Bennington Magazine Spring 2025

BENNINGTON

Bennington Day is April 16!

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BENNINGTON MAGAZINE

Ashley Brenon Jowett

Editor and Director of Communications

Kat Hughes

Art Director and Designer

David Morelos Zaragoza Laguera Photographer

Natalie Redmond

Associate Writer

Jeffrey Perkins MFA ’09

Associate Vice President, Communications and Marketing

David Buckwald

Vice President for Enrollment Management and Marketing

CONTRIBUTORS

Ben Hewitt

Charlie Nadler

Edwin Ozoma MFA ’19

Elizabeth Zimmerman ’66

TO SUBMIT

Bennington Magazine welcomes letters, opinions, essays, interviews, thought pieces, fiction, nonfiction, poetry, captioned work samples, and personal and professional updates. Please send submissions, proposals, and story ideas to magazine@bennington.edu. All will be considered. Due to limited space, we may not be able to publish all submissions.

CORRECTION

There were two misspellings in the “Bennington Writing Seminars at Thirty” article that appeared in the Fall 2024 issue: the names of Eugenie Dalland and faculty member Taymour Soomro. We regret these errors and have taken steps to prevent similar errors in the future.

Bennington Magazine is printed on stock that is Forest Stewardship Council® and Preferred by Nature™ certified, and is designated Ancient Forest Friendly™. The cover is made from 30% sustainable recycled fiber and the interior from 100% sustainable recycled fiber.

Dear Alumni and Friends,

What truly transforms a college student’s life? The answer is remarkably clear: According to a landmark Gallup* study, it’s the powerful combination of dedicated faculty mentorship and real-world learning experiences. Students who receive these advantages achieve extraordinary levels of personal fulfillment and professional success throughout their lives.

This is precisely what sets Bennington apart. Through our distinctive emphasis on faculty advising and the Plan process and innovative Field Work Term placements, we don’t just meet these crucial benchmarks—we define them. Every Bennington student experiences individualized mentorship and real-world engagement; less than five percent of students at other colleges nationwide receive the same.

The study’s findings resonate with our alumni’s achievements. Take Andrea Tapia ’15, cofounder of GANAS. Faculty members Marguerite Feitlowitz and Jonathan Pitcher empowered her “to push boundaries—social, intellectual, and personal—and find ways to create things from scratch, even when it felt unrealistic.” Or consider Jessica Smith ’23, whose Field Work Term inspired her to establish an artists’ collective dedicated to social change. These are just two examples of how Bennington graduates transform their education into meaningful lives and make an outsized impact.

Throughout this issue of Bennington Magazine, you’ll discover stories that illuminate our unique educational approach—one that cultivates audacity, deep curiosity, profound compassion, and fierce resilience. You’ll see how the Bennington experience shapes not just careers but lives devoted to positive change.

Yet maintaining this transformative model of education requires significant resources. While other institutions may be content with lecture halls and traditional internships, Bennington’s commitment to intensive mentorship and immersive learning demands a deeper investment. This is where you come in.

Your support isn’t just about maintaining an institution; it’s about preserving and strengthening a proven path to lifelong success and fulfillment. Every gift helps ensure that future generations of students will receive the same life-changing combination of mentorship and real-world experience that makes Bennington extraordinary.

Join me in securing Bennington’s future. Your donation will help sustain the very elements that make our college unique: the close faculty relationships, the real-world experiences, and the innovative spirit that transforms students into creative, engaged citizens who make our world better.

With gratitude,

Laura R. Walker President | Bennington College

*“Harnessing the Life-Transformative Powers of Higher Education” from the September 2024 issue of Liberal Education from the American Association of Colleges and Universities

After

14 From Crisis to Collaboration

Bennington College and former University of the Arts faculty and students dance into the future.

20 Bill Dixon and the Black Music Division

Learn about how one man advocated for Black music’s rightful place within the academy. 26 One Acre, Big Influence

Bennington’s Purple Carrot Farm makes an outsized impact. 32 Self Starters

Bennington alumni make the lives they want and places for others.

First & Foremost

1 How to Make Your Podcast Pop

On October 25, 2024, Bennington College hosted a Podcast Symposium that brought together seventy-five students, podcasters, writers, journalists, and podcast fans for an afternoon of networking and learning.

Bennington College President Laura Walker, former CEO of New York Public Radio, hosted the event with Andrea Bernstein, presidential fellow and visiting faculty member at Bennington and a Peabody and duPont award-winning journalist and creator of podcasts like Will Be Wild and Trump, Inc.

“Podcasting is an intimate and powerful medium for storytelling, journalism, and creative expression,” said Walker. “This event was an opportunity to learn from some of the most talented podcasters.”

Guests included Tonya Mosley of NPR’s Fresh Air and She Has a Name; Kat Aaron, vice president of Development at Pineapple Street Studios; Lauren Chooljian and Jason Moon ’13 of the Pulitzer-nominated 13th Step from New Hampshire Public Radio; Peabody award-winning podcaster Erica Heilman of Vermont Public Radio’s Rumble Strip; Matt Katz of Inconceivable Truth; Cynthia Rodriguez, senior editor at Reveal and editor of 40 Acres and a Lie; and Emily Russell of North Country Public Radio’s If All Else Fails.

“This Podcast Symposium was a chance for the Bennington community to engage with some of the best podcasters in the business,” said Bernstein. “Audio creators like Tonya Mosley and Matt Katz candidly discussed how they reported and

unfurled stories of family tragedies. Local podcasters talked about sourcing, safety, and landing stories. It was a nourishing and enlightening event for podcasters, students, faculty, and everyone who attended.”

2 Stillness. Silence. Time.

Acclaimed director and theater artist Robert Wilson visited Bennington College for a 3-day residency from September 20–22, 2024. The Dance and Drama programs jointly hosted Wilson, thanks to funding from the Peter Drucker Fund for Innovation and Excellence, which allowed him to share his astonishing aesthetic universe with students, faculty, staff, and the general public.

Highlights from Wilson’s residency included an interactive lecture entitled, “1 HAVE U BEEN HERE BEFORE; 2 NO THIS IS THE FIRST TIME,” which combined striking images from moments throughout his prolific career to showcase an intimate self-portrait of his creative process.

Wilson also conducted a master class for students, who explored his manner of working and the creative process. Students focused on the foundational ingredients of motion, space, time, light, text, and sound using only simple scene design and costumes made with newspapers.

3 Your Bennington Bookshelf

Mother and Daughter Coming of Age Together

The New York Times highlighted Bruna Dantas Lobato ’15, winner of the National Book Award for translated literature, whose debut novel Blue Light Hours was published in October 2024 by Grove Atlantic. The book depicts a young Brazilian woman’s first year at a small liberal arts college in Vermont and the rituals she develops with her mother as the pair reconnect from a continent away each week on Zoom.

The Hidden Life of Ordinary Things

The saxophone is “the ‘devil’s horn,’ it’s the voice of jazz— an extension of the player’s soul—it is a character trait of U.S. Presidents, YouTube sensations, and cartoon characters,” and thanks to Mollie Hawkins MFA ’23, it is now the subject of its own book in Bloomsbury’s Object Lesson series. Saxophone blends Hawkins’s research, cultural criticism, and personal narrative to reveal a new perspective on a contradictory instrument.

Behind the Shutters

The writing of Carol Kino ’78 has appeared in The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Atlantic, Slate, Town & Country, and many art magazines. She has published her first book, Double Click, with Simon & Schuster. It is a nonfiction account of the McLaughlin twins, trailblazing female photographers of 1930s and ’40s New York.

A Jolting Exploration of a Broken System

In her latest book, journalist and author Claudia Rowe ’88 takes an in-depth and intimate look at the American foster care system and the way it so often fails the children it is meant to help. Wards of the State: The Long Shadow of American Foster Care, released by Abrams in May 2025, tells the story of eight former foster youth whose stories—along with accounts from psychologists, advocates, and judges—champion a need for reform in a broken $30-billion-dollar system.

“Despite the rather austere title, I’ve written [Wards of the State] to be an engrossing, character-driven look at the intimate connection between foster care and the criminal justice system,” said Rowe.

Navigating Grief and Parenting

Kirkus Reviews gave a starred review to I Will Do Better, a memoir by Charles Bock ’97 published in October 2024 by Abrams Books, praising it as “a uniquely forthright and powerful addition to the literature of fatherhood.”

Bock’s no-holds-barred memoir traces his experience raising his infant daughter Lily during and in the aftermath of his wife’s battle with leukemia. Left a single father saddled with medical bills and grief, Bock and Lily navigate their new reality together. “Single parents will find much to identify with in this warts-and-all account,” wrote Publishers Weekly.

4 Sharing a Love of Languages in Local Schools

As part of the course Teaching Languages and Cultures K-6, cotaught by faculty member Noëlle Rouxel-Cubberly and Ikuko Yoshida, Bennington students have the opportunity to share their love of languages with local children at the Village School of North Bennington (VSNB). This long-standing relationship between the schools offers myriad benefits for the VSNB students, as bilingual language learning has been linked to improved cognitive ability, problem-solving skills, and memory in children.

This year, Bennington students—including Destiny-Rose Chery ’25, Ebony Dalimunthe ’25, and Jacqueline Walsh ’26— taught Japanese, French, Indonesian, and Spanish at VSNB. Dalimunthe has worked with preschool, first-grade, and sixth-grade students at VSNB. This year, she taught Indonesian to sixth graders and was also taken by the enthusiasm students have shown in class.

“They are curious, they are caring, and in the end that is the perfect recipe for an open-minded, diligent, forward-thinking student,” said Dalimunthe.

Detail, still from Sonya Dyer, Action>Potential (2023), two-channel video. Image courtesy of the artist.

5 Experiencing the Past Anew

Queens Girl: Black in the Green Mountains, the third installment of the Queens Girl plays trilogy by Caleen Sinnette Jennings ’72, was produced at the Everyman Theatre in Baltimore from October 20 to November 17, 2024.

“While the weight of history hangs heavy overhead, Queens Girl: Black in the Green Mountains allows you to experience the past anew and through a lens so often ignored,” wrote DC Theater Arts critic Constance Beulah.

Black in the Green Mountains uses poetry, music, and dance to tell the story of Jacqueline Marie Butler, a young Black woman who arrives at Bennington College in 1968. The play was directed by Danielle A. Drakes, and all twelve characters in this one-woman show were performed by Helen Hayes Award-winning actor Deidre Staples.

6 We Have Reach

On view in Bennington College’s Usdan Gallery through April 26, We Have Reach is a visual/performance curation that considers avenues of the body in space, particularly how the Black feminine has been restricted or exploited or expelled or compelled in relationship to taking up space. This group exhibition seeks to facilitate a conversation about the Black feminine figure in relation to her exterior environment—the extent of the body across time and space, fugitive movement and fugitive stillness, exploitative fecundity, and her longing for heaven and home.

Curated by Studio AGD, We Have Reach is in dialogue with historical muses including Henrietta Lacks, Anarcha Westcott, and Sawtche (widely known as the Hottentot Venus). The curatorial group Studio AGD includes Bennington Literature faculty member Anaïs Duplan ’14, Zoe Butler, and Folasade Adesanya.

Courtesy of Theresa Castracane and Everyman Theatre

7 Dramaturgies of Care

Curator, poet, and performance artist jaamil olawale kosoko ’05 returned to Bennington for a residency in fall 2024. During this time, he taught the course Dramaturgies of Care, which he developed while teaching and performing in Europe in the fall of 2022 as a response to the lack of health, care, and safety protocols he noticed while touring live art performances internationally.

Throughout the term, the class explored how care systems— explored in art, politics, and natural processes—can serve as frameworks for both personal and collective transformation. Students engaged in interdisciplinary research and brought performance strategies, political theory, and ecological care systems together to develop creative projects that reflect how care informs not just art making but active social engagement.

While at CAPA during the Fall 2024 term, kosoko also focused on developing a new performance work “Voncena’s Spell,” which will premiere at Abrons Arts Center in June 2025.

“The experience was incredibly enriching, not only because of the dedicated students, but also due to the community I found in the CAPA environment, especially having the opportunity to reconnect with Susan Sgorbati, who was quite important to my education when I was a student here years ago,” said kosoko.

8 The Bennington Multiform

Bennington students put their personal artistry and distinct personalities at the forefront of fashion and make campus style feel more “multiform” than uniform.

Fashion has always been a creative outlet for Sawyer London ’24, who now serves as a recent alumni member of the Bennington College Board of Trustees. When he arrived at Bennington in the fall of 2020, he was impressed with fellow students’ personal style. Almost immediately, he was inspired to start an Instagram account highlighting it. He called it @BTONFITS, as in Bennington Outfits.

“My perspective wasn’t much about curating a certain look. I would ask people [if I could take their photo] whenever I saw them wearing something that stuck out—a color combination, a texture, a cow print, or whenever I saw someone who was just themselves and confident.”

Over the course of four years he requested, took, and posted 100 fashion-fabulous portraits. “Bennington is very fashionable,” said London. “And I think it creates an environment, ideally, where people feel comfortable to express themselves in that way.”

London tapped Nico Migdal ’25 to continue the project. “Sawyer has such a great eye for fashion and personal style, and he did a really great job highlighting the subtleties of that,” Migdal said. “You don’t have to be wearing a crazy extravagant outfit to get posted on @BTONFITS. He was more looking for people’s personality coming out in their outfits. I definitely want to keep that focus going.”

Share images of your best Bennington look to magazine@bennington.edu. ●

For more Bennington news, visit bennington.edu

Ten Years of Grassroots Activism

By Ashley Brenon Jowett

On a Monday afternoon in the first days of November, nearly twenty students sat around a ring of tables in a design lab in the Center for the Advancement of Public Action (CAPA). Among the topics for discussion was how to get Miguel, an undocumented worker who speaks only Spanish, translation services for a phone call with the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV). He wanted to apply for a Vermont Driver’s Privilege Card.

The conversation unfolded in a mix of English and Spanish. A first-term GANAS student, Ananda Zamarrón ’26, raised her hand to provide translation. Another, a tutorial participant, Cyrus Vella ’26, offered to provide Zamarrón transportation to the farm where Miguel works. The process was well worn.

They hit a snag when they realized the DMV hours conflicted with Miguel’s work schedule, which includes long hours six days a week. “It’s often the DMV,” said Spanish faculty member Jonathan Pitcher with some frustration. A third of the requests they receive involve the DMV.

Pitcher was among the founding members of the group, called GANAS, “motivation to act” in Spanish, more than a decade ago. He acts as both a member and the faculty facilitator. The student-run group aims to create meaningful connections and cultural exchange with undocumented immigrants and to provide opportunities for students to support migrant workers through providing translation and English lessons. The Latino migrant worker population serves the Vermont dairy industry and other industries in Bennington County and faces constant fear of deportation, difficulty advocating for safe and equitable working conditions, and racial profiling.

THE BEGINNING

In 2011, Carlos Méndez-Dorantes, PhD ’15, Selina Petschek ’15, and Andrea Tapia ’15 had begun volunteering at the Bennington Free Clinic, a local medical practice that offers free care to those without insurance. They were missing interactions with Spanish-speaking people since having come to Bennington; Méndez-Dorantes and Tapia were among the few Latinos at Bennington during that time. And they had the urge to be useful. “I found the need to do something more practical with what I was studying,” said Tapia, who now works on the digital communications team at the World Bank in Washington, DC. “I remember being frustrated thinking, ‘I

am studying Latin America as a region, but I am in the middle of nowhere. Where are the Latin Americans?’ It was ironic.”

Méndez-Dorantes, who was undocumented while at Bennington and now works as a cancer researcher at Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, noted that the clinic waiting room was one of the few places for migrant workers to meet people from other farms and connect. “Latinos were so isolated on their separate farms that a lot of the healing happening in the clinic was occurring in the waiting area,” he said. “Upon that realization, Selina and Andrea had the vision to think, ‘We can fix that. We can provide opportunities where students can teach and also learn from this community, which is very much part of the Bennington area.’”

That’s when Petschek and Tapia approached Pitcher, who had just returned from a frustrating trip to the U.S.-Mexico border with his border theory class, and asked if they could work together to offer services to migrants living nearby. Pitcher was enthusiastic. “I said yes immediately,” he remembered.

At the beginning, the founding students note, it was not always easy. “On paper, we were this sexy project for the College to talk about, but I didn’t always grasp that the institution had our back,” Petschek, who now works as a certified nurse midwife, confides. Méndez-Dorantes agrees, “Bringing migrants to campus, transporting migrant workers in college vans…there was pushback,” he said. It took a lot of advocacy with the administration and others to develop the foundation and keep it going. “I think we got a taste of what activists do and how difficult it can be to do this kind of work,” said Tapia. That the group would survive its first years, much less a decade, was not a given.

Early members of the group handed out Pitcher’s business cards to Spanish speakers at Walmart and China Wok, a local restaurant, and posted flyers on bulletin boards. With the initial people who responded to them, only two or three at first, they started a weekly soup kitchen at the Unitarian Universalist church in Bennington. Little by little, more people came. By the end of the first term, they had ten regulars. “We would just have conversations, enjoy food together, tell stories,” Pitcher said. “By the following term, we asked them what they needed. That was the true beginning of GANAS.”

THE EVOLUTION

Since 2016, GANAS has been a part of the curriculum as both a class for first-time participants and a tutorial for those with experience. In their first term in GANAS, students learn about the group and help out on projects led by those who have participated for multiple terms. They often become a primary contact for a small group of GANAS “friends,” as the migrant worker contacts are known collectively. By their second year in GANAS, students are in the tutorial, which means they lead a project of their own.

Alex López ’27, who studies Spanish and Architecture, took the class and spent two terms in the tutorial. In addition to keeping the group’s finances, organizing students to serve as primary contacts, and serving as a primary contact themself, they are often at the helm of organizing the social events. These events, which made up the core of the activity at the start, continue to be important. “Farms are isolated, miles apart, and migrants don’t have great access to transportation,” said López. “So, apart from GANAS, migrants aren’t very well connected to each other.” At the last social event, López witnessed friend attendees exchanging phone numbers. “That’s why we have social events, to connect people,” said López.

Zamarrón, along with tutorial participant Abraham Dreher ’26, is teaching friend Lupita, from Colombia, English.

“It’s an opportunity to learn new things, meet people, and practice English,” said Lupita, through a student interpreter. “I am grateful for the opportunity of being able to share my time with these students who have taken the time to teach me English. They’re very kind and very committed to what they do. I’m glad I met them.”

Jacqueline Walsh ’26, who studies politics, is the latest in a string of students who have worked with a Vermont organization called Migrant Justice to bring Milk with Dignity to local migrants. The program, run by migrant farm workers, aids dairy workers in efforts toward safe working conditions, including adequate housing, safety equipment, reasonable hours, and paid sick days. She organizes protests and call drives. “The top of the supply chain, places like Hannaford, are not willing to pay prices high enough for farmers to provide

their workers with safe housing, safety equipment, one day off a week…,” she said. She pointed out that Hannaford’s parent company made $2.98 billion in profit in 2023.

That the work is still happening much as they had envisioned it, Tapia said, “This makes me want to cry. I tear up when I see it,” she said. “It’s definitely one of the most important things I have done.” Petschek acknowledged, “It took a lot of support [to keep it going]. Ultimately, the work Jonathan Pitcher did was a constant.”

TOMORROW

Through the work of GANAS, Bennington has become the recognized leader in a consortium of nearby colleges and universities with students interested in doing this work. It has been recognized as the Southwestern Vermont Chapter of Vermont’s Migrant Justice organization and has been acknowledged with a grant from the Mellon Foundation and support from the Peter Drucker Fund for Innovation and Excellence.

Looking ahead, Pitcher would love to have migrants and farmers come to campus one night a week for language classes. He imagines a situation where the farmers would be in one room learning Spanish, while friends would be in the next room learning English. His “3-year utopian vision” is one where a connected and respected Latino community is able to advocate, socialize, and support itself without help from students and where local migrant workers, many of whom had other professional careers in their home countries, come to campus to teach in a cultural studies or social sciences series. “My dream is that [GANAS] will one day be obsolete,” Pitcher said, “that we will no longer have to do this work, any of us, ever again.” ●

Alumni who participated in GANAS are especially encouraged to reach out to Pitcher at jpitcher@bennington.edu and to attend Reunion October 3–5, 2025.

Photo by Malvika Dang

Collaborative Art Project Bridges Cultures

HOW STUDENTS AND FACULTY BROUGHT

ART TO THE U.S. CONSULATE IN CHIANG MAI

By Ashley Brenon Jowett

When the U.S. Department of State’s Office of Art in Embassies needed art for a new consulate building in Chiang Mai, Thailand, in 2019, they called on now former faculty member Jon Isherwood, Director for the Center for the Advancement of Public Action (CAPA) Susan Sgorbati, and Bennington College students to submit a proposal.

Bennington was a proven entity. Faculty and students had developed a unique and highly collaborative artmaking process, underwent a rigorous evaluation, and oversaw the successful installation of a trio of pieces for the U.S. Embassy in Oslo, Norway, in 2017.

“Because they had worked with us before, we had a track record,” said Sgorbati. “We had developed not only artworks for these public spaces but a way of creating artwork that resonates with the place where it is installed.”

The Bennington group met with U.S. State Department structural engineers at the fabrication facility in Chiang Mai on November 2, 2022 to review the voice circle prototype.

THE PROCESS

As they had for Norway, Isherwood and Sgorbati formed a class around the project, which attracted students studying an array of disciplines, including visual arts, politics, environmental action, poetry, history, dance, and others. “The most important thing was not to start with what the artwork would look like,” Isherwood said. Megan Banda ’24, a student on the project elaborated. “It started off getting us to understand, ‘what is public art? What does that mean?’ From monuments to murals to street art, we were examining the things that we encounter in public spaces and how they connect us and how they spark dialog.”

Then, Isherwood and Sgorbati directed the students to choose an aspect of Thailand’s culture—its landscape, arts, history, literature, traditions, commerce, politics, and ecological activity—and conduct thorough research. The class welcomed a steady stream of virtual guests to class, including artists and curators, diplomats, and a geographer. Students researched the history of the relationship between the United States and Thailand in an effort to identify shared values and patterns that could represent the relationship.

THE DESIGN

The next step was to translate the research into the forms, shapes, and colors that presented an idea for consideration. The focus of the Chiang Mai work was on speech. Jessica Smith ’23 studied art at Bennington and is now in her second year at Vermont Law School. “The individual right to freedom of speech is in question around the world,” she said. “The piece includes our hopes that [freedom of speech] will be restored and continue for everybody wherever they are at whatever time they need to use their voice.”

With the voice as a starting point, students experimented with translating recordings of their own voices into visual elements. They were surprised to find that each of their voices made a unique pattern. They used those patterns along with their own designs and motifs from Thai culture to create a series of six etched glass disks, each 6 feet in diameter. These translucent lenses are stacked parallel to one another along the consular walkway. The placement allows viewers to look through them or to see each one individually.

ADDING SENSES

In addition, the site provided an opportunity to create a design for the top of a low wall, 62 feet long, leading visitors up to the consulate waiting room. For this our students recorded their own voices and the voices of Thai college students studying with Karma Sirikogar at Silpakorn University International College in Bangkok, reading phrases and poetry each student developed in their own language and reflecting on their shared values.

They added imagery of resounding elements from Vermont’s and Chiang Mai’s landscapes. The two areas are remarkably similar geographically, Smith said. “Both have rivers and mountains. Both are agrarian. They have villages at the bottoms of their mountains, so we represented that in the piece.” The students’ images were designed to be translated into mosaics by วิเศษศิลป, Wises Silp, a multigenerational family of mosaic artists in Suphan, Thailand.

“We envisioned a person approaching the consulate for a visa having a calming contemplative moment as they view and run their hand along the mosaic on the top of the wall,” said Isherwood. “The idea was to create a journey that would relax and engage the people coming to the consulate.”

As they were nearing the end of the project, “four years of intense knowledge and research,” Banda said, “I just knew that people had to hear us because we have had a lot to say, and our voices…. It’s how we were connecting to each other and how we are reaching each other.” Banda and Smith, along with Tanner Criswell ’24, composed an original sound score from the voice recordings they had collected. It was a lastminute addition but one that Banda, Criswell, and Smith felt passionately about.

Consul General Lisa Buzenas commented, “I am truly grateful to the students at Bennington College for their collaboration with Thai students and artists in creating this meaningful and beautiful mosaic tile and glass voice-circle artwork that will welcome millions of visitors to the U.S. Consulate General Chiang Mai for generations to come.” She continued, “The art exemplifies the cooperation and collaboration that has been the foundation of the U.S.-Thai partnership for more than 190 years.”

The class met for three consecutive terms and extended a further 18 months for a smaller group of students, including Banda, Smith, and Criswell. Altogether, more than eighty individuals engaged on the project. Banda summarized. “We let each other’s exploration build the outcome, which speaks to the journey that we went through, from research to design to collaboration, even cross-continental collaboration with people in Thailand,” she said. “I think that’s at the heart of what we all aimed to do, to have an exchange of ideas, of people, of talents.” The opening of the Chiang Mai consulate is planned for this summer. ●

To

By Ashley Brenon Jowett

In May 1999, Berte Hirschfield ’60—who had retired to Wilson, Wyoming, near Jackson Hole—read a letter to the editor in her local newspaper. It described a multibillion-dollar U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) project to build a first-of-itskind plutonium and hazardous waste incinerator upwind in nearby Idaho. The incinerator had the potential to spew “a witch’s brew” of toxic particles into the air over her community. Moreover, it could pollute Yellowstone National Park.

“I began to realize that if we were really downwind, this was going to be very dangerous,” Hirschfield said. She deployed all of the skills she gained throughout her life— including those from her time at Bennington—to execute her personal formula for change, one that became ever clearer throughout the many projects she has worked on. Her work put an end to the incinerator project and led to a ban of nuclear and hazardous waste incineration at Department of Energy sites nationwide.

and distributed bumper stickers. The campaign caught the community’s attention.

“Here’s a woman who was retired, who had a lovely home down on Fish Creek,” said Woollen of Hirschfield. “Her children, some were in the community, some were elsewhere. She could have been doing a million different things with her time, but this is what she trained her focus on. And she got her hands dirty.”

Hirschfield’s first task was to get the facts. “[Going directly to the source] was the main thing I took away from college,” said Hirschfield. “That’s Bennington. That’s just the way it was. We read original texts.” So when she heard about the incinerator project, she consulted her doctor, Brent Blue, MD, and Gerry Spence, a friend and legendary trial lawyer known for representing the family of nuclear whistleblower Karen Silkwood. Both Blue and Spence agreed they needed to act fast. The incinerator project was shovel ready. The public comment window, which had not included Jackson Hole, was closed. “Idaho saw no reason to inform us, as we were in a neighboring state,” said Hirschfield.

Dr. Blue suggested Hirschfield contact Mary Woollen, a hospital social worker and mother who also felt called to action. Hirschfield and Woollen put together a group and started a public information campaign with the eventual aim of raising money to secure expert lawyers. They named the group Keep Yellowstone Nuclear Free (KYNF), posted flyers,

They booked Walk Festival Hall for a large community meeting. The crowd was estimated at 500 people and bridged the socioeconomic divide. It included “ski bums and service workers, members of the social elite,” reported The Christian Science Monitor. After a short presentation from the nuclear and hazardous waste experts, Spence gave a rousing speech.

Ellen Safir ’66, who is a member of the Jackson Hole community and is on Bennington College’s Board of Trustees, was there. She credits Hirschfield for building a large base of support and involving partners like Spence, who “spoke very dramatically about the topic,” said Safir. Then they asked attendees to stand and pledge support.

The response was overwhelming. The big donors were important, but people from all levels of society pitched in. “The same people who clean the homes of the rich and famous also contributed parts of their meager paychecks,” reported the Monitor. Altogether, they raised $496,000, more than $800,000 in today’s dollars, in about an hour.

Hirschfield had always been fiercely independent and “take charge.” She took responsibility for her household and two younger siblings when her mother passed away when she was just 13. At Bennington, she learned not to take no for an answer. “There was an ethic, an underlying assumption, that if you really have a passion about something, keep going.” And

fighting the DOE took every bit of her resolve. The project was one of the biggest the Department of Energy ever set out to do. There was a lot of money involved; they weren’t going to back down easily.

The DOE tried every mechanism imaginable to deflate KYNF. They opened a local public relations office. “Nobody went in,” said Hirschfield. The DOE presented what they claimed was a sophisticated fail-proof filter system, but KYNF uncovered thirty emission control system breakdowns, eight of which involved filter failures. “They were trying all sorts of ways to make it look like we didn’t know what we were talking about,” said Hirschfield.

The project had already been rejected in two other communities. KYNF wanted to put a stop to it entirely. Hirschfield said, “Not here, not anywhere.” Spence sued the government, not only to stop the project in nearby Idaho, but to find an alternative to incinerating nuclear and hazardous waste altogether.

Meanwhile, the national media got wind of the story. First, The New York Times sent a reporter. “After that, we got a lot of attention,” said Woollen, including from CNN, NPR, The Chicago Tribune, and others. Everybody got on board, said Hirschfield. “Even those in the government, the congressional delegation and the governor, who, at first, were uncomfortable with us challenging the federal government.”

While Spence, Woollen, and a new member of the group, Tom Patricelli, took a trip to New York City and Washington, DC, to visit the Council of Environmental Equality and hand deliver a letter to the Vice President of the United States Al Gore, Hirschfield connected with Roger Altman, who served in leadership of the Treasury Department under two presidents. He was able to talk with the then-secretary for the DOE Bill Richardson.

In January 2001, after more than a year of fighting, Richardson came to Jackson Hole to announce that the project would not go forward. Hirschfield invited Ellen Glaccum, the author of the “Witch’s Brew” letter to the editor, to the event. It was a celebration. They had gotten the first part of what they wanted: “not here.” And in March 2001, the lawsuit settled. The settlement led to the creation of a commission to seek alternatives to incineration of transuranic nuclear waste and hazardous material at DOE sites. The second part of their demand was resolved: “not anywhere!”

The waste was treated non-thermally and most has been shipped to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico. Woollen, who had quit her hospital job to lead KYNF, started a 25-year career at the intersection of nuclear waste and the communities affected by it. And Spence, now 95, is retired from law without ever having lost a case.

Hirschfield continued work with Jackson Hole Childcare Helpers, a nonprofit she founded to help childcare programs afford equipment. She responded to needs in her own family— two of her grandchildren had been born deaf—and founded the non-profit the Pediatric Audiology Project, which brings renowned experts to conferences in Jackson to share best practices, including hearing tests for all newborns at birth. She created a lymphoma research endowment at Dana Farber Cancer Institute in honor of her husband and Dr. Arnie Freedman. And she and her husband, who cared deeply about Native American art and culture, funded the creation of the Institute of Tribal Learning at Central Wyoming College. She also served on the board of Brain Chemistry Labs, a research organization working to end Alzheimer’s, Parkinsons, and ALS, and was chair of the Jackson Hole Community Housing Trust. “I go about each thing in a similar way,” said Hirschfield, referring to her modus operandi: get the facts, gather a coalition, and don’t give up.

“It goes back to my challenges growing up, taking responsibility for my sister and brother. Bennington’s culture nurtured that independence. It’s in my DNA now because it has been the case throughout my life; if I see something that needs to be done, I don’t question if I can do it.”

“Berte is my poster woman for Bennington College,” said Safir. “In terms of her activism, in terms of her being undeterred by obstacles…. That, to me, is the kind of problem solving that I associate with the Bennington-educated woman.”

Hirschfield passed away, surrounded by her family, on January 27, 2025. An exhibit and archive of articles and videos about Keep Yellowstone Nuclear Free and its work are available at the Jackson Hole History Museum. ●

By Elizabeth Zimmer ’66 | Photography by Daniel Madoff

NE AFTERNOON last fall, eight years after my last visit to Bennington for my fiftieth reunion, I found myself on a balcony in Greenwall Auditorium, observing a series of rehearsals by students and faculty of a newly blended dance program, called Dance Lab, that weeks earlier had incorporated thirty-six students and a number of faculty members from Philadelphia’s University of the Arts (UArts).

Down on the main floor, Jesse Zaritt, a Brooklynbased dance artist, led a run-through of Dance Lab choreographer Sidra Bell’s latest work for the students. Then Cameron Childs, teacher/administrator with the BFA program, saw another group through a balletic piece by Gary W. Jeter II, a UArts MFA graduate now on the faculty of the same Dance Lab. Both pieces and others were part of a concert shown at Bennington and then again in Philadelphia in December. The rehearsals I saw evidenced a kind of highly technical, expressive dancing notably different from Bennington’s dance program, which is generally more experimental, personal, and improvisational. Around me on that balcony were several students waiting their turn to perform, a couple of others nursing injuries, and Donna Faye Burchfield, developer of the beloved UArts dance program.

Burchfield, whose students call her “DFaye,” was the longtime dean of the American Dance Festival, which began life at Bennington in 1934. She had been the Dean of Dance at UArts for 14 years when she received a disconcerting message: her workplace was closing down in a week. An arts educator with more than 40 years’ experience, she swung into action.

A compact dynamo with a graying braid and a brisk, engaging manner, Burchfield is a native of Georgia who trained at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth and received BFA and MFA degrees before joining the administrative staff of the American Dance Festival in 1984. Founded by Martha Hill at Bennington when the college itself was only two years old, ADF has been the spine of modern dance training in the United States for nearly a century and exposes students and teachers from across the country to the latest and best developments in the art form for six weeks every summer. The festival migrated from Bennington to Connecticut College in New London in 1948, and then to Durham, North Carolina, in 1978. Burchfield became dean at ADF in 2000, only the third person to hold the position, succeeding the late Martha Myers; in 2003 she also began directing the MFA program at Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia, after having

been teaching there since 1993, simultaneously with her administrative and teaching duties at ADF.

When an educational institution fails—goes bankrupt, closes down without warning—lives are disrupted. Faculty and staff members lose their jobs. Entering students have to make other plans. Matriculated students must, as well. UArts shut its doors on June 7, 2024, a few days after announcing its financial difficulties. It has since filed for bankruptcy liquidation. The school, which grew over about 150 years through the mergers of various visual arts and musical academies with a dance school and eventually a theater department, attained university status in 1987, and was a training ground for many luminaries in music and art. Its dance program, originally known as the Philadelphia Dance Academy, produced Judith Jamison, Alvin Ailey’s muse and later the director of his company, who died last fall at 81.

Dean Burchfield was understandably frantic; her thirty-one MFA students were holding airline tickets and about to depart for their summer term in Montpellier, France. She had dozens of undergraduates expecting to continue their training at the Philadelphia institution and newly admitted students knocking at the door. Laura Walker, the president of Bennington, and Provost Maurice Hall sprang to her aid, urged, said Provost Hall, by two UArts deans who “have kids here at Bennington.”

“The UArts dance program’s mission, rooted in the liberal arts, matches Bennington’s values,” said Hall. “It’s a wonderful complement, dare I say marriage, both the BFA and the LowResidency MFA.” The UArts dance division was the only one of the University’s programs to be “adopted” in quite this way.

The Bennington dance faculty and the Philly teachers were deeply familiar with one another’s work, which smoothed the way for the new alliance. “Within the first day, I got emails from my faculty asking, ‘Can we help?’” said Walker. “Our enrollment is the highest it’s ever been, but we had space for around thirty-seven students. And we’re delighted that it’s a really diverse group from countries around the world.”

Dana Reitz, choreographer, dancer, and visual artist, has taught at Bennington for 30 years. “We were asked by Laura [Walker] and Maurice [Hall] if we were OK with them joining us in some way, in our spaces, with a very different agenda and different needs. There was a very intensive technical schedule that they wanted to keep… We respect the journey and the agony and everything they went through.”

A hastily assembled task force managed, in a week, to raise $1 million to underwrite the MFA program’s mission to Montpellier and other expenses involved in transplanting thirtysix UArts undergraduates, their teachers, and a few staffers from Philly to Bennington. Sebastian Scripps, the son of Louise Scripps who, with her husband Samuel, had been a longtime benefactor of the American Dance Festival, came through with most of the necessary funds; other contributions came from the Ford Foundation and the Transformational Partnerships Fund.

Nate Tantral-Johnson ’26, a 19-year-old student from Stratford, Connecticut, had been at UArts for one year when the news broke. “I really don’t know what I would have done without Bennington. I was preparing to travel to France as a research assistant with the School of Dance MFA program, and all of a sudden, I had to look into transferring schools or taking a gap year, neither of which seemed like the right option.”

He continued, “The program that DFaye cultivated [is] like nothing else. She’s teaching us to tune our attention, priming us as critical thinkers, encouraging us to engage with art in a special and unique way. I couldn’t just go back home to Connecticut after being in that world. It would be like closing my eyes. I’ve joked about how I would be willing to follow her halfway around the world, but in some part, that’s true. And now I’ve followed her to Vermont. I think what we’ve been able to build here is incredible. The way we think about education and community has been totally recontextualised. It’s such a fragile thing, and that means you have to hold each other tighter. The other students have kept me grounded. There’s so much support.”

Cat Bauermann ’25, a native of Baltimore now in the final term of their BFA degree, chose UArts because of its hip-hop offerings. They “felt completely lost” when the closure was announced and fought hard to keep the UArts program alive in Philly by writing dozens of letters to politicians and others on social media. “If it hadn’t been available to continue DFaye’s program,” they observed, they would probably have left school and headed to a metropolitan area where they could continue

“Te BA students study a working alongside them has

The arrival of the former UArts students and faculty on the Bennington campus is not, Burchfield hastened to say, “program acquisition.” “We’re developing a new experimental, likely mobile, BFA program.” As many as fourteen members of her full-time UArts faculty have taken part-time work, paid by the course, in order to join her in Vermont. They are continuing the developing relationships they have with the students and their creative and technical efforts.

Bennington’s financial aid office “matched or beat the aid students had at UArts,” said Provost Hall. The dance students, a lively, energetic, and diverse community whose previous training was in some ways closer to the conservatory emphasis of a place like Juilliard than to the free-ranging, experimental model in use at Bennington, appear to be having a wonderful time. Five newcomers enrolled directly into the College’s BA program.

performing, in New York or Los Angeles or Amsterdam; “I would continue my education in the ‘real world,’” which would be their classroom instead. They are trying “not to calculate, but to follow my heart.” Bauermann is thrilled that Philadelphia hip-hop leader Kyle Clark is teaching at Bennington now. “I’m in Kyle’s POD (Performance Pedagogies),” a series of intensive weekends that enable students to continue their engagement with hip-hop in Vermont. They are delighted with the similarity between “the moral compass at UArts and at Bennington” and glad to have access to “places like ‘the Cave’ in VAPA, with new resources and new tools” that feed their special interest in making dance films.

Three of the UArts students enrolled in Reitz’s multidisciplinary Collaboration in Light, Movement, and Clothes,

milliondiferent things;

made me

reorientmy

CAT BAUERMANN ’25

taught with designers Michael Giannitti and Tilly Grimes last fall. Bauermann said of that class, “the BA students study a million different things; working alongside them has made me reorient my perspective. What they see in a dance work, versus what I see, has shed a light on different ways of making things. It’s been incredible to experience how someone sees my work because that person is a sculptor.”

What does the future hold for Bennington’s newest dance program? Walker said, “We’re figuring it out. We’re learning from having Donna Faye and the BFA in Dance students and faculty on campus. We could move [the program] back to a center in Philadelphia, with a cultural institution [there] as partner. We want to be a little out of the box. What could a mobile dance campus look like, embedded in Philadelphia? It will be experimental in several ways.” ●

Donna Faye Burchfield (top) and President Laura Walker in VAPA.

The Legacy of Bill Dixon & the Black Mu ic Divi ion

By

O. Edwin Ozoma

Black Music is legacy. You hear it every day. You hear it in music that you didn’t know was Black, that you hadn’t considered sprang from Blackness.

It’s easy to hear in Robin Thicke, Amy Winehouse, and Bobby Caldwell. You might even recognize it in Michael Franks, George Michael, and No Doubt. It’s even there in Daft Punk’s house music and disco, Black Sabbath’s rock and roll, and Billie Eilish’s sample-bopping rhythmic ballads. It’s not hard to argue Black Music’s legacy and impact on the greater cultural landscape in a post-Prince, post-Michael Jackson world that awarded Kendrick Lamar a Pulitzer Prize and has Lupe Fiasco teaching at MIT. Praised by the white masses and even accepted by their academy, in 2025 there is no argument that Black Music is king. In 1974, in the era of funk, disco, R&B, soul, jazz, and the blues, it wasn’t such an easy argument.

Bill Dixon, a trumpet virtuoso, came to Bennington College in 1968 with dancer Judith Dunn. Dixon played, Dunn danced, and the students were awed, previously unaware that people were allowed to move, to play, to present the way they did. They were radical, engaged, and charismatic. Bill brought his ideas about Black Music and its position in the greater landscape and the academy with him.

Dixon noted that western music was celebrated, lauded, and praised as the default. He wanted to create a program that celebrated Black Music. He successfully created a curriculum under Black Studies, but he wanted more. He wanted an entire Division—a department—dedicated to Black Music. He wasn’t without opposition.

Most of the music faculty at the time argued that there was no such thing as Black Music, and if there had been, they could not teach it because they didn’t know what it was, Dixon wrote in the 1974 document called “Statement of Intents and Purposes with Regard to Being a Division Among Divisions.”

He continued that by the music department’s assessment, not only was there no such thing as Black Music, but there was no such thing as a Black Musician either, despite having a few of them as colleagues, as if a field of study or its practitioners could not exist without the approval of the faculty at an academic institute. If that was how the music division felt, then “there [was] no room for experimentation, new thought or ideas or implementation of those ideas within the single music

division makeup,” Dixon said in his Statement. “So things have to be separate,” he continued.

Dixon was born in 1925 on Nantucket Island in Massachusetts. During the Great Depression he moved to Harlem with his family where he attended high school. As a student there, Dixon played the trumpet and started to paint— creative endeavors that would stay with him for the rest of his life. In 1944 he went off to serve with the U.S. Army in Germany during WWII. He returned in 1946 and attended the Hartnett Conservatory of Music until 1951. In the fifties Dixon worked with the United Nations and founded the UN Jazz society. By the time he made it to Bennington, Dixon had been working to legitimize Black Music in the larger culture for years.

Dixon was aware of the musician’s struggle, and the pull between making art and making a living. “The young musician coming up doesn’t have the strength, tenacity, or even willpower to resist the overtures of commercialism that are laid on you to survive,” Dixon stated about Black musicians in an interview in 1975. “The only way for it to survive would be if the universities and colleges in this country are going to survive, then this should be a part of the curriculum.” Dixon had been teaching for years by this point, but it was still no wonder that he had worked so hard to create the Black Music Division. To preserve the artist, to preserve the art of Black Music, Dixon suggested you find the artists and you “make this person a real teacher, and you turn the person loose in what the person’s doing.”

Dixon was a force who believed in improvisation, “live composition without notation.” He composed on the fly for the audience and the piece that was being played in the moment. It was a sort of interactive composition that took the environment into account. And that innovation added to the conversation in a way that changed the musical landscape. In this sense, through his work as an educator who inspired students and broadened their views of Black Music, as someone who emphasized improvisation the way he did, Dixon was certainly an innovator.

It is worth noting that Bennington College is a private liberal arts college in Vermont: not exactly a hub of Black activity, or an oft-sought home for Black students. So why a Black Music Division there? How many Black Students would Dixon reach with his division at a predominantly white institution, or PWI? Frankly, these are fool questions. Bennington is an institution that takes itself and art seriously, and not focusing at all on Black Music would be a misstep. Besides, why not? The students certainly responded well to the Black Music Division. Dixon himself knew that he wasn’t teaching a ton of Black students, certainly not more than he’d teach at a university in a more integrated city, or at an Historically Black College or University. Dixon was also aware that Black Music wasn’t solely consumed by Black people, that it was an integral part of American music culture, and that teaching it would inspire and change the way new nonblack musicians created and the way students who weren’t musicians would engage with the art and the culture.

Below: Dixon teaches his aesthetics class, 1973; Left: Dixon conducts his advanced ensemble in concert at Great Meadow Correctional Facility in Comstock, N.Y., November 1973.

An early course, Aesthetics as They Relate to Black Music, was primarily for non-musicians and contained readings by music critics, liner notes, record reviews, and album listenings. It wasn’t so much about creating Black Music but understanding it and its culture, and the culture that it came from. Dixon believed that it was impossible to teach all of Black Music. The art was too vast, too varied to cover everything. But he did believe that there was a Black aesthetic he could teach students to recognize. He stated in an interview that, “the Black aesthetic is one that has arisen out of the very nature [of] how Black people came to this country, how they were

treated in this country, and how they are still treated in this country. Which is to force them to take everything that is around them and metamorphosize it into something that makes sense for them.” The class was a cultural and sociological study through music. It was accessible to non-musicians and, though it was an advanced course, it accepted anyone who chose to enroll. The class was truly a celebration of Black Music.

Clearly Dixon got his division. It included faculty members Arthur Brooks from 1975–1995 and Milford Graves from 1975–2012. The Black Music Division ran for 10 years, from 1974 to 1984. After that, the courses were listed under Music, and much of the faculty remained. Dixon himself taught at Bennington until 1995. He fought to create a legacy at Bennington, and he won. He brought along a powerhouse staff, designed a curriculum, and implanted Black Music in academia. Dixon died in 2010, but not before he left Bennington College changed.

In spirit, and in course offerings, The Black Music Division lives on at Bennington. Michael Wimberly teaches several courses in the spirit of the Black Music Division and is leading a Black Music Symposium March 21–22. While there was a strong focus on jazz to begin with (though jazz was certainly not the only music covered by the Black Music Division), Wimberly’s courses reimagine what the Black Music Division would look like

now and cover the culture and artists who are making contemporary Black Music. He says that the focus is on serious artists, not the lighter pop artists, but there’s certainly a wide range of Black artists covered in Wimberly’s courses now. They include Thelonious Monk, Sun Ra, Max Roach, Nina Simone, and Jimi Hendrix but also Parliament Funkadelic, Beyoncé, Public Enemy, Childish Gambino, Kendrick Lamar, and others. And like the Division in Dixon’s time, Wimberly invites a rotating cast of Black artists to the school to present, perform, and engage the student body.

Now, at universities all over the country, all over the world, jazz is

recognized by the academy at large as a serious and even formal music of study. It would be preposterous to assume that Bennington’s Black Music Division alone is responsible for that change in perspective in academia, but it is reasonable to say that, at the very least, Bennington was not left in the past when it came to recognizing Black Music. It would be reasonable still to say that Bennington’s Black Music Division helped, in a small way, contribute to jazz being legitimized and Black Culture being recognized as a field of study. Even today, in a time when Lupe Fiasco is teaching hip-hop at MIT and “Outkast and the Rise of the Hip-Hop South” was taught at Armstrong State University in Savannah, Georgia, Bennington won’t be left behind. It holds onto and celebrates its legacy and continues to offer Black Music courses.

The Black Music Division is a hell of a legacy to leave. Dixon himself said, “I like to think that when I die, I’ve left something.” ●

The Bill Dixon Ensemble, from left: Milford Graves, Stephen Horenstein, Bill Dixon, Henry Letcher, Susan Feiner, Jay Ash, Sidney Smart, and Arthur Brooks.

THE OUTSIZED ROLE OF THE PURPLE CARROT FARM

By Ben Hewitt

In the United States, the average farm comprises 464 acres, and the USDA defines a “small farm” as comprising 179 acres or less. According to this definition, Bennington College’s Purple Carrot Farm, which consists of a single acre, is small even by small farm standards. One might call it a mini farm, or maybe a tiny farm, or even a micro farm.

Yet none of these definitions would account for the ripples that extend outward from the Purple Carrot Farm into the many communities it touches daily. There are the students who tend it, turning soil, sowing seeds, harvesting crops; there are the chefs who transform its bounty into nourishing meals that feed hundreds daily; there is the broader Bennington community who benefits from the farm’s

partnership with the Bennington Fair Food Initiative. If one considers these ripples, and how they often reverberate across the decades after a student graduates and impact lives far beyond the greater Bennington College community, then perhaps that humble one-acre farm isn’t so humble after all. Perhaps the measure of its physical size is just one way to understand its influence and not such an accurate way at that.

Lilly Kelly ’25 is just one of the many Bennington students whose life has been profoundly impacted by that single acre. Kelly came to Bennington as a freshman, with a keen interest in farming already instilled in her. She began working on the farm immediately, knowing how important it was for her health and happiness to remain engaged in agriculture, which

had become a passion for her during the COVID-19 pandemic. What she didn’t yet realize was how much more the farm had to offer. “The farm has been one of the most important educational experiences I’ve ever had,” she explained. “It’s been really interesting to realize that I’m not just a sponge for knowledge; I’m actually someone who can spread knowledge. I have something to share with others.”

Still, for Kelly, perhaps the greatest lesson of the farm is rooted in the connections it fosters. “Farming and food is one of the easiest, most natural connectors between people. There is something that feels uniquely loving and important in the act of growing and sharing food.”

Kelly’s experience at Purple Carrot is exactly what staff member Kelie Bowman had in mind when she partnered with the College in 2021 to revitalize the farm and expand the food and agriculture studies opportunities. It was a natural fit for both Bowman, a self-professed “obsessive gardener,” and the College, the alma mater of best-selling author Michael Pollan ’76, whose books include The Omnivore’s Dilemma, In Defense of Food, and Food Rules. Long an advocate for regionalized food systems and regenerative farming methods, Pollan is widely credited for popularizing the local food movement.

Much like Pollan and the students who work the farm, Bowman believes fervently in the power of small-scale regenerative food production. Regenerative farming leverages a variety of techniques and technologies to produce nutrient-rich crops while always returning more to the soil than it takes, even as it supports the physical, economic, and social health of the communities it impacts. Increasingly, its proponents point to regenerative farming’s capacity to mitigate climate change through the rapid creation of top soil, which acts as a carbon sink. “Farming has such a direct impact on the land and community,” said Bowman, an established artist and

gallery owner who came to Bennington when her partner took a job at the College. “I’ve come to think of it as my new social service work.”

Part of Bowman’s work involves deepening and broadening the College’s food and ag-related opportunities to deliver a greater emphasis on sustainable farming methodologies while also ensuring that students have ample chances to put these methods into practice. According to Bowman, this approach serves the students in several ways: first, by giving them the hands-on experience they need to experiment with and truly understand regenerative practices such as no-till soil management and Hügelkultur, a horticultural technique that involves planting into mounds of organic biomass for improved soil fertility and heat retention. And second, by offering them the opportunity to connect directly with

the very source of their sustenance.

“The cool thing about growing food is that it’s very tangible,” said Bowman. “It offers a way to measure value that’s not connected to money, and I think that’s really important.”

There’s also the fact that farming takes place outdoors and requires physical effort, often in the company of others, a combination that’s particularly beneficial in the cerebral environment of higher education, to say nothing of the myriad life stressors we all navigate.

“I’ve really noticed how some of the students have come to rely on the farm for their mental health,” said Bowman. “It’s incredibly therapeutic.”

This observation is mirrored by Lilly Kelly’s lived experience. “It tends to get pretty brainy around here,” she said with a laugh. “I was feeling a little lost without anything to do with my hands, and the farm has really helped

“The farm has been one of the most important educational experiences I’ve ever had.”

LILLY KELLY ’25

ground me. It’s had such a positive influence on my learning beyond the farm.”

The positive influence of the farm extends in many directions, including the College Dining Hall, where Chef Matthew Daigneault transforms its seasonal abundance into nourishing meals that feed hundreds of students and faculty daily. In 2024, the farm provided over 5,000 pounds of produce to the school kitchen, up from 1,500 pounds the year prior. Chef Daigneault’s appreciation for the farm is rooted first and foremost in his commitment to using the freshest, highest quality produce possible, and also in its ability to provide him with ingredients he simply can’t source elsewhere. “I love and adore and get a little crazy about using all the tomatoes before they ever see the inside of a refrigerator. I want them to go through as few hands as possible before they land in mine,” he said. “And I love how the farm makes me a more creative chef. My other purveyors only sell what they already know, which tends to pigeonhole you into using certain things.”

Perhaps the biggest challenge inherent to Chef Daigneault’s relationship with the farm is the sheer abundance and variety of food it produces during the peak harvest months of September and October. Here, too, he relies on his creativity to make the most of the boxes upon boxes of produce finding their way to his kitchen. According to Chef Daigneault, there’s a fringe benefit to his creative thinking and meal planning that might just be as important as the food itself: it engages the students. “The more I use food from the farm, the more kids get involved and talk about it with other students, which leads to more students getting involved.”

It’s a fitting dynamic for a piece of land with a long history of feeding its immediate community, first as a part of the original 140-acre piece of farmland donated by Fredric and Laura Jennings that became Bennington College and later as a victory farm during World War II, comprising 100 acres.

For many years following the war, the farm lay fallow but was resurrected again in the ’90s under a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) model, which sold farm “shares” to the community in exchange for produce. The College hoped to make the farm financially self-sustaining while also engaging the student body in its operations. The CSA program met with limited success, and by the year 2000, it was winding down.

In 2011, two College students— Sofie Sherman-Burton ’13 and Bryan Markhart ’13—petitioned the College to commit an acre of land to a permanent student garden, and this became the Purple Carrot Farm. “In our first year, we had a kids’ camp that would come by the farm and help out,” recalled Sherman-Burton. “We had planted purple carrots, and one of the campers didn’t believe there was such a thing. Even when we harvested and he saw they were actually purple, I’m pretty sure he thought we’d painted them somehow.”

The purple carrots were real, and so was the energy coalescing around the farm, which quickly became a focal point for the student body. At one farm meeting in 2012, more than 100 students, one-sixth of the student body, showed up. “The energy around it was huge,” said Sherman-Burton. “People felt like they were part of something big and had an opportunity to shape things in a positive way. I think that was really alluring.”

It’s exactly that opportunity that excites Kelie Bowman. “More and more, I see the farm as a community space for people to gather. It’s not merely about physical nourishment anymore; it’s about nourishment of the soul too.” ●

This just in: NSF Awards $1.8 Million to Bennington

In January, the National Science Foundation awarded $1.8 million to Bennington College as a part of an $8 million Science and Technology Research Initiative for the Vermont Economy (STRIVE). Under the direction of David Bond, Associate Director of CAPA, this grant includes an array of new analytical equipment for the sciences, two new positions, and support toward a timber-framed barn to reintroduce sheep and chickens to the campus. Building on the foundation CAPA Director Susan Sgorbati started with a $1 million grant from the Mellon Foundation for local food security work and food studies courses in 2019 and as a part of the $2 million Bennington Fair Food Initiative in 2022, this award will create a laboratory for locally focused sustainability studies.

“The campus farm was founded in the forties as a homefront in the fight against fascism,” said Bond. “Support from NSF will help us sharpen that legacy for the ecological and economic challenges we face in southern Vermont today.”

Alumni with memories of the campus farm, insights from their own work in agriculture and food issues, and those simply interested in learning more about exciting work on the campus farm, contact magazine@bennington.edu.

SELF STARTERS

BENNINGTON ALUMNI MAKE THE LIVES THEY WANT AND PLACES FOR OTHERS

Bennington Magazine spoke with four alumni who have started radically different projects: a shop, a forest cemetery, a nonprofit writers residency, and an augmented reality gaming company. Despite their differences, each has used deeply personal motivation marked by creativity, uncertainty, and the joy of the work.

By Ashley Brenon Jowett

BRIANA MAGNIFICO ’08

W. COLLECTIVE

Since high school, Bennington native Briana Magnifico ’08 has always wanted to have a shop, specifically one that sold both beautiful pastries and handcrafted items she made herself. She cofounded and owns W. Collective on North Street in Bennington. “It is my dream realized,” she said during a recent visit. “I always knew that I was meant to be a business owner.”

At Bennington, she studied costume and fashion design, photography, acting, and voice. She was able to get a job straight after graduation working as a costume production assistant for Taking Woodstock, directed by Ang Lee. From there, she worked for fashion designer Adam Selman and assisted him and his brand with all of Rhianna’s tours and red carpet looks, most notably the nude Swarovski crystal dress she wore for the Council of Fashion Designers of America Fashion Icon of the Year award show. “Bennington College gave me so much. It was unlike anything else,” she said. “I miss it, and I dream of it often.”

All along, while working other jobs, she designed and made things—candles, original clothing, and napkins and placemats dyed with natural pigments—and curated antiques and vintage clothing to take to markets.

Now, in the spacious, artistically appointed space at W. Collective, Magnifico sells handcrafted items made by women artisans, including herself. Items are chosen for their beauty and sustainability. Between the work of operating the shop, she makes screen-printed clothing, candles, a string of pennants made of recycled denim—And she stages them.

“I have an idea in my mind, and I am a perfectionist. I sacrifice a lot to reach my vision,” she said, pointing to a pink light illuminating a 5-foot grapevine wreath studded with dried hydrangeas. “It had to be pink,” she explained.

True to her high-school daydream, Magnifico also sells coffee and espresso drinks and pastries from local women-owned bakeries and those she bakes herself. The shop is the only local purveyor of natural wine. “It just tastes better, and it’s better for the environment,” she said.

“It’s important to have a place like this in my hometown, to have that sense of community and to feel a little bit better every time you leave,” she said. “I hope people can come in and feel inspired and make the world more beautiful for ourselves and for each other.”

Photo by Jamie Magnifico

MICHELLE HOGLE

ACCIAVATTI ’05

THE VERMONT FOREST CEMETERY

Photo by Glenn Russell

As a student at Bennington College, Michelle Hogle Acciavatti ’05, who now lives in Montpelier, Vermont, studied human development and the brain. “Bennington allowed me to pursue that as a science exploration and a philosophy exploration and to look at neuroscience through writing and not to give up my love of singing,” she said. “I went to Bennington because I never understood that you had to fit into one box to do anything.”

But just a few months before graduation, her class suffered deep trauma. There were three student deaths all within five months: Adam Mills ’05, Kelly Muzzi ’06, and Elissa Sullivan ’05. She thought of them throughout Commencement. “The people at the podium were saying that we could do anything we wanted.” At the same time, she recognized that lives end, sometimes abruptly.

She carried the thoughts of her friends with her as she entered graduate school for neuroscience at Boston University and, later, as she worked as a research consultant in the Office of Ethics at Boston Children’s Hospital. She saw parents and families go through what she describes as the worst possible situation, the death of a child. Despite having access to the most extensive medical and support resources available she remembered thinking, “these parents need more than what exists. There is a piece missing.”

That’s when she began to ask, how do we support people through the dying process? “That has been the driving question for me throughout my work.” She trained as a hospice volunteer, then a home funeral guide and an end-of-life doula, not long after the term itself was coined. Acciavatti racked up many end-of-life credentials by the time she started Ending Well, a for-profit company, in 2016. (She rebranded it as Green Mountain Funeral Services in 2023.) Her aim was to help people understand what their options were and how to access them.

The more conversations she had, the more she came to understand people’s needs and fears. She heard people say, I want to go back to nature. I want to do something good with

my body when I die. “These are people who drive electric cars and eat organic food. They don’t want their bodies stuffed with chemicals or contributing to the carbon load in the atmosphere,” she said. She and many others she encountered wanted to be buried naturally in a forest. Only natural burial— placing a deceased person’s remains directly into the earth without embalming, a casket, or a burial vault—was not legal at the time. “The missing piece kept getting bigger,” she said.

In 2016, Acciavatti led a campaign, successful in 2017, to legalize natural burial in Vermont and began steps to create a forest cemetery on more than fifty acres in Roxbury, Vermont. It’s called the Vermont Forest Cemetery. Looking back, she recognizes, “It’s not so much about creating the cemetery. I am really attempting to create a system that changes the way people in Vermont engage with the end of life,” she said. “How do we connect people with how they want to die? It means connecting with how we live and with our values.”

The cemetery has five areas of interest. In addition to burial, they also work on conservation, art, learning, and community. “We want people to come into relationship with this land. If you are going to sustain it with your body when you die, what can it offer when you are still alive?” There are a lot of ways people are interested in engaging, she said. Conservationists are interested in the land’s tree and bird populations and how to turn forests into natural sponges to alleviate flooding, while historians are considering the land’s precolonial and colonial inhabitants. “It’s not even about death and dying; it’s about making this place meaningful to them in life.”

Acciavatti considers herself as much a storyteller as a deathworker. “People’s stories… have been tremendously enriching to me.” When people visit the cemetery, she gives them tours and shares the stories of the people buried there. “One of the things that we have tried to do at the cemetery is make sure that people’s stories become as much a part of the ecosystem as their bodies do.” She is working with a documentary filmmaker to offer 15-minute documentaries to the families of each of the the twenty-three people buried in the cemetery so far. An interactive map will allow visitors to read about, see photos, or watch a short film about the people who Acciavatti describes as literally sustaining the forest.

“For me, it is all about love. How do we love the world and how do we love the people that we bury and how do we continue to love the people who come in the future? Who we are is how we love.” For more information, visit cemetery.eco

V Hansmann MFA ’11’s 30-year career in finance ended abruptly when the company he worked for closed in 2008. He said, “If I never see another annual report in my life it will be too soon.” His retirement lasted just six months. “I was at risk of becoming that gay man who had seen everything on and off Broadway and could talk at length about it, and I did not want to be that person.” So he applied to the Bennington Writing Seminars and became, he said, “the English major I always intended to be.” His favorite part of the master’s of fine arts in writing was the residencies, ten days in January and June, especially the company. He said, “I loved being with smart people who are interested in making better sentences.”

When graduation came in June 2011, he didn’t want the program to end. He had heard poet Donald Hall say, “The friendship of writers is the history of literature,” and he took it to heart. Thinking of ways he could replicate the residency experience, he went back to New York City and started a monthly reading series that ran for 10 years. While the series expanded his literary circle in New York and achieved great success, he said, “What I really wanted was to build something.”

In 2018, he was in North Bennington celebrating the graduation of a friend from the Bennington Writing Seminars when he noticed that a derelict nursing home at the top of Prospect Street was for sale. He had to take a look. He thought, “I can do something with this.” By that December it was his. He called Centerline Architects, and by June 2019, construction had begun.

The original building, a historic Victorian, blends in with the new modern light-filled spaces that make up the vast majority of the 6,000 square-foot structure. There are three suites of four bedrooms each. Most rooms have their own bathroom, and the suites have a kitchenette and a sitting room. “It’s the best dorm ever,” he said, as he showed a well-appointed room.

In June 2021, the house was finished “in the way construction is ever ‘finished,’” he joked, and in June 2022, they had their first paying writers. He admits that he started the residency without any sense of what it would be like, operationally, or how much work it would entail. He began by doing all of the jobs himself, including housekeeping and cooking dinner, the one communal meal offered every day.

He soon partnered with Gary Clark, formerly of the Vermont Studio Center, to handle submissions, applications, and invoicing. “I needed someone who knew the residency business, and we work great together,” Hansmann said. Unlike many other residencies, residents can choose their dates. Residencies are shorter than most, as little as a week. “This is a new kind of residency, in a way.” It is friendlier for writers who work other jobs and those who have children, he notes. “Parents can leave their kids with family members for a week, but not two,” he said.

“The learning curve has been pretty steep. In 2021, we offered people to come for free, so we could gain some confidence; I made a lot of mistakes,” he said. “I didn’t get enough rest. People got COVID. I became short tempered.”

At this point, more than 3 years into hosting residencies, Hansmann is deeply satisfied. “It has been a lot of fun,” he said. He’s hired a housekeeper to help him turn over the rooms between residents, a bookkeeper, a gardener, and, this summer, a cook. Enjoyable conversations unfold over wine. “Writers are great to talk to because they each have an interesting project,” he said. “They are my people. I know what they are trying to do. I know the whole process, and I identify with it. And, it turns out, I am a good host.”

And he writes daily in a journal he calls The COVIDiary, a mashup of COVID and diary. He has compiled 300,000 words on 750 pages and intends to turn it into the story of Prospect Street. “I just need to get myself to a residency,” he said, laughing, “where I can sit and make an outline, and I can see what all these sentences are about.”

For more information, visit prospectstreet.org.

V HANSMANN MFA ’11

PROSPECT STREET WRITERS HOUSE

ASAD MALIK ’19

JADU AR INC.

Asad Malik ’19 is the CEO and Founder of Jadu AR Inc., a company of more than thirty designers, engineers, and artists recognized as augmented reality (AR) pioneers. Their work is taught at the nation’s top tech schools, and they have partnered with American rapper Snoop Dogg and Transformers Producer and Director Michael Bay, among many other household names. Beyond that, Malik has been lauded by Variety, Rolling Stone, and Forbes for being young and influential in the tech industry.

“It all started while I was here at Bennington,” said Malik during a visit to campus this past fall. “My background was a bit more in design and technology and a bit less in art and expression. That’s why I wanted to force myself to try art at a place like Bennington. Being here was awesome. It really pushed me to figure out work involving my personal perspective and past.”

Originally from Pakistan, he attended his first hackathons while a student. Doing so helped him earn the money to buy his first augmented reality headset. He and fellow students—one of whom, Jack Daniel Gerrard ’18, is Jadu’s Chief Technology Officer—worked on short-term projects that earned them spots at the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival and the 2019 Sundance Film Festival, even before graduation.

After graduation, he said, “I knew that I wanted to go back to the technology roots and build a longer term product. That’s when we founded Jadu, my current company.” The company has worked on projects based on the conditions in the market and their strengths. For the last two years, they have been working on an augmented reality game called Jadu. It is a first-of-its-kind multiplayer fighting game for iOS and Android phones. It has 345,000 users and a 4.8 app rating from nearly ten thousand reviews.

“The game unfolds in a futuristic city invaded by an alien species known as the AVAs,” the site reads. Players build their own avatar and start rivalries with friends or compete with strangers. The game uses the phone’s camera to bring a character into the player’s physical space on their phone’s screen. Other players playing online at the time can enter the world for a one-on-one battle. It launched globally in October 2023.

Malik plays daily, mostly test versions. He takes out his phone. “This is from this morning. We are trying out a jetpack mechanic, where the character is a bit smaller. You are not actually using a joystick. The character is following the movement of the camera. It makes it way easier to fly around and maneuver and go on a table or go on a different surface.”

Malik loves how all encompassing games are. Like films, they use art and music, “but games take it a step further because they are interactive,” he said. “The players have some agency to find their direction, and there’s a big community

element where people contribute as a player in a world where other people interact with them.” The company has a community of players around the game. They show up at forums, know each other’s usernames, and interact. The community helps guide change. For instance, player environments forced creators to shrink the characters. Smaller characters fit better into players’ physical rooms.

Currently, the Jadu team is at a pivotal moment. They attempted to create playable characters with stories and predefined movesets that would help reveal the game’s culture while also providing intellectual property (IP) assets. But they found that people would far rather create their own character than play one designed for them. So the IP they created will no longer be playable, though Malik said, “you may encounter them or have a battle with them or a story moment with them. The characters will help us express the world and the lore or the vibe.”

“We are also moving away from the real-time multiplayer, where another player shows up in your room who is currently online and you compete, to a set up where you are competing against different creatures.” Players will explore the world, collect resources, and upgrade their tools in ways that help them progress through the world. “You might encounter other real players in these settings, but the relationship is more cooperative, where you and other players help each other to further defeat these enemies and explore the world,” he explained.

The overall goal is to change the nature of mobile games, which have been until now largely casino-like and financially exploitative. Malik is aiming to make a game that makes money while also ensuring that the experience is good for free players. He also wants mobile games to have more prestige. “We are trying to make a phone game you can be proud of playing, that’s cool and interesting for the younger generation. Most excitingly, it offers a way of interacting with your space and your phone that’s totally new.” ●

Learn more about Jadu at jadu.ar.

Did you start something? Let’s hear about it! Share the story of your organization, company, or career at magazine@bennington.edu.

From Learner to Mentor

SEBENELE “SBOBO” NDLANGAMANDLA ’21 AND HER JOURNEY FROM SWAZILAND TO STUDENT SUCCESS

By Charlie Nadler

SEBENELE ‘SBOBO’ NDLANGAMANDLA ’21

has come full circle at Bennington. Once a student navigating her own transformative journey, she now serves as a Student Success Specialist and First-Year Counselor, helping others thrive during their college years.

AN UNLIKELY PLAN

For Sbobo, discovering Bennington was almost accidental. After graduating from the United World College in Singapore, Sbobo returned to Swaziland [now Eswatini] for a gap year, during which a supportive conversation with Admissions helped her secure financial aid and begin her journey at Bennington. Her first day on campus was anything but conventional. “When I got here I was frazzled, confused, and overwhelmed by everything,” Sbobo remembered, laughing. “But Kate Child [Associate Dean for Academic Services] really helped me feel more stable and at home.” Despite the disorienting initial transition, Sbobo soon found her footing thanks to this type of warmth from the community, which became a model for her to emulate in her current role. “I wanted to offer that same experience to students,” she said.

BUILDING COMMUNITY THROUGH CONNECTION, WORK, AND INQUIRY

Sbobo’s sense of belonging at Bennington was shaped as much by her student employment on campus as by her studies. Roles in the Dining Hall, Post Office, and as a House Chair for Welling and Paran Creek fostered lasting connections and developed her passion for supporting diverse students. “The Post Office is my favorite place on campus,” she says, noting that she and Postal Clerk Tracy Provensal are very close and carpool to work together every day.

In quintessential Bennington fashion, Sbobo invested time into learning and understanding the ways in which people can be different and the same and how she could support folks accordingly. “I took classes on American Conservatism,” she explained. “I took a class on mass incarceration and how it affects people. How laws are made in this country.” Her studies were also bolstered by meeting students who had different experiences from her own, such as one who was homeschooled. “I now have a familiarity that I am able to bring into my work if I have a homeschooled student who comes in for counseling.”

FINDING HER PATH AND PEOPLE THROUGH A NEW LENS

A fateful scheduling twist changed Sbobo’s initial plan to study psychology. “One term there were no psych classes offered that I hadn’t taken,” she shared. “So I took a digital photo foundations class with faculty member Elizabeth White.” That experience made photography the core of her Plan, sparking creativity and lasting friendships. She now underscores to students the magic and relationships that develop when you create a community with people who share your interests.

MENTORING THE NEXT GENERATION

In her student-facing role, Sbobo offers her tips and resources from her own years as a student, which translates into a deep and empathetic understanding for navigating Bennington’s curriculum and Plan Process. When students bring her overly ambitious schedules, she laughs, “No, you can’t do this— many have tried!”

Sbobo views her role as a way to offer the stability and guidance she once received. “With the students I work with, it’s about doing the best with what you have,” she explained. “I work with a lot of neurodivergent students who don’t necessarily feel like they belong in this space. I think about how these institutions were built for neurotypical, strong, white students. For people who this place was not built for, how can we bring our experiences and the way our minds work? Passing classes definitely is what I want students to do, but are they showing up for themselves? How much are they getting from their classes? I want students to get the highest value out of the classes they take. That, to me, is success.”

REFLECTING ON RESOURCES AND SUPPORT

Reflecting on her student years, Sbobo emphasizes the importance of using campus resources, a lesson she now imparts to others as an academic counselor. Sbobo did well as a student but mused out loud how much better she may have done if she had investigated more of the school’s many support structures. “We are doing that work in our department to get resources to students and make sure people know what’s available,” she said. Sbobo didn’t work with an academic counselor consistently when she was a student. Now working regularly with students, she sees how much consistent support improves their experience and often reflects, “I wish I’d had myself as a counselor!”

Sbobo is also a major advocate and ally for FLoW, a student organization that focuses on First Generation, Low Income and/or Working Class students. “One of my biggest accomplishments with FLoW has been advocating for funding to keep the Little Extras Pantry consistently stocked with basic food items that any student facing food insecurity can access,” she said. “I have two interns who run programming and they have been great at creating community for our FLoW students, and making sure that there’s an awareness of their experiences.”

The support Sbobo now provides is highly reciprocated to this day. “I just generally believe in Bennington and love this institution, which feels very cheesy for a job,” she said. “Being at Convocation at the beginning of the term, listening to all these people speak about their work, being themselves and being brilliant…. I appreciate being in a place like this, the ideal of Bennington, and people’s hard work making it what it is. It feels good to work in a place that you believe in.” ●

Class Notes from the Pacific Northwest

Class Notes is one of the most-loved sections of Bennington Magazine. This issue, we kick off the section with notes from the Pacific Northwest. Look for other geographic areas in future issues or recommend yours by emailing classnotes@bennington.edu

SEE YOU IN SEATTLE

On September 24, 2024, Bennington College trustee Suzanne Brundage ’08 hosted a casual gathering of Seattlearea alumni at the home of her in-laws, Trisha and Eric Muller. Twelve alumni attendees represented ’70s classes to recent graduates. ▼

1960–1969

Sheila Diamond Goodwin ’61 works as a clinical therapist and acts locally. She played Margaret Scully on The X Files for nine years and enjoyed the thirtieth anniversary last year. She lives in Bellingham, Washington, with her husband, dogs, and horse and enjoys family who live nearby.

Sally Bowie ’66 retired four years ago after more than fifty years as a psychiatric social worker. She works on behalf of Democratic candidates and, with her husband, contributes to the care of two grandchildren. Elin (Fleischer) Leonard ’66, Jean (McMahon) Humez ’66, Loren Siegel ’66, and Bowie ▶

Susan Franzen ’69 writes that she is “retired, living happily ever after so far.”

1970–1979

Laurel Sprigg ’73 retired after 30 years of running her own business sewing for interior designers in the San Francisco Bay area. She sings for the Bremerton Symphony Chorus, Kitsap Opera, and LMCSeattle.org and volunteers at Bainbridgebarn.org.

Laurie Moss ’79 continues her psychotherapy practice. She and spouse Greg Ostergaard celebrated their 35th wedding anniversary and the marriage of their daughter. laurieruth50@gmail.com

1980–1989

Diana Maltz ’87 just started her twenty-fifth year as an English

professor at a small college in Ashland, Oregon. She completed a research fellowship at Åbo Akademi University in Turku, Finland.

1990–1999

Mollia Jensen ’91 expects to graduate with an MFA in nonfiction from Pacific University in 2025. This last fall, she read a piece at the Body Chronicles + Pacific Northwest

Narrative Medicine Collaboration and had an essay in sneaker wave magazine She writes, “And I’m writing a book proposal for my memoir, which includes some Bennington. How could it not?” ▲

2000–2009

Kj Swanson ’02 pivoted from fulltime academics last year and is now working full-time with her writing partner to develop internal franchise projects for film studios and theme parks. “I’ve literally been riding roller coasters for work,” she said.

Paúl Garcia ’05 traveled and worked in accounting for a few years before becoming a 911 dispatcher. “I get to use my Spanish and Mandarin at work, and on the weekends, I record music at home.” He is married with a 2-year-old daughter.

Toby Lyons ’07 is a licensed clinical social worker currently working for the Oregon Health Authority to improve access to qualified health care interpreters.

Kizel Urrutia ’07 has been working with environmental law firm Miller and Axline since 2011. They hold manufacturers of toxic chemicals accountable for the groundwater contamination. Urrutia learned about the firm during a Field Work Term.

Christie Goshe ’09 is making mini documentaries with Oregon Public Broadcasting, including one on forest fungi of the Pacific Northwest.

2010–2019

Zimyl (previously known as Simone) Adler ’12 helps lead Friends of the Earth’s international forests and land rights advocacy and policy campaigns and organizes in the Jewish movement for solidarity with Palestinians. In 2017 Adler cofounded Seattle’s premier klezmer band, Shpilkis, which released an album in 2023. shpilkisseattle.com ▼

India Kieser ’12 had solo shows of painting and photography at Makerspace Sellwood and at Case Study, both in Portland, Oregon. She is senior creative producer at the design studio Jolby.

Lauren Davis ’14’s debut short story collection The Nothing is forthcoming from YesYes Books in 2025.

Claire Elam ’14 works to support visual artists and creatives as they build their careers and businesses through educational opportunities, business coaching, and community development. She is the chair of the regional board of Planned Parenthood.

Carlos Torres de Janon ’14 graduated from Louisiana State University with a master’s of Landscape Architecture in 2022. He works at a design firm in Seattle and presents on the potential uses, impacts, and consequences of AI tools in the design field. Janon at LABash at the University of California, Davis ▲

Rachael Meyers ’15 leads Youth on Root, which provides opportunities for youth at the frontline of environmental harm and elevates their lived experience in affected neighborhoods.

2020–2024

Frances Erlandson ’20 started her first year as a lead teacher in an upper elementary classroom at a Montessori public charter school. She lives with Willy Giambalvo ’20 in northeast Portland.

Otto Schatz ’20 works as an online tutor for an audio engineering and music production mentorship and continues to write and produce music for dance performances and short films.

Craig Holt ’21 completed the BookEnds fellowship program at Stony Brook. He signed with a literary agent in February, and his novel, Monster, I Will Miss You, is currently on submission. His essay, “For My Sons, Who Are Convinced We’re All Screwed,” came out in MicroLit Almanac. ●

Class Notes

1950–1959

Jane Iselin ’56 was honored by the Horticultural Alliance of the Hamptons at their Garden Fair Preview Party in May. She was profiled by 27east.com in June.

Treva Silverman ’58 was highlighted in Moment Magazine for her lifetime work in comedy writing, which included an Emmy for The Mary Tyler Moore Show, as well as iconic work in film, TV, and theater.

1960–1969

Peggy Adler ’63 reported that the audiobook edition of her book, Trilogy: Three True Stories of Scoundrels and Schemers, won a gold medal from the Electronic Literature (eLit) Awards.

Carolee Lee ’63, CEO & Founder of WHAM (Women’s Health Access Matters), has been named to TIME’s inaugural TIME100 Health List of the 100 most influential people in global health.

Palgrave Macmillan published The Novel and Neuroscience from Dostoevsky to Ishiguro by Nina Pelikan Straus ’64 in January 2025.

Emmy Award-winner Holland Taylor ’64 played a congresswoman in the Lincoln Center Theater world premiere of N/A, a play about “power, politics, and the perilous path to progress.”

Ellen Wilbur ’66’s Listening and Speaking: New and Selected Stories will be published in the spring of 2025. She lives in Cambridge, MA.

Lois Lichtenstein Wilkins ’67 and Margaret Seidenberg-Ellis ’90 showed their wood-fired ceramics at Lebanon Picture Frame & Fine Art Gallery in Pennsylvania throughout the winter.

Barbara Kaufman Bouldinn ’68 published a steamy workplace romance novel, Tangled Tech: Love and Intrigue in Silicon Valley. barbarabouldin.com.

1970–1979

Carol Child Rosenblith ’70 was inducted into Maine’s Fryeburg Academy Hall of Excellence for her achievements in vocal music performance, ice skating, and as an adaptive skiing instructor.

Ann Goldstein ’71, translator of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, is the recipient of the 2024 Maplewood Literary Award, which is associated with the Ideas Festival at Maplewood Library in Maplewood, New Jersey.

Heidi Koring ’71 of Fitchburg State University and her colleagues presented “LIFE@Lynchburg: Lynchburg’s Pioneer Quakers and Their Meeting House” on October 2 at the University of Lynchburg in Virginia.

Jill Nooney ’71 published Bedrock: The Making of a Public Garden in March. The publisher calls it “a love letter to a 30-acre garden from the woman who spent 40 years creating it.”

Lynne White (Robbins) ’71 has a “vintique” in the Mall at Echo Bridge in Newton Upper Falls, MA. She sells organic coffees, raw local honey, teas, old books, and an array of vintage and antique items of interest.

Jo Ann Rothschild ’71 and her paintings were featured in a recent issue of Boston Art Review.

David Appel ’72 with Ava Heller ’07, Emilee Lord ’04, and others presented Care Package as part of Art in Odd Places (AiOP) 2024: CARE. The event took place October 18–20 along 14th Street in Manhattan.

Christopher Bishop ’72 discussed his diverse career journey from music to technology on the Superposition Guy’s Podcast in August.

Randie Denker ’72 spent three months in Indonesia and Malaysia learning to speak Indonesian. She practices environmental protection law; tutors immigrants in English; registers voters; serves on the executive board of the Alliance of Tallahassee Neighborhoods, on the legal advisory board of Sierra Club, and as president of her neighborhood association; and works as a Fulbright Visiting Scholar. She writes, “I am

in the process of getting a grant to create a pocket park on a vacant lot. Retirement is overrated.”

Sharon Ott ’72 has been appointed director of the School of Theatre and Dance at the University of Houston and the executive director of the Houston Shakespeare Festival.

Philemona Williamson ’73 was a guest on the Arts to Hearts Podcast in September. The episode was called “The Role of Vulnerability, Family, and Creativity in an Artist’s Growth.”

Susan Cantrick ’74 participated in the Salon Zürcher, 100 Women of Spirit+, Part 1, September 2–8, 2024.

Susan Hoenig ’76 had a solo exhibition of paintings and forest compositions called On Lenape Land October–December, 2023, at the Tulpehaking Nature Center, Hamilton, NJ.

Mel Watkin ’77 had a one-person show at A.I.R. Gallery in Brooklyn,

NY. The drawing installation titled “Revolving Cycle” featured her 44foot long drawing of a tree cycling through the seasons of the year. She also received the 2024 Franklin Furnace/Xeno prize for her revised and annotated artist’s book Girls Can Do Anything ▲

Teachers and students who were part of the Bennington College Music and Black Music Division program performed as part of the Nu Mu 3 festival in Brattleboro, VT, in August 2024. Organized by former faculty member Vance Provey, the ensemble consisted of Provey with former faculty member Paul Austerlitz ’79, Alby Balgochian, former faculty member David Bindman, former faculty member Arthur Brooks, Stephen Haynes ’80, Glynnis Lomon ’75, former faculty member Dennis Warren ’84, and Eric Zinman ’85. Austerlitz also played with The Convergence Trio for Vermont Arts Exchange’s (VAE) Basement Music Series Coffee House Jazz event in August. They played

several of Austerlitz’s original works, which have grown from four decades of ethnomusicological research in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and beyond.

Dion Birney ’79’s poem “Sharon” was published in Mudfish 24.

Beth Kanter ’79, working in nonprofit and philanthropy in Silicon Valley for the past 15 years, has published four books about the intersection of emerging tech and social impact, most recently books on nonprofits and artificial intelligence.

1980–1989

University of California Los Angeles’s Center for the Art of Performance (CAP UCLA) presented the World premiere of Arms Around America, from Dan Froot & Company, artistic director Dan Froot ’82, in November. The live theatrical performance was performed at the Nimoy Theater in Los Angeles and explores the stories of

real families from around the country whose lives have been shaped by guns. The show has a limited podcast series that launched in the summer.

Michele Marcoux ’82’s painting The form does not repeat (For Lynne) was selected for Visual Arts Scotland’s biggest-ever exhibition at historic Dalkeith Palace in August 2024.

Co-executive directors David Dubov-Flinn ’84 and John Lugar partnered with Bennington Theater to bring professional-quality theater back to the town. “With that fearless Bennington spirit, we approached the management company that runs the space and are working on a full season of plays and musicals.” DubovFlinn starred as Bottom in Fort Salem Theater’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

The Rent Collectors: Exploitation, Murder, and Redemption in Immigrant L.A. by Jesse Katz ’85 was published by Astra House in July 2024.

On December 7, flutist, composer, and Fletcher Professor of the Arts and Music Department Chair at Middlebury College Su Lian Tan ’85 premiered “Sky Was Possible,” a song cycle for soprano, flute, and piano, which she composed, at Middlebury.

Lora Whelan ’85, who was featured in the Sentinel & Enterprise and in The Working Waterfront, is represented by Full Fathom Five Gallery in Eastport, ME, and Gallery Sitka in Newport, RI, and Shirley, MA, where her exhibition Ocean Land Lines was on display in August 2024.

Jonathan Lethem ’86’s latest, Cellophane Bricks: A Life in Visual Culture, came out in July. It is described by the publisher as “a

rapturous, ravenous celebration of visual art and storytelling from one of our most innovative writers and critical minds.” In addition, he interviewed with thelineofbestfit.com about the nine songs that have been most influential throughout his life.

Ella The Ungovernable, a play written by David McDonald ’86, recently completed a highly successful run at Greenwich Village’s Theater for the New City. McDonald employed Jasmine Hyman ’23 as his project manager and Bailey Kasdun ’23 as stage manager. The play was offered another 3-week run at Theater for the New City in December/January and a French-language production at The Avignon Theater Festival in France next summer. McDonald, playwright and co-director, with Michele Baldwin, co-director; Photo by Rome Neal

John “Ben” Schenck ’86 leads the Panorama Jazz Band and Panorama BRASS Band on clarinet in New Orleans, LA. Next year will be their thirtieth in business. In May 2024, they celebrated 10 years of releasing monthly online singles through their song-of-the-month club, Good Music For You (Bandcamp). Schenck also recently celebrated 30 years accompanying dance classes at Tulane University.

The New York Times Book Review has named the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century. The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt ’86 made the list.

Avi Bower ’87 writes, “After college, I worked as a cook for a spell in Morgantown, WV, went to Paris, did a master’s in comparative literature at the University of Iowa, hightailed it to Finland, wrote poetry, came home after five Finnish years, did a

PhD at the University of Buffalo, met a boy, moved together to Albany, got a job at a college, had a baby girl, raised the child, got a job at the University at Albany, watched little girl drive herself to college, and felt sad. Now I help people at work, worry about climate change, observe the soft night of time creeping in through the windows of the body, see arugula still growing jade green in the November garden, walk to the pottery studio, walk in fear, watch Marx Brothers movies, stay married to Mark these many years, and plan our next disappearance to Porto or Berlin….”

Ciaran Cooper ’87, member of the Bennington College Board of Trustees, wrote, “In 2024, I completed a novel-in-stories, which I’m currently shopping for publication. Of the twenty-three stories in total, seven have been published so far in various literary journals, including the latest story, “Broken Horses,” which appeared in June’s issue of Pangyrus

Spanierman Modern in New York City hosted a group exhibition, Force of Nature, featuring work by Erin Parish ’88 in July and August 2024. In addition, Parish was featured in the Andra Norris Gallery in California and the Laundromat Art Space in Miami. In

addition, Parish writes, “I have been writing articles for Artburst Miami, and I am stupidly excited that I will be showing at the Havana Biennial in four different locations.” In January, Parish started teaching three lecture classes at Miami Dade College. “I am planning to reference a class I took with former faculty member Sidney Tillim at Bennington College decades ago.”

Christie’s in New York City chose Identity Is…, an installation by Michael Sylvan Robinson ’89 at the Museum of Art and Design, also in New York, as a top pick.

Installation view of Identity Is... by Robinson at the Museum of Arts and Design, New York.

Artist Tom Sachs ’89 was profiled for an article in the October–December 2024 issue of the French design magazine Intramuros.

1990–1999

Danielia Cotton ’90 was featured in the Murfreesboro Press music section in July 2024. Her latest EP, Charley’s Pride: A Tribute to Black Country Music, was released in August.

Artist and jewelry designer Claire Florence ’90 was featured in Forbes magazine in August.

In October, the African Development Bank Group appointed Moono Mupotola ’92 as Deputy Director General for the Southern Africa Regional Development, Integration, and Business Delivery Office.

Eric Reymond ’92 published a Hebrew edition of the manuscripts of the Wisdom of Ben Sira with friend Frédérique Rey and the University of Lorraine in September.

In 2024, Susie Felber ’93 and Shana Silverman ’93 cofounded Big Noyes, a woman and veteran-owned business committed to elevating business needs by delivering excellent work. “Yes, our name is a nod to the ‘new’ house we lived in.” bignoyes.com

Tess Callahan MFA ’96 published Dawnland, a novel, on September 3.

Nicholas Elliot ’96 translated for French filmmaker Alice Diop’s recent visit to Bennington College. Diop’s editor Amrita David joined her. The story was covered in The Manchester Journal.

Photo by Jenna Bascom courtesy of the Museum of Arts and Design ▲

Radha Marcum ’96’s second poetry collection, Pine Soot Tendon Bone, winner of the 2023 Washington Prize, is now available.

Jackie Sedlock ’96 and her Pownal, VT, pottery studio were featured in an article in the Bennington Banner in July.

This fall, The New Mexicans by Kevin Bubriski ’97 will be published by Museum of New Mexico Press.

Heather Ritchie ’97, a maker of commercial and custom hand carved memorial art, was included in the piece “On Stones” by Ellyn Gaydos in the August issue of Harper’s Magazine. “As a working artist in Vermont, I have always taken a lot of pride in and vocalize my creative background as a Bennington graduate.” She makes art for pleasure using stone, fiber, mixed media, and paint. Ritchie with Barre, Vermont-area toolmaker Bernie Scott ▲

Linda McCauley Freeman MFA ’98 has published her second poetry collection, The Marriage Manual, with Backroom Window Press.

Leslie-Anne “L.A.” Schildt ’99 published her debut fantasy novel, Splintered Realms, with Champagne Book Group. www.lamyles.com

Don Silver MFA ’99 released his second book, Scorched, a comingof-age novel set in a suburb of Philadelphia in the seventies.

Lyra Silverstein ’99 and Sara Cronan ’00 are part of a multi-author book called Activating the Divine Human: Embracing our Shadow as Well as Our Light. The book is available from I.AM publishing on Amazon.

2000–2009

Eco-novel Arroyo Circle by JoeAnn Hart MFA ’00 was published in October 2024 by Green Writers Press.

IndieWire highlighted Bryn Mooser ’01, founder of the new AI studio Asteria, which aims to equip artists with the technology to stay at the center of the AI-assisted filmmaking process.

In July, John Brauer ’02, Senior Vice President of Insights and Media Measurement at Fox Television Stations, participated in a TVNewsCheck Webinar, “Data, Technology, and Optimizing Local TV Advertising,” with other sales and technology leaders.

Author and activist Rivera Sun ’04, program coordinator with Campaign Nonviolence, spoke with PopularResistance.org about the days of nonviolent action from September 21 to October 2, 2024.

Michelle Hogle Acciavatti ’05, a natural death worker and founder of the Vermont Forest Cemetery in Roxbury, Vermont, presented at the TEDxHartlandHill event in Woodstock, Vermont, and, in September, was profiled in the Bennington Banner.

The Aluminum Lining: A Memoir of Psychosis and Recovery by S.C. Jackson ’05 offers a powerful tale of her transformation, from the depths of psychosis to a triumphant return to sanity, as well as practical solutions for recovery.

Collette (Hill) Ouseley-Moynan ’05 wrote, “I wanted to share about my new yoga book, Foundational Yoga Flow, published by Human Kinetics…. I took my first yoga class at Bennington, in fact!”

Liesl Schwabe MFA ’05 received her second Fulbright-Nehru Award for Professional and Academic Excellence. She is spending the ’24–’25 academic year teaching and writing in Kolkata, India, with her family.

Artist Cosmo Whyte ’05 continued the Chautauqua Visual Arts Lecture Series in Hultquist Center in July 2024. The Atlanta- and Montego Bay, Jamaica-based artist talked about the evolutions of both his work and his artistic process.

Mac Young ’06 directed, acted in, and designed the sets for Much Ado About Nothing at Tisbury Amphitheater as part of Martha’s Vineyard Playhouse’s summer season. He and his production were featured in the Vineyard Gazette.

Jules Nyquist MFA ’07 earned her PhD in postsecondary and adult education from Capella University in 2024. Her dissertation topic was Using Poetic Inquiry for Professional Stress Management: A Qualitative Study of Higher Education Poetry Instructors. She continues to teach writing and lead retreats at Jules’ Poetry Playhouse in Placitas, NM. Her poem “Amber Sonnet” is in the latest issue, #14, of the Taos Journal of Poetry.

Lena Valencia ’07’s debut short story collection Mystery Lights came out in August 2024 with Tin House Books and in the UK in November with Dead Ink Books.

Ellen Ann Fentress MFA ’08’s memoir, The Steps We Take: A Memoir of Southern Reckoning, has been selected as the Library of Congress 2024 Great Reads from Great Places pick. It represented Mississippi at the National Book Festival in Washington in August.

Ross Dillon ’08 MAT ’09 and his wife Shannon are pleased to announce the birth of their son, Bronson, in May 2024. Dillon lives and works in education in Monterey, CA. ▼

Christine Herzer MFA ’09’s artwork is on the cover of Poem as a Journal, from the Lithuanian Culture Institute. Inside, it features an eight-page portfolio of her written drawings.

2010–2019

Mary Jones MFA ’10 released her first short story collection The Goodbye Process, which received a starred review from Library Journal.

Poet Safiya Sinclair ’10’s memoir, How to Say Babylon, was released in paperback. National Public Radio re-aired an interview between Sinclair and Terry Gross on Fresh Air.

Dukakis: Recipe for Democracy, a documentary codirected by Erin Trahan MFA ’10, premiered as the opening-night selection of the prestigious GlobeDocs Film Festival in Boston on October 22.

Emmet Penney ’11, current editor at Compact Magazine, was named one of seven outstanding recipients of the 2024–25 Robert Novak Journalism Fellowship. In addition, he is the creator of the Nuclear Barbarians Substack and podcast. Penney’s work has appeared in Spectator World, American Affairs, Claremont Review of Books, and elsewhere. Penney, third from left, with other Fellowship recipients ▲

Anna Peretz Rogovoy ’13 received her MFA in Dance from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in spring 2024 and has joined the Dance department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison as a full-time teaching faculty member.

Reeve Andrew ’14 and Jessie King ’14 were highlighted in Northforker for their Shelter Island, NY, cheese shop, King Andrew Cheese.

The Bennington Banner highlighted Hillary Chase ’14, winner of the

2024 Bennington’s Got Talent All Stars Competition. Chase is currently recording her new album in the Berkshires.

Tori Malcangio MFA ’14’s story “Invasive Species” won the Jeffery E. Smith Editors Prize and currently appears in the Spring issue of The Missouri Review

Sarah Madden ’15 opened her collaborative print studio, SRM Editions, in Brooklyn, NY. The press specializes in intaglio printmaking.

Linda Michel-Cassidy MFA ’15 sold her story collection, When We Were Hardcore, to Eastover Press. It is slated for publication in January.

Uzayr Agha ’18, an architectural designer and painter from Karachi, Pakistan, was a part of the City Gallery’s summer invitational, MOSAIC, in New Haven, CT, in August.

JP (Jennifer) Solheim MFA ’18 is featured with her story “We Knew a World” (originally published in Bellevue Literary Review) on the Midwest Weird Audio Literary Magazine

John Beebe West MFA ’18 has sold his second book, Fertile Circuits, to Eerdmans. It will be published in fall 2026.

Carling Berkhout ’19 released her album Omens and was featured in a story in the Manchester Journal in Vermont.

Sarah Tiffin ’19 is in her fourth year at the Wright Institute at Berkeley for her PsyD in clinical psychology.

2020–2024

Puloma Ghosh MFA ’20 published her debut story collection, Mouth, on June 11, 2024, with Astra House. Mouth received rave reviews in Chicago Review of Books and Kirkus Reviews.

Of Flightless Doves, a poetry newsletter by Ethan Koss-Smith ’21, was featured by Substack as recommended reading. ethankosssmith.substack.com

Melih Meric ’21 was featured on a “meet the artist” video on the Summit Artspace Youtube channel. Summit Artspace, in Akron, OH, hosted a latesummer exhibition of Meric’s work.

Ashley D. Escobar ’22’s poem, “Tivoli,” appeared in issue 13 of The Drift

Michele Feeney MFA ’22 published a historical fiction called Like Family, set during the 1918 influenza epidemic, with Black Rose Writing.

Ariél Martinez MFA ’22 interviewed Charlotte Shane, the author of An Honest Woman: a Memoir of Sex Work and Love, for Interview Magazine.

Srichchha Pradhan ’22, Miss Nepal World 2023 and founder of Deego Pranali, a sustainable lifestyle brand, spoke on anapana meditation for mental well-being at TEDxMaitighan.

Carson Fletcher Reid MFA ’22 published a new story, “In the Car Before School,” in Narrative Magazine. The story was selected as a Story of the Week.

James Roseman MFA ’22 published his novel, Placeholders, on September 26 via Verve Books (UK).

Sagarika Bhati ’23 is an artist in residence at Arcosanti, a community exploring the intersection of ecology and architecture with an emphasis on sustainability, in Arizona.

Guillermo Rebollo Gil MFA ’23 published a new poetry collection, El tiempo es todavía, via Folium books.

Rachel Greenley MFA ’23 published a new piece of nonfiction, “Here in Umatilla,” in the New England Review

Christine O’Donnell MFA ’23 published a new essay, “Triple Word Score,” in Porter House Review.

Arlene DeMaris MFA ’24 has won first place in the 2024 Connecticut Poetry Awards for her poem “Telling the Hive.” She has also published two poems, “Georgina and the Eels” and “Space” in the 2024 Connecticut River Review

Will Greer ’24 was profiled by advocate.com in the midst of his run to become a state representative in Vermont. He was elected to the office on November 5.

Fabienne François Keck MFA ’24 has been selected as one of two 2024–2025 Teaching Fellows at Grub Street. The Teaching Fellowship for Black Writers provides financial and professional development support to two selfidentified Black writers interested in teaching classes, participating in events, and working with Grub Street instructors and staff to deepen the curriculum.

Jean Marie MFA ’24 published a story, “I Want Bulbs,” in Does It Have Pockets.

Four poems from Amy Raasch MFA ’24’s poem sequence about Los Angeles were recently published in the journal Does It Have Pockets. Her poems, “Ashes” and “Why I Am Not a Gravedigger,” appear in the latest issue of Angel City Review. In addition, Raasch has been nominated for the “2025 Best of the Net” by Does It Have Pockets for her poem, “Dia de los Muertos,” and has been named a semifinalist for the Red Wheelbarrow Poetry Prize, judged by Kim Addonizio.

In July, Clementine Malicoat Valtz ’24 was featured in the Provincetown Independent for her work helping to grow clams on Cape Cod.

Ana Maria Voiculet MFA ’24 won first place in a Quebec-wide writing competition organized by the Montreal Poetry Magazine. The poem, “Aporia illness,” was published in September. ●

Please submit your professional and personal updates to classnotes@bennington.edu

Faculty & Staff Notes

Ethnomusicologist and Music faculty member Joseph Alpar was a Jacob Perlow Fellow in residence at Skidmore College in Fall 2024 and gave several talks and workshops exploring the intertwined histories of Jews, Muslims, and Christians in the Ottoman Empire through a musical lens. The residence culminated in a concert titled “Aşk: Music, Love, and Mysticism in the Ottoman World” at Skidmore’s Arthur Zankel Music Center on November 16, 2024.

Faculty members David Bond and John Hultgren were interviewed by the Chronicle of Higher Education on the deepening crisis of liberal arts colleges in America. In addition,

Bond’s book, Negative Ecologies: Fossil Fuels and the Discovery of the Environment, was awarded the 2024 Textor Prize in Anticipatory Anthropology by the American Anthropology Association (AAA). “The roster of previous winners is awe-inspiring, and I am humbled to be included in their ranks,” said Bond.

Jenny Boully, a Guggenheim fellow who wrote Betwixt-and-Between: Essays on the Writing Life, read at the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference on August 21.

Michael Cohen published an opinion, “Should Israel accept Jordan’s olive branch during the war?,” in The Jerusalem Post

Literary Hub published an excerpt from former faculty member Nicholas Delbanco ’s memoir Still Life at Eighty. The selection described his years living nearby when he was a teacher at Bennington College.

An Duplan ’14, a trans poet and artist, presented on the connections between land ownership and documentary poetics on November 7 as a part of the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts’ 2024–25 lecture series, Politics of the Visual. Duplan is the author of Blackspace: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture. Duplan’s talk was titled, “What Lies at the Intersection of Land Ownership and Documentary Poetics.”

Luiza Folegatti’s exhibition “Mothering in Migration,” MCLA’s Gallery 51; Photo by Carolina Porras Monroy.

An opinion by Judith Enck, president of Beyond Plastics, appeared in Scientific American in October. In it, she gets behind a California lawsuit against ExxonMobil that aims to reveal that plastic recycling is a lie.

In July and August, MCLA’s Gallery 51 debuted “Mothering in Migration,” an exhibition celebrating immigrant mothers by Luiza Folegatti. The show was a part of an Artists at Work Fellowship Folegatti received and of an ongoing collaboration between Folegatti and Latinas413, which aims to strengthen local support for immigrant mothers while using image-making as a tool for community building. Photo by Carolina Porras Monroy (previous) ◀

Mariam Ghani exhibited Counting, Accounting, Recounting January 9 –February 15, 2025, at Ryan Lee Gallery in New York City. The exhibition included Ghani’s short film There’s a Hole in the World Where You Used to Be (2024) with accompanying sculptures, which translate the process of mourning people and places into tangible form.

Manuel Gonzales, author of The Miniature Wife and Other Stories and the novel The Regional Office Is Under Attack!, wrote a review of There Is a Rio Grande in Heaven by Ruben Reyes Jr. It was published by The Washington Post in August 2024.

John Hultgren’s journal article “Anti-environmentalism and the natural ‘wages of whiteness’” was chosen as the best published in the journal Environmental Politics in 2023. “This is a highly original and innovative article based on a critical reading of the history of white working-class politics in the USA

that shows how race, gender, and environmental concerns intersect to produce and reproduce an articulation of power and society that both undercuts possibilities for crossracial working class alliances and efforts to produce pro-environmental policy,” the judges commented.

In August 2024, Dina Janis’s Vermont Public Theater presented a one-night showing of a new play called Texting Through Grief at Arlington Common in Arlington, VT, and Shakespeare in the Woods’ Twelfth Night, a fundraiser for Bennington County Coalition for the Homeless at Merchants Park in downtown Bennington. Also in August, Janis directed Untitled by David Deblinger and My Body Says No by Tomoko Miyagi for the LAByrinth Theater Summer Intensive in New York City. Janis, center, with Mary Bacon and James Still, the writer/performers of Texting Through Grief. ▲

Kirk Jackson and Erin Nicole Harrington directed Heidi Schreck’s acclaimed play, What the Constitution Means to Me, at Hubbard Hall in Cambridge, NY, in September 2024.

John Kirk, a member of the Susquehanna String Band, a group of three musicians dedicated to the promotion and performance of American traditional music, performed at Bainbridge Town Hall Theatre in Bainbridge, NY, in January.

Jen Liu was recently named a recipient of this year’s Anonymous Was A Woman grant. The unrestricted prize of $50,000 per artist is awarded to women who are 40 and older and at a critical juncture in their careers.

Anina Major won the Pommery Prize at the 2024 Armory Show and was named as the inaugural winner of the Future Perfect Gallery’s the Future Perfect Prize. She also exhibited All Us Come Across Water at the Pamela Salisbury Gallery in Hudson, NY, in 2024. She was profiled in The New York Times on November 8.

Visiting Society, Culture, and Thought faculty member Catherine McKeen co-edited The Routledge Handbook of Women and Ancient Greek Philosophy, a collection of forty

essays re-imagining philosophy’s past. In the spring of 2024, McKeen was a panelist for “New Directions in Scholarship on Women and Gender in Greek Antiquity” at the Canadian Colloquium for Ancient Philosophy in Toronto and at the EuGeSta Gender Studies and Classical Scholarship Society’s International Women’s Day event. She was an invited guest for a panel discussion and book salon hosted by Fairfield University on October 2.

Vice President for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Alfredo Medina, Jr., sat on a live panel about Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion for WAMC Northeast Public Radio’s The Roundtable at The Linda in Albany on September 19.

In December 2024, Plinth Gallery in Denver presented distinctive porcelain ceramics by artist Aysha Peltz in a show entitled Echoing Elasticity.

Ann Pibal is one of nineteen contemporary artists included in the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden presentation of Revolutions: Art from the Hirshhorn Collection, 1860–1960. Pibal’s work is included with 208 artworks in the Museum’s permanent collection and a total of 117 artists including Georgia O’Keeffe and Jackson Pollock. The exhibition runs through April 20, 2025.

Anthropology faculty member Miroslava Prazak was inducted into the Vermont Academy of Arts & Sciences in November. The honor is in recognition of her contributions to the knowledge and of including Vermont in her scholarship. Notably, Prazak has taught on Bennington, Vermont, and the Abenaki.

Liquid, a novel by Mariam Rahmani, was listed in “The 25 Most Anticipated Books of 2025” by Oprah Daily.

Jennifer Rohn joined a panel with dramaturg Anne Cattaneo and costume designer William Ivey Long to discuss their work on Robert Wilson’s original production of Hamletmachine. The panel “Hamletmachine in New York” was part of a four-day event at The Segal Theatre, The Graduate Center, City University of New York, in August.

Composer Allen Shawn’s 2006 chamber work, “In Memory Of,” was performed as a part of Music from Salem at Hubbard Hall in Cambridge, NY, in October. Shawn’s Double CD, Piano Sonatas 6,7,8 and 9, and Complete Etudes, and his new book, In the Realm of Tones; A Composer’s Memoir, will both be released early this summer.

Visiting faculty member Maboula Soumahoro was in residency at the Center for Advancement of Public Action from August 20–30, 2024. During this time, she continued her work on a screen adaptation of French Guadeloupean writer Maryse Condé’s novel Segu (Robert Laffont, 1984; Penguin, 1987).

Alison Tartaglia, associate dean and director of integrated wellness, was interviewed on Campus Safety Magazine’s video podcast Campus Safety Voices about improving student mental health at small liberal arts schools.

John Umphlett, faculty member in sculpture, was profiled in the Manchester Journal. The title of the piece, “‘Bruising,’ ‘humbling’ and ‘terrible,’ sculptor describes being entombed

within his own work,” described his sculpture for the annual North Bennington Outdoor Sculpture Show.

The prestigious Peruvian literary magazine Umbral N.18 has published a selection of poems (pp. 84–89) by visiting faculty member in Spanish Lena Retamoso Urbano. In addition, Retamoso Urbano presented her academic and artistic works at Surréalismes Paris 2024 Conference and read her poetry in Spanish at the first Multilingual Creative Writing Conference in New York City in November. Upon her recommendation, four Bennington College students from her advanced class, Creative Writing in Spanish, submitted a panel themselves and read their poems at the conference, as well.

Faculty member Emily Waterman is the second author on “Preventing Adverse Childhood Experiences in a Sample of Largely Indigenous Children,” which appeared in Pediatrics, a prestigious peer-reviewed journal published by the American Academy of Pediatrics. She spoke about the research as a guest on the academy’s podcast, Pediatrics On Call, last fall. ●

Obituaries

Joanne Robinson Hill ’68

By

Gay McDougall ’69 | Joanne Robinson Hill ’68 was a dancer, an arts educator, and an independent arts consultant. While at Bennington, she studied dance and anthropology. She was born in Queens, New York, on February 14, 1946, and died on August 27, 2024.

When her father passed away at an early age, her mother transformed her skills as a housewife into what some called “a Black Betty Crocker.” She published her recipes in Ebony magazine and sold evaporated milk from Pet, Inc., to Black mothers throughout the south.

Joanne, like her mother, had an extensive and accomplished career. She served as the Director of Education at The Joyce Theater from 1995 to 2014. She was a consultant for the New York City Department of Education, where she was recognized for leadership. During her career she served as trustee of Dance/USA, chair of its Educators Council, and was an Engaging Dance Audiences Panelist in 2017.

Joanne served as a panelist for the New York State Council of the Arts and the New Jersey Council on the Arts. She was a founding board member of the New York City Arts in Education Roundtable, an editorial board member of the Teaching Artist Journal, and a member of the Dance on the Lawn Advisory Committee.

She has been a Joyce Residency artist panelist, a Harlem Stage choreographic mentor, and guest curator of a performance

for Nimbus Dance Works. She also was a founding dance member and an honoree of the Lincoln Center Institute, an arts fellow of the Leonard Bernstein Center for Education Through the Arts (a division of Nashville Institute for the Arts), Dance Curriculum Developer for National Institute of Education’s CEMREL Aesthetic Education Program, and a faculty member at Sarah Lawrence College.

Joanne worked in the arts in Portland, Oregon, where she met and married world-renowned jazz pianist Andrew Hill. She was the Education Director for Portland State University’s Contemporary Dance Season, where she held posts of Arts Commissioner for Oregon’s Regional Arts & Culture Commission, and a board member of the Portland Center for the Performing Arts and Portland Arts & Lectures.

Over the years, she danced with the Raymond Sawyer, Rod Rodgers, and Erin Martin dance companies; collaborated with jazz composer Julius Hemphill; and performed with Tina Croll and James Cunningham in From The Horse’s Mouth.

Joanne was known for her knowledge, wisdom, sophistication, and creativity. Her many devoted friends will also remember Joanne’s courage, determination, and resilience in the face of increasing physical hardships that plagued her later years. Her persistent smile through her difficulties has been a lesson for us all.

Patricia Johanson ’62 P ’07

Patricia Johanson ’62, an influential American artist and a trailblazer in ecological art, passed away on October 16, 2024. Known for her large-scale, functional projects, she skillfully addressed both infrastructure and environmental challenges while creating habitats that served to rectify humans’ effect on nature.

In an interview conducted by Roel Arkesteijn for the book The World as a Work of Art. Patricia Johanson: Selected Writings and Interviews 1960–2024, Johanson said, “I have never wanted to be an ‘art star’ or see my work in a commercial context…. My goal was always to select projects that could become models for a more inclusive world, including all lifeforms.” The 736-page book of nearly 200 work descriptions, statements, letters, and interviews includes a forward by Lucy R. Lippard. It was published in January.

Born in New York City, Johanson studied painting at Bennington College under Paul Feeley, Tony Smith, and art historian Eugene Goossen, who became her mentor and, later, her husband. “In 1959, she took over Feeley’s office to create ‘Color Room,’ an installation of green and black sculptural shapes, colored lights, and orange paper covering the walls,” wrote Anne Thompson, director and curator of Bennington College’s Usdan Gallery, in 2020. “Viewers became part of the work, as if entering a painting, creating different compositions

as they moved through space.” Johanson earned her master’s degree in art history from Hunter College in 1964 and worked as a researcher for New York publisher Benjamin Blom, where she contributed to a compendium of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American artists.

In the 1960s, Johanson’s paintings and sculptures featured prominently in early minimal art exhibitions, including 8 Young Artists (1964), Distillation (1966), and Cool Art (1968). Her minimalist works, characterized by simple lines and explorations of color, laid the groundwork for her later, larger sculptures.

She began creating large-scale minimal sculptures in 1966, starting with William Rush, which consisted of 200 feet of painted steel tee-beams arranged in a clearing. Her 1968 piece, Stephen Long, expanded the scale further, with 2-footwide painted plywood segments spanning 1,600 feet along an abandoned railroad track in Buskirk, New York, where she eventually moved and lived until her death.

“Had I remained in New York City, I’m sure I’d be an entirely different artist today,” Johanson told Arkesteijn. “This remote property…removed me from the narrow dialogue of the New York art world and focused my attention on my work and not ‘success.’”

Her first large-scale environmental artwork restored Leonhardt Lagoon in Dallas, Texas (1981). Her sculptural forms mitigated wave action, incorporated indigenous plantings as wildlife habitats, and launched her reputation for creating beautiful places that also worked to solve pressing ecological issues, including flooding, erosion, and wildlife endangerment. Her

other significant projects in San Francisco, Brazil, South Korea, and Salt Lake City reconnected people with nature. She exhibited as recently as January 2024 in Groundswell: Women of Land Art at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas.

“More than any other ecological artist, Patricia Johanson developed a deeply coherent methodological program to confront pressing environmental problems with practical ‘sculptural solutions,’” said Arkesteijn. “Relatively unknown, as her work remains, she leaves her incredible legacy as a pioneer and one of the most prominent founders of Ecological Art.”

In 1969, Johanson received a commission from House & Garden magazine to design a garden. The project sparked a series of visionary drawings that emphasized both beauty and practicality. The entire collection was exhibited for the first time at Bennington College’s Usdan Gallery in 2020. She considered it the turning point of her career. A shift, she said, “from a focus on art and the making of objects to a focus on nature and the living world.”

In the early nineties and recent years, Johanson was profoundly affected by long-term illness. In an interview for The World as a Work of Art, Arkesteijn asked about Johanson’s perception of death. “I believe in eternal life as described in one of the House & Garden magazine drawings: ‘Garden of the Immortals—Rot.’ The individual may die, but transformational processes, such as decomposition, ensure continuance. Both destruction and creation are necessary components to life.”

Johanson is survived by her three sons. Her husband, Eugene Goossen, passed away in 1997.

Riva Magaril Poor ’56, P’79

Riva Magaril Poor ’56, P’79 was a management consultant and author of Four Days, Forty Hours: Reporting a Revolution in Work and Leisure, published through her former firm, Bursk and Poor Publishing, in 1970. She has given more than 500 speeches and has made more than 200 guest appearances on television and radio shows, including Today, CBS News, Merv Griffin, and Phil Donahue. Born in 1936, Riva was in the class of 1952 at St. Mary’s Hall in Burlington, New Jersey, (now known as Doane Academy) before coming to Bennington to study Social Science and Literature. She subsequently received her master’s degree in city and regional planning in 1968 and a master’s of science in management in 1971, both from MIT. She also studied landscape architecture for a year at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard and has a background in painting. A notable alum and Silo Society member, Poor was a 2016 Reunion Committee Member and a speaker on the reunion panel, “Unexpected Careers: The Paths to Entrepreneurial Life.” She also conducted a workshop at the 1991 reunion. She leaves a daughter, Lane Poor Parrott ’79; son, Edmund Ward Poor III; and her partner, Stan Ryckman. ●

Johanson with her son and Georgia O’Keeffe in Abiquiu, NM, 1976

Bennington Day | April 16

Mark your calendars for Bennington College’s first-ever annual day of giving!

Join us by celebrating Bennington, our shared connection, and all the ways this remarkable place has shaped your path. Your donation on Bennington Day preserves and advances this innovative and individualized education for future students.

Make Bennington Day a tradition to remember and be counted as an early donor today!

How you can help celebrate Bennington Day: Give: Be counted as an early donor now at bennington.edu/benningtonday

Challenge: Turn your donation into a match or challenge to motivate your Bennington housemates, friends, and family to give back to Bennington.

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Remember: Share your Bennington photos and special Bennington moments for a chance to win exclusive Bennington gear. Post your photos on social media and tag @BenningtonAlumni to be featured on this momentous day of support.

Connect: Gather your fellow alums and meet up virtually or in person to celebrate Bennington Day! Share photos on social media and tag @BenningtonAlumni

To learn more about Bennington Day and how you can help, contact annualgiving@bennington.edu.

In Memoriam

Joyce Orgel Basche ’55

Lorraine Lubart Becker ’53

Michael Burkard, former MFA in Writing faculty member

Marvin Deckoff P ’88, former trustee

Nina B. Gerosa ’78

Sarah Sedgwick Ginocchio ’55

Robert H. Gratz, former staff member

Sean Heaney MFA ’08

Joanne Robinson Hill ’68

Berte Hirschfield ’60

Joan Heilig Kahn ’56

Linda Lawton ’70

Suzanne Crowell Mendes ’53

Katharine Kingsford Newton ’72

Sharon Pinsker, former staff member

Ellen MacVeagh Rublee ’56

Joan Skinner-Knapp ’46

Christine A. St. John ’87

Druanne Blackmore Sweetser ’44

Roberta Jossy Tichenor ’66

Jane Albright Vipond ’56, P ’88

Joanne Von Blon P ’71

October 3–5, 2025

Join alumni from across the decades and around the world for a weekend of sharing stories, reconnecting with old friends, and making new ones.

See the inspiring student work in VAPA, hear the creak of the Barn floors, and sit at the End of the World. Campus awaits you!

Details will be posted on our website and appear in the monthly alumni e-newsletter.