuan was one of 20 singers to reach the semifinal round of the 2023 Metropolitan Opera Eric and Dominique Laffont Competition.

2013 Jaqueline Stucker made her role debut at the Royal Opera House in London as Pamina in Die Zauberflöte last winter.

Logan Walsh recently relocated to Los Angeles to begin work at LA General Medical Center as a

In January, Stephanie Hollander joined the faculty of Syracuse University as horn professor and was promoted to associate director of career development at Hartwick College.

IN MEMORIAM 1950 John Lee Rice Sr., 94, died December 23, 2022. John was born in Granby, Connecticut, graduated from Mercersburg Academy, and after Bard served in the United States Army. He owned and operated the Queen Palm Nurseries in Sarasota, Florida, for many years. He is survived by his son John Jr. and daughter Betty.

Naomi Fox Rothfield died July 2, 2023. In a career spanning seven decades, first at Bellevue and then at the UCONN Health Center, she wrote more than 150 journal articles on rheumatologic

diseases and authored 42 book chapters. In 1991, Bard honored her with the John and Samuel Bard Award in Medicine and Science. She loved ballet, opera and other “high” arts, but she also loved the Hartford Whalers, University of Connecticut women’s basketball, and mystery novels. The late poet and Bard professor James Merrill, who was a friend, wrote of Naomi, in the last line of his “Laboratory Poem,” which is about her: “I have never known her tired.” She is survived by her children: Suzy, Larry, Jane, and John.

1955 Loretta Goldenberg Waite, 89, died May 25, 2023. Born in the Bronx, her talent and passion for painting were apparent at a young age. She published her first painting at 15 in 16 Magazine. She was awarded a scholarship to Bard to study art and went on to earn her master’s degree from Columbia Teachers College. Loretta spent her career teaching art to young people at Walton High School in the Bronx, working as a commercial illustrator, interior designer, and painter. She is survived by her daughter Clea.

1957 Naomi Kisch died December 28, 2022. Naomi had a very successful career as a writer and editor, contributing to the Columbia Encyclopedia, several cookbooks, and countless social studies textbooks with Macmillan and Prentice-Hall. She is survived by her husband of 65 years, Gil, and two children, Erica and Alex.

1958 Carl Davis, 86, died August 3, 2023. An all-round musician, Carl was the driving force behind the reinvention of the silent movie for this generation. He was a conductor and composer of symphonic works, a notable writer for the ballet, and had his own record label, the Carl Davis Collection. Carl studied composition with Paul Nordoff, Hugo Kauder, and Per Nørgård, and gained conducting experience with the New York

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City Opera and the Robert Shaw Chorale. Carl’s UK career was launched after he was commissioned to write music for That Was the Week That Was and he moved to London shortly thereafter. He wrote scores for the National Theatre and Royal Shakespeare Company as well as for some of the most loved and remembered British television dramas. In 1970, Carl married the actress Jean Boht. Following the success of his work on Abel Gance’s Napoleon, Carl wrote and reconstructed scores for more than 50 silent films. He also created a number of ballets, with his final ballet, Le Fantôme et Christine, premiering at the Shanghai Ballet in May 2023.

Carl was awarded a CBE (Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire) in 2005 and an alumni/ae honorary doctor of fine arts degree from Bard in 2018.

He is survived by his daughters, Hannah and Jessie.

1961 Emily Ann Haas Davidson, 83, died November 19, 2022. After receiving her history degree from Bard, she studied theater at the Weber Douglas School of Dramatic Art in London. In 1967, Emily married photographer Bruce Davidson. Together they published Bobby’s Book, the story of former gang leader Bobby Powers. Emily was the first student of Jewish descent chosen for the American Field Service and sent to Germany after World War II. She performed in several offBroadway productions and was an avid dancer. She also studied child psychology at Hunter College and volunteered with the Ackerman Institute AIDS Project in the 1990s. She is survived by Bruce and her daughters, Anna and Jenny.

1964 Lawrence “Larry” William Johnson, 80, died January 30, 2023. Larry graduated from the Buxton School, Bard College, and LSU where he earned his PhD in physical chemistry. In 1974, he became a chemistry professor at

IN MEMORIAM

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THE HEART OF ASIAN STUDIES LI-HUA YING, Bard’s senior faculty member of Chinese language and literature, died January 29, 2023. Born in Sichuan in 1956 and raised in neighboring Yunnan, China, Ying received her BA from Yunnan Normal University in Kunming, China, and her MA and PhD from the University of Texas, Austin. A devoted and beloved teacher and scholar, she joined the Bard faculty in 1990 and taught continuously until her recent illness.

“Li-hua will be remembered by her colleagues, students, and friends for her generosity of spirit, her kindness, and her optimism,” writes President Botstein. “These were central to her life and her teaching. Li-hua demonstrated an exceptional commitment to Bard as an institution as well as to her students. Bard’s thriving Chinese language and literature program is a living tribute to her devotion and leadership.”

Among Ying’s publications are “Negotiating with the Past: The Art of Calligraphy in Post-Mao China” (ASIANetwork Exchange, Spring 2012), “Vital Margins: Frontier Poetics and Landscape of Ethnic Identity” (the first chapter in Mapping Shangrila: Contested Landscapes in the Sino-Tibetan Borderlands, 2014), and Historical Dictionary of Modern Chinese Literature (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021). She also served for many years as the executive director of the American Society of Shufa Calligraphy Education, promoting the teaching of Chinese calligraphy in the US. Ying mentored students, built the Chinese language program from the ground up, and made key contributions to the Asian Studies and Literature Programs. Before Ying’s appointment, a Chinese language program at Bard did not exist; her tireless dedication and pedagogical talent enabled a notoriously difficult language to be learned and mastered by undergraduates at Bard. For her contributions, she was awarded the Michèle Dominy Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2021.

Li-hua Ying ensured that Bard students studying Chinese had the opportunity to fully immerse themselves in Chinese language and culture. She established and directed Bard’s summer intensive Chinese program, leading groups of students in an eight-week program at Qingdao University in China every summer for more than two decades.

In addition to founding a new area of study, Ying made valuable contributions to the curriculum in the arts and gender studies. She was also instrumental in helping the Bard Conservatory of Music build its significant relationships with China.

The Li-hua Ying Fund for Asian Studies has been established at Bard for students and faculty who are pursuing an Asian studies concentration, studying in Asia, or conducting research in the field.

It was initiated and supported by her surviving family, her husband, Charles Chao, and son, Kyle Chao. bardian.bard.edu/register/lying

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IN MEMORIAM

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Photo by Chris Kendall ’82

York College, where he taught for 46 years. Larry was an accomplished research academic with numerous publications, a patent, and several fellowships to his name. He was also a devoted teacher who pushed his students hard and loved seeing them succeed. Outside of his professional life, Larry loved the ocean, sailing and swimming, reading, the arts—especially theater and dance—and his dogs.

He is survived by his wife, Maryan, and his children, Christina and Nicholas.

Susan Marcus, 80, died May 17, 2023. As a teenager, Susan picketed Woolworth’s in New York City’s Union Square, protesting for civil rights. Susan worked as a copy editor and indexer, cocreated a stencil business, managed a garden of epic proportions and, for more than 20 years worked as a waitress at Le Garage in Wiscasset, Maine, near her home in Alna. After retiring, she spent a number of years as a court appointed special advocate on behalf of children dealing with child protective services. She is survived by her children, Simon ’97 and Sarah.

Eric D. Werthman, 81, died September 10, 2022. A Gestalt psychotherapist, filmmaker, and activist, for 50 years he was a fixture in Park Slope, Brooklyn.

He is survived by his wife, Polly, and sons, Nick and Jesse.

1965 Stephen Williams Foote, 80, died March 8, 2023. Steve spent 17 years with St. Mary the Virgin in Falmouth, Maine, first as curate and then rector; 13 years with the Episcopal Diocese of Maine in Portland as archdeacon; and 13 years as the dean of the Cathedral Church of St. Luke. He worked with Maine Preservation and Greater Portland Landmarks.

A lifelong interest in architecture guided his efforts in a cathedral renovation as well as input into the design of the home in Bremen that he shared with his partner, Jonathan Pelletier. Steve is survived by three brothers, Dwight, Daniel, and Jonathan.

1966 Frank Minnelli, 80, died June 27, 2023. His forebears were theater people, and Frank’s passion was the written word. After Bard, he attended the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop and later opened Parnassus Bookstore in Marblehead, Massachusetts, which hosted memorable poetry readings. In 1973, Frank met his wife, Anne, and they ventured from the East Coast to Lakewood, Ohio. Frank served during the Vietnam War as an Army medic and training supervisor, overseeing the burn unit at Fort Sam Houston in Texas. The majority of his career was spent in the field of clinical chemical dependency, with 40 years as a master addictions counselor and certified addictions specialist. He is survived by Anne and their children, Andrew and Maria, and his sister, Marian Riley.

1967 Zazel Wilde Loven died April 26, 2023. Her early years traced a path from Hagerstown, Maryland, to Peter Cooper Village in New York City to Westport, Connecticut, with summers as a teenager in Portland, Maine, where she met and became lifelong friends with poet, critic, and Warhol actor Rene Ricard.

After Bard, Zazel moved back to Manhattan, where she worked in the fashion industry as a stylist.

When she was 21, she was photographed for the back cover of the Doors’ album Strange Days. A longtime magazine editor, Zazel worked at Harper’s Bazaar in the ’70s, McCall’s and Country Living in the ’80s, and Rodale’s Organic Gardening in the ’90s. In the 2000s, she turned her focus to community organizing, serving on the West 300 Block Association and Chelsea Waterside Park Association. She was an early supporter of the High Line and the thriving garden of wild plants that had taken over its disused elevated train tracks. Zazel is survived by her longtime partner, Robert Sherman, and her children, Hillevi and Sven.

Paula Fuchs Blasier died January 1, 2023. Paula’s interest

THE SOLOMONS Ruth Rosenheim Solomon ’57 died June 12, 2023; John Leonard Solomon ’58 died October 30, 2023. Ruth and John each met two of the most important people in their lives at Bard. In addition to each other, Ruth met her mentor, Jean Erdman, and John met László Bitó ’60. Erdman invited Ruth to be her assistant dance director at Tisch School of Arts at New York University in 1967.

A well-regarded modern dancer and teacher, Ruth was later recruited to establish the theater arts program at the University of California, Santa Cruz, College Five (now Porter College), where she continued to teach until her retirement in 1995. Over the span of her 88 years, Ruth created more than 60 works in her unique version of the modern dance idiom, published articles in the Journal of Dance Medicine and Science, and volunteered with the Dance Medicine Program at Harvard.

Growing up in Indianapolis, John excelled athletically and academically. At Bard, he won awards for his writing and he went on to earn a master’s degree from Columbia University and PhD from Indiana University. In between those degrees, he served in the Army and was stationed in Puerto Rico. John was also on the Porter College faculty, as a professor of contemporary literature, and later became assistant provost. After retirement, John and Ruth began a prolific partnership, conducting research and publishing books, articles, and journals focused on dance medicine.

In more recent years, he returned to literature, editing translations of several books by his Bard classmate and dear friend, Hungarian author László Bitó ’60, who died in 2021. John lived with the debilitating effects of multiple sclerosis for more than 50 of his 87 years, but he rarely missed his daily workouts at the health club, and traveled extensively with Ruth. They are survived by their children, Mardi and Rowan.

in how humans think, learn, and behave, and the most effective ways to communicate with them, led her to take a job as a psychiatric social worker in a maximum security prison after graduation. She later moved to California and worked for 17 years in sailboat design, marketing, and sales. In 1987, she switched careers again, working in landuse education. In 2001, she became director of special projects at University of California, Berkeley’s Fisher Center for Real Estate and Urban Economics, where she led the team that created the UrbanPlan program (UP). From 2003–14, she worked with more than 30 community-based land-use nonprofits to implement UP in their local high schools. After retiring, Paula joined the PD Active Community in Berkeley.

She is survived by her sister, Marlene Brown.

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Gail C. Grisetti, 76, died March 14, 2023. Gail studied dance at Bard, and earned a certificate in physical therapy in 1977 and a doctorate in health education in 1989, both from Columbia University. She joined the faculty at Old Dominion University (ODU), where she taught for 32 years. She expressed her passion to help others by volunteering with several international organizations to share her expertise and train physical therapists worldwide. Merging her interests in education and international service, she developed a collaboration between ODU and Physicians for Peace to create a study abroad program. She received many awards for her accomplishments, including the Physicians for Peace Medical Diplomat Award in 2012. Gail is survived by her husband, Dr. Abdul Hamid Jamaludeen.

IN MEMORIAM

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1969

1981

Philip “Peter” Peltz, 76, died October 16, 2022. A carpenter by trade, Peter was a Vermont state legislator, a committed civic leader, an advocate for children and education, and a champion for Vermont and its natural environment. He is survived by his wife, Cacky, and children, Aysha and Alex.

Robert Fagan died July 8, 2023, in Granada, Spain, after suffering a stroke. Bob grew up in the Olneyville neighborhood of Providence, Rhode Island, and studied English and music at Bard. He was a member of one of Bard’s most legendary bands, Virus, and went on to perform some 100 shows with Powell St. John and the Aliens—whose songs Bob first heard when he got to Bard—playing bass, acoustic guitar, and banjo live and on the band’s 2009 record, On My Way to Houston. Bob earned a certificate in English language teaching to adults from St. Giles and an MA in teaching English as a second language (ESL) from San Francisco State University, taught computer skills in an ESL setting, was a freelance writer (covering mainly travel and music), and worked as an editor for Destination Guides until moving to Vietnam, where he made a living teaching and continued to perform until the pandemic closed schools in Vietnam, at which point he moved to Spain. He is survived by his sister, Demaris.

1975 Jean Fuller Bagley, 70, died April 1, 2023. After graduating from Bard, Jean moved to Provincetown, Massachusetts, where she lived for many years.

In 1985, she relocated to New Orleans to live with her mother and took up the bagpipes. She joined the Highland Light Scottish Pipe Band and played with them for many years, eventually becoming pipe major.

She is survived by her brothers, Michael and Peter.

Karl Gottlieb Harr III, 71, died April 12, 2023. Karl had a rock band in his teen years, and went on to play solo guitar and sing.

After his music career, Karl became a writer and authored several Hardy Boys mysteries, following in the footsteps of his grandmother, Harriet S. Adams.

He was a talented artist as well.

Both at Bard and at Yale Film School, he shot beautiful, creative movies. He is survived by three siblings, Tim, Cathy, and Amy.

1977 John Ponzini, 69, died November 9, 2022. John studied theater at Bard as well as at the American Academy and Catawba College.

He spent the last 41 years practicing family law and general practice law, and served the Connecticut state attorney general and Stamford board of representatives. John continued to act in local theater productions, including The Fantasticks, A View from the Bridge, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and Guys and Dolls. He is survived by his partner, Lynne; daughter, Maya; and former wife, Carol.

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IN MEMORIAM

1982 Gladys Watson died September 2022. Her Senior Project looked at what could be done to clean up New York’s foster care system, and she went on to earn a master’s degree in counselor education and psychology from SUNY Brockport, all of which made her well qualified to serve as director of residence life at Bard for many years before taking the same role at Bowie State University.

1987 Suzanna Geraghty died December 8, 2022. In the middle of her preparations to take the Irish university matriculation examination, Suzanna was diagnosed with dyslexia.

Teachers told her not to bother applying to college, but she did, and was accepted to Bard. She immersed herself in theater and excelled in her studies. After years of going on auditions, Suzanna wrote a one-woman

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play based loosely on those experiences. Zoe’s Auditions won the Audience Award in 2011 at the United Solo Theatre Festival; toured Ireland and the UK playing to sold-out theaters; and returned to United Solo Theatre, where it won Best Comedy in 2015. Suzanna was described as “an Irish Lucille Ball,” and the New York Times called her “charming” and “a gifted physical comedienne.” She was predeceased by her mother, Susie, and is survived by her father, Malachy, and brothers, Patrick and Paul.

Sean T. McGowan, 56, died December 18, 2022. Sean attended Simon’s Rock before graduating from the Annandale campus. His writing career spanned a variety of industries including law, business, news, and his personal favorite: scriptwriting. Storytelling was his passion, and his love of the motion pictures and television industry drew him to Los Angeles. He is survived by his siblings: Elly, Laureen, Regina, Bill, Terrance, Kevin, and Bryan.

2008 David “Kit” Martin died March 24, 2023, from non-small cell lung cancer. He was 39. After receiving his BA in history, with concentrations in Middle Eastern and Africana Studies, he earned a master’s degree in international development at the University of Minnesota and a doctorate in learning sciences from Northwestern University.

Kit was extremely proud of his Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, which took him to Brazil to research ant ecology, Senegal to design pest-management systems, Jordan to investigate desert pollution impacts, and Tanzania to survey ant fauna. His graphic novel Boom Times was published in April (see page 44).

Kit was predeceased by his father, Henry, and sister Stephanie. He is survived by his mother, Deborah, and siblings Taylor, Allison, Joseph, Daniel, Jeffrey, and Lindsay.

2013

Michael Merchant MFA, 58, died March 16, 2022. Mike was a member of the Branchburg (New Jersey) Township Open Space Advisory Committee and an advocate for environmental and historic preservation in the township. Before moving to New Jersey, his art was exhibited in Europe and the US, including in New York City. He is survived by his mother, Mary; wife, Anne; children, Coleman, Sarah, and Katy; brothers, David and Steven; and sister, Christina.

Emily (Nelson) Sofaer MAT, 39, died February 28, 2023. Emily was an accomplished writer, actress, and musician. She performed with many musical groups, including The Wild Poppies, and opened for The Virgins and Duncan Sheik. Emily worked for the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies, taught at SUNY Ulster, and is remembered by many for her work with Family of Woodstock. An artist, a lifetime New Yorker, and an intellectual, Emily devoted her life to the humanities, to books, music, languages, fashion, people, and love. She is survived by her parents, Barbara and Michael, and sister, Becca.

2004

2017

1992

Carolina Gonzalez-Hutton, 54, died January 10, 2023. Carolina was a documentary filmmaker, artist, and producer. In 2011, she earned her MFA in social documentary film from the School of Visual Arts, in New York City. Carolina was predeceased by her husband, Bard film professor Peter Hutton.

Kaitlyn Noel Mock, 28, died April 5, 2023. Katie attended the Archer School for Girls in Los Angeles, earned her bachelor’s degree in psychology at Bard, and went to work for the Anthony Brindisi for Congress campaign as part of the team that successfully turned a red district in Utica, New York, blue again.

She then moved to New York City, working for Elf Cosmetics

and AS Beauty, before joining Bloomberg LP in California, first as a financial product analyst and for the past two years as an account manager. There she met her boyfriend, Sam Peck. Katie’s death from a rare, undiagnosed, and asymptomatic heart condition was a great shock to all in her large community of family and friends. She is survived by her mother, Tina; stepfather, Tom; brothers Nicholas and Brody; and sisters Mia and Paige.

She was predeceased by her father, Sean. A bench at Blithewood has been dedicated to Katie by her Bard friends.

2023 Thevi Jean-Louis, 21, died May 12, 2023. In the midst of the pandemic, Thevi was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia. He had been teaching surfing at Venice Beach, California, but he wasn’t feeling right, so he went to the emergency room at CedarsSinai—the hospital where he was born—and a day later found out he had cancer. Thevi spent a lot of time at the medical center, and there he rediscovered a love of photography. “It was kind of a way of accepting my situation because it was a way of documenting the constraints of where I was and kept me grounded in what I was doing,” he told Katie Rosenblum for the Cedars-Sinai blog. His care team found the images so compelling that they arranged to have them displayed on the pediatric floor.

Another of his great loves led to a surprise visit from professional skateboarders Paul Rodriguez, Kyle Walker, and Sean Malto, and the construction of a temporary half-pipe in the Argyros Family Garden outside City of Hope’s Helford Clinical Research Hospital. Rodriguez and Walker presented Thevi with a professional camera, and the Dream Machine Foundation flew in sports photographer Atiba Jefferson to share some tricks of the trade. Thevi is survived by his parents, Evelyn and Jimmy, and sisters, Jasmin and Kyra.

FACULTY Burton Brody, professor emeritus of physics, died October 4, 2023, after a prolonged illness. He was 81. Burt was a graduate of Columbia College and earned his PhD in experimental physics at the University of Michigan in 1969. He came to Bard the following year as the second fulltime faculty appointment in physics and taught here for 32 years. For most of his career, he also maintained a presence at Columbia University in the Atomic Physics group as a researcher, working with graduate students and designing and developing experimental techniques and equipment. Burt was beloved by students and was tireless in helping both science majors and non-majors (notably in Light and Color, a course he routinely taught to two 32-student sections per semester) with their academic work. He was also deeply engaged in the intellectual and artistic life of the college: a regular member of the French table; deeply interested in the work that students and faculty did in dance, theater, and music; and known to recite long sections of Percy Shelley or Dr. Seuss, with equal affection. Matthew Deady, Bard’s third full-time physicist, whom Burt recruited to the College in 1987 and who retired in 2020, writes, “Most of all, those who knew Burt remember a gentle spirit who always tried to do what he could for the people he cared about, and that was a very wide network of friends.” The primary teaching laboratory for the Physics Program was named the Brody Lab in his honor after his retirement. Burt was predeceased by his wife, Susan, and is survived by his longtime partner, Pamela Hull.

Virginia Grab, 85, died July 6, 2023. Ginger was born in Los Angeles, a proud red diaper baby who joined the Marxist-Leninist Labor Youth League as a teenager. In 1957, she traveled to the World Festival of Youth and Students in Moscow (which the CIA called “the largest, costliest, and most spectacular youth

gathering in history”), where between events and meetings she embarked on a whirlwind romance with Fred Grab, whom she would later marry. Ginger earned her undergraduate degree at Berkeley University and her masters at Columbia University, both in English literature. After marrying Fred—a professor of English at Bard for 32 years—she taught English and Greek and Roman history at Oakwood Friends School in Poughkeepsie, New York. In 1991, Ginger received her master of divinity degree from Union Theological Seminary, was ordained, and went on to serve as Bard’s ecumenical chaplain. She is survived by her daughters, Samantha and Daphne.

Frederick Hammond, Irma Brandeis Professor of Romance Culture and Music History at Bard from 1989 to 2013, died March 3, 2023. He was 85.

Hammond did his undergraduate work at Yale University, where he also completed his PhD. He taught at the University of Chicago, then at Queens College of the City University of New York, and subsequently, for almost a quarter century, at the University of California, Los Angeles, before coming to Bard as the College’s first full-time music historian. A distinguished scholar of medieval, renaissance, and baroque music and an expert and connoisseur of all things related to Italy—its ancient and modern history, its literature, and above all its language— Hammond is best known for his definitive biography and study of the works of Girolamo Frescobaldi. He was also an accomplished keyboard player; his primary instruments were the harpsichord, clavichord, and the organ. He studied with Ralph Kirkpatrick, the eminent harpsichordist and expert on Scarlatti, at Yale, and played continuo in professional performances for most of his life, including with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in the 1980s.

“Fred was charming, wonderfully articulate, and generous to others,” writes

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President Botstein. “His concern for the beauty of language betrayed a lifelong love, not only of the intersection of words and music found in sacred music, opera, and song, but also of poetry, particularly the work of W.H Auden. The exceptional range of his expertise was available to Bard undergraduates, not only in Annandale but in the Bard Prison Initiative. Fred was the first to teach music history in BPI. He did so with great imagination and style; he considered teaching in BPI a high point in his career as a teacher.”

Hammond is survived by his sister, Sue, and brother, Clarence.

Paul LaFarge, 52, died January 18, 2023. Paul first came to Bard in 2005 as the fourth winner of the Bard Fiction Prize, for his brilliant novel Hausmann, or the Distinction, and later taught in the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts. He also taught written arts in the undergraduate College from 2010 to 2013. Paul was the author of four other novels: The Artist of the Missing (1999), The Facts of Winter (2005), Luminous Airplanes (2011), and The Night Ocean (2017) and was in the process of completing his sixth at the time of his death. Paul’s prose was marked by elegance and wit, capacious intellect, precision, and refinement. His fiction was both erudite and humane, and the intersection of literature, technology, history, and culture informed his pedagogy. Paul was the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Guggenheim Foundation, Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, and American Academy in Berlin.

He is survived by his wife, Sarah Stern.

Larry Fink, professor emeritus of photography, died November 25, 2023. For a full tribute, see the next issue of the Bardian.

IN MEMORIAM

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MARGARET AND JOHN BARD SOCIETY Members of the Margaret and John Bard Society gathered for lunch at the Bard Graduate Center, New York City, December 5, 2023, photo by Patrick Arias

Board of Governors of the Bard College Alumni/ae Association Mollie Meikle ’03, President Gerry Pambo-Awich ’08, Vice President Kristin Waters ’73, Secretary Beth Shaw Adelman ’74 Hannah Becker ’11, Young Alumnx Cochair Jack Blum ’62 Connor Boehme ’17 Michael Burgevin ’10 Hannah Byrnes-Enoch ’08, Strategic Planning Committee Chair Matthew Cameron ’04 Kathleya Chotiros ’98, Development Committee Cochair Charles Clancy III ’69, past president Tyrone Santana Copeland ’01 Peter Criswell ’89, past president Caia Diepenbrock ’15 Greg Drilling ’16 Nicolai Eddy ’14 Sarah Elia ’06 Nolan English ’13, Young Alumnx Cochair Randy Faerber ’73, Events Committee Cochair Tamar Faggen '23 Andrew Fowler ’95 Richard Frank ’74 Eric Goldman ’98 Hasani Gunn ’18 Alexander Habiby ’18 Boriana Handjiyska ’02, Career Connections Committee Cochair Nikkya Hargrove ’05

Sonja Hood ’90, Nominations Committee Cochair Maud Kersnowski Sachs ’86, Communications Chair Kenny Kosakoff ’81 Jacob Lester ’20 Darren Mack ’13 Peter McCabe ’70, past president Emily Melendes TŌN ’20 Ryan Mesina ’06, Nominations Committee Cochair Anne Morris-Stockton ’68 Anna Neverova ’07, Career Connections Committee Cochair Karen Olah ’65, past president KC Serota ’04, past president, Development Committee Cochair Genya Shimkin ’08, Diversity Committee Chair George Smith ’82, Events Committee Cochair Thoko Soko ’20 Geoffrey Stein ’82 Paul Thompson ’93 Maxwell Toth ’22, Events Committee Cochair Brandon Weber ’97, past president Ato Williams ’12 Emeritus/a Robert Amsterdam ’53 Claire Angelozzi ’74 Penny Axelrod ’63 Mimi Roskin Berger ’56

Cathaline Cantalupo ’67 Arnold Davis ’44, past president Michael DeWitt '65, past president Michelle Dunn Marsh ’95, past president Robert Edmonds ’68, past president Naomi Bellison Feldman ’53, past president Barbara Grossman Flanagan ’60 Richard Gerber ’71, past president Michael Glass ’75 Diana Hirsch Friedman ’68 Ann Ho ’62 Charles Hollander ’65 Maggie Hopp ’67 Cynthia Hirsch Levy ’65 William Lowe ’66, past president Steven Miller ’70 David E Schwab II ’52, past president Roger Scotland ’93 Mackie Siebens ’12, past president Walter Swett ’96, past president Olivier te Boekhorst ’93 Toni-Michelle Travis ’69 Paul Weinstein ’73, past president John Weisman ’64, past president Barbara Crane Wigren ’68

Board of Trustees of Bard College James C. Chambers ’81, Chair Emily H. Fisher, Vice Chair Brandon Weber ’97, Vice Chair; Alumni/ae Trustee Elizabeth Ely ’65, Secretary; Life Trustee Stanley A. Reichel ’65, Treasurer; Life Trustee

Fiona Angelini Roland J. Augustine Leon Botstein, President of the College, ex officio Mark E. Brossman Jinqing Cai Marcelle Clements ’69, Life Trustee The Rt. Rev. Andrew M. L. Dietsche, Honorary Trustee Asher B. Edelman ’61, Life Trustee Kimberly Marteau Emerson Barbara S. Grossman ’73, Alumni/ae Trustee Andrew S. Gundlach Glendean Hamilton ’09 Matina S. Horner, ex officio Charles S. Johnson III ’70 Mark N. Kaplan, Life Trustee George A. Kellner Fredric S. Maxik ’86 Jo Frances Meyer, ex officio Juliet Morrison ’03 James H. Ottaway Jr., Life Trustee Hilary Pennington Martin Peretz, Life Trustee Stewart Resnick, Life Trustee David E. Schwab II ’52, Life Trustee Roger N. Scotland ’93, Alumni/ae Trustee Annabelle Selldorf Mostafiz ShahMohammed ’97 Jonathan Slone ’84 James A. von Klemperer Susan Weber Patricia Ross Weis ’52

WILL POWER We can all use a little self-care these days. By taking care of yourself you can also take care of Bard. With a will you can secure your future and support Bard.

Bard College has partnered with FreeWill, a free, online resource that guides you through the process of creating a legally valid will in just 20 minutes.

This opportunity allows you to secure your future, protect your loved ones, and create a legacy that will inspire curiosity, a love of learning, and an ongoing commitment to the link between higher education and civic participation.

Get started by visiting freewill.com/bard.

All donors who support Bard through a planned gift become members of the Margaret and John Bard Society.

For more information, please contact Debra Pemstein, Vice President for Development and Alumni/ae Affairs at pemstein@bard.edu or 845-758-7405.

All inquiries are confidential.

Blithewood Garden overlooking the Hudson River, photo by Pete Mauney ’93 MFA ’00

freewill.com/bard

Bard

Bard College PO Box 5000 Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 12504

Nonprofit Organization U.S. Postage Paid Bard College

COMMENCEMENT & ALUMNI/AE REUNION WEEKEND IN ANNANDALE MAY 24–26, 2024 Calling everyone in the classes of 2019, 2014, 2009, 2004, 1999, 1994, 1989, 1984, 1979, 1974, 1969, 1964, 1959, 1954, and alumni/ae from the 1940s Interested in being on your reunion committee?

Want to update your contact information?

Let us know!

alumni@bard.edu

845-758-7116

alums.bard.edu

#bardreunion