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Faculty at the Top of Their Fields
Members of the Bard faculty inspire our students in the classroom. They are thought leaders investigating the most critical questions in their fields. Bard faculty awards and honors have included: the French Legion of Honor, GRAMMY awards, Guggenheim Fellowships, Kennedy Center Honors, MacArthur Foundation Fellowships, the National Book Award, National Science Foundation Grants, the Nobel Prize, Pulitzer Prizes, Rhodes Scholarships, the Royal Society of Literature, and Tony awards.
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State-of-the-Art Science Facilities
Students taking courses in science, mathematics, and computing at Bard have use of exceptional facilities and the latest equipment. The Reem-Kayden Center for Science and Computation features seven smart classrooms and nearly 17,000 square feet of laboratory space with state-of-the-art biology and chemistry equipment. The computer science space includes cognitive systems, robotics, and hardware teaching labs.
At Bard, students get the best of both worlds: an excellent liberal arts education and one of the finest arts schools in the country. Arts students study and work with active, distinguished professionals in their fields. All of the arts programs unite a study of craft with history, theory, and criticism. From the Frank Gehry–designed Fisher Center for the Performing Arts to the László Z. Bitó '60 Conservatory Building, world-class facilities support top-level artistic training in the context of a liberal arts education.
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Bard College Awarded $750,000 from National Park Service for Restoration of Montgomery Place Mansion
The National Park Service has announced that Bard College has been chosen as a recipient of a $750,000 Save America’s Treasures grant through the Historic Preservation Fund. This prestigious award will help support the restoration of the Montgomery Place Mansion, a National Historic Landmark owned by Bard College. “As stewards of this historic property, we’re gratified that the National Park Service has recognized the importance of Montgomery Place and awarded us this generous grant to support its ongoing restoration and conservation,” said Bard College President Leon Botstein.
Bard College Awarded $750,000 from National Park Service for Restoration of Montgomery Place Mansion
Montgomery Place.
The National Park Service (NPS) has announced that Bard College has been chosen as a recipient of a $750,000 Save America’s Treasures grant through the Historic Preservation Fund (HPF). This prestigious award will help support the restoration of the Montgomery Place Mansion, a National Historic Landmark owned by Bard College. The grant funding will support structural repairs to the exterior of the building in order to restore its integrity and resiliency for future preservation.
“As stewards of this historic property, we’re gratified that the National Park Service has recognized the importance of Montgomery Place and awarded us this generous grant to support its ongoing restoration and conservation,” said Bard College President Leon Botstein.
The work at Montgomery Place Mansion will include a comprehensive assessment of the structural conditions and will help secure the long-term preservation of the building, its finishes, and its collections. Following completion of the structural assessment and a comprehensive onsite evaluation of the building envelope, restoration work will begin focusing on the mansion roof, drainage, north- and east-facing porches, as well as exterior paint.
Montgomery Place, a 380-acre estate adjacent to the main Bard College campus and overlooking the Hudson River, is a designated National Historic Landmark set amid rolling lawns, woodlands, and gardens, against the spectacular backdrop of the Catskill Mountains. The mansion is part of the Hudson River Historic District and plays a crucial role in defining the region’s unique cultural landscape, and the estate site functions as a microcosm of American landscape history, evolving through the centuries to its latest reincarnation as an integrated part of the Bard College campus. Bard is committed to conserving the Montgomery Place Mansion and its significant historic and cultural collection, along with the landscape, farm, and public access to this unique and extraordinary site.
Established in 1977, the Historic Preservation Fund has provided more than $2 billion in historic preservation grants to states, Tribes, local governments and non-profit organizations. Administered by the NPS, Congress appropriates from the HPF to support a variety of historic preservation projects to help preserve the nation’s cultural resources and history.
Post Date: 09-18-2023
Bard College Professor Kerri-Ann Norton ’04 Awarded $31,657 by the National Institutes of Health to Study Cancer
Kerri-Ann Norton ’04, assistant professor of computer science, has been awarded $31,657 as part of a larger study funded by the National Cancer Institute (NCI) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The study uses computer models to investigate the potential success of novel drug combinations for clinical cancer treatment.
Bard College Professor Kerri-Ann Norton ’04 Awarded $31,657 by the National Institutes of Health to Study Cancer
Kerri-Ann Norton, assistant professor of computer science.
Bard College is pleased to announce that Kerri-Ann Norton ’04, assistant professor of computer science, has been awarded $31,657 as part of a larger study funded by the National Cancer Institute (NCI) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The study uses computer models to investigate the potential success of novel drug combinations for clinical cancer treatment. Led by professor Trachette Jackson at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, the goal is to improve the effectiveness of immunotherapy drugs by using computer models to help characterize the dynamics between malignant tumors and the body’s immune responses and to improve clinicians’ ability to select the most promising combinations of drugs in clinical trials.
Professor Norton will address some of the challenges associated with analyzing and calibrating agent-based models (ABMs) in order to develop an approach that leverages ordinary differential equation (ODE) models to bridge the computational gap between ABMs and experimental data at the cellular level. Norton’s research expertise is in multiscale agent-based modeling of tumor microenvironments and she will lead the development, simulation, and analysis of the agent-based cancer model. She will also help design the tumor-immune interactions within the ABM.
The NIH is the largest public funder of biomedical research in the world. The NIH has 27 member institutes, including the NCI, which leads the national effort to eliminate the suffering and death due to cancer. The NCI conducts and supports research that will lead to a future in which we can prevent cancer before it starts, identify cancers that do develop at the earliest stage, eliminate cancers through innovative treatment interventions, and biologically control those cancers that we cannot eliminate so they become manageable, chronic diseases.
Bard College Awarded $124,936 by the Heising-Simons Foundation to Simulate and Detect Potential Biosignatures
Clara Sousa-Silva, assistant professor of physics at Bard College. Photo by Melanie Gonick
Bard College is pleased to announce that it has received $124,936 from the Heising-Simons Foundation for a five-year project to simulate and detect potential biosignatures from exoplanets. The project, led by Assistant Professor of Physics Clara Sousa-Silva, will look for potential markers of life beyond Earth by expanding our understanding of how molecules behave in different atmospheric environments. “Currently, the most pressing limitation in the characterization of planets, and, ultimately, the detection of life, is our lack of understanding of molecules and their environmental interactions,” professor Sousa-Silva explains. “My research proposal aims to address this problem through a combination of quantum chemistry, astrobiology, and planetary sciences.”
Professor Sousa-Silva’s previous work focused on simulating spectra (the band of colors produced by the separation of components of light by wavelength) for biosignature gases. Now, with the development of more advanced observational technologies, she is able to apply that work more directly by studying the atmospheric spectrum of exoplanets and identifying molecules connected to life. In 2019, professor Sousa-Silva was named a 51 Pegasi b fellow with the Foundation. The fellowship, which is named for the first exoplanet discovered orbiting a Sun-like star, provides three years of postdoctoral support to early-career scholars in planetary science and astronomy.
The Heising-Simons Foundation is a family foundation that funds work that advances sustainable solutions in climate and clean energy, enables groundbreaking research in science, enhances the education of our youngest learners, and supports human rights for all people.
Bard College Awarded Funding for a Visiting Assistant Professor Position in Korean Studies
Soonyoung Lee, visiting assistant professor in Korean Studies.
Bard College is pleased to announce that it has received funding from the Korea Foundation to support the hire of Soonyoung Lee as a visiting assistant professor in Korean Studies for the 2023–24 academic year. This hire is the first step toward building a Korean Program at Bard. The hire is part of a broader effort to expand the Asian Studies Program—including the Asian Diasporic Initiative, begun in 2021, and Bard’s first-ever Korea Week in April 2022.
“We are beyond delighted to receive the support of the Korea Foundation to begin offering Korean language and literature courses at Bard for the first time,” said Nathan Shockey, associate professor of Japanese, who worked together with Heeryoon Shin, assistant professor of art history and visual culture, to bring Korean courses to Bard. “This grant gives us the opportunity to meet the long-standing student interest in and demand for Korean Studies, and we are excited to continue growing Korean at Bard as part of our expansion of the Asian Studies program.”
Soonyoung Lee joins Bard from the University of California, Riverside, where she received her PhD in Comparative Literature and Foreign Languages in 2023. Professor Lee’s areas of research and teaching interests include contemporary Korean literature and film, Korean popular culture, East Asian film, Cold War studies, trans-Asian cultural studies, critical race theories, and postcolonial studies. She will teach courses on Korean literature, cultural history, and introductory courses to Korean language, including an online network course with Bard High School Early Colleges and the Open Society University Network (OSUN).
The Korea Foundation is a nonprofit public diplomacy organization established in 1991 to promote awareness and understanding of Korea, and to enhance goodwill and friendships throughout the international community. To date, the Korea Foundation has established 156 professorships in 99 universities across 18 countries.
Bard College Awarded $300,000 by the Booth Ferris Foundation to Support the Center for Ethics and Writing
Dinaw Mengestu, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of the Humanities, director of the Written Arts Program, and director of the Center for Ethics and Writing.
Bard College is pleased to announce that it has been awarded a two-year, $300,000 grant by the Booth Ferris Foundation to support the establishment of the Center for Ethics and Writing. The center, directed by Dinaw Mengestu, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of the Humanities and director of the Written Arts Program, reimagines the study of literature and writing as both an academic and social practice, one that asks students to translate the skills they develop in the classroom as critical readers and writers to some of the most pressing and divisive social issues of the moment. Center-supported courses and events prioritize the complexity of public discourse and the important role language plays in shaping it. The center aims to address the deterioration of civic dialogue, which has been under increasing threat in recent years from a growing intolerance of opposing viewpoints and widening gaps in experiences along racial, ethnic, and economic lines.
"The Booth Ferris Foundation’s incredibly generous support allows us to play a critical role in developing and modeling a creative and critical practice that engages with some of the most pressing issues of the moment,” said Mengestu. “With this grant, the center is able to extend Bard’s history of innovative teaching into classrooms across New York while also supporting artists whose freedom of expression is under threat."
The Center for Ethics and Writing engages in many activities, including developing an interdisciplinary approach to teaching ethics and writing that empowers students to develop narratives that reflect the experiences and concerns of their communities; partnering with local and national nonprofit organizations, including PEN America, to provide students opportunities to produce publishable narratives on social justice topics; promoting the values of free expression through a fellows program that brings in international, at-risk writers and artists; offering multi-day micro-workshops with artists and activists on topics related to current course offerings; providing training for community college faculty; and developing digital platforms including an online journal and podcast series.
In its first year, the center will provide an impressive array of programs. It has offered courses such as Writing While Black, Writing as Resistance, and Risk and the Art of Poetry and has hosted four micro-workshops by writer and activist Yasmin El-Rifae; Dana Bishop-Root, the director of education and public programs at the Carnegie Museum of Art; Fahima Ife, poet and associate professor of ethnic and critical race studies at UC Santa Cruz; and Emily Raboteau, writer, critic, and Professor at CUNY. In partnership with PEN America’s Artist at Risk Connection, an inaugural cohort of international fellows will begin this fall. Participating fellows’ freedom of expression is under threat due to their creative practices. Their work will be published alongside writing produced through center-supported courses in the center’s online journal, to be launched later this fall. The center is also partnering with Bard Microcolleges in Harlem and Brooklyn, and the Bard Prison Initiative, to develop courses that empower students to express their cultural and gendered experiences.
The Booth Ferris Foundation was established in 1957 under the wills of Willis H. Booth and his wife, Chancie Ferris Booth. The Foundation funds a variety of nonprofit organizations in the areas of arts and culture, K-12 and higher education, and parks and outdoor spaces.
Bard College Receives $2,000,000 from the Mellon Foundation to Support the Work of Artist Tania El Khoury
Tania El Khoury. Photo by Nour Annan HRA ’23
The Fisher Center at Bard (Gideon Lester, artistic director and chief executive; Aaron Mattocks, chief operating officer) today announces that, in partnership with the OSUN Center for Human Rights and the Arts at Bard (CHRA),it has received a $2,000,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation to support the work and livelihood of Tania El Khoury, a commissioned artist and guest cocurator at the Fisher Center, founding director of CHRA, and a distinguished artist in residence at Bard’s Theater & Performance Program. El Khoury’s live art engages the audience in close encounters with narratives drawn from the political realities of borders, displacement, and state violence. The grant will support her live art production and touring, her scholarly and artistic research, and her curatorial work at the Fisher Center and CHRA.
Over the next three years, the Fisher Center and El Khoury will re-imagine the collaboration between an institution and an artist and will develop ways in which an institution becomes a holistic home for an artist. El Khoury’s relationship with Bard began in 2017, when Gideon Lester, the Fisher Center’s Artistic Director and Chief Executive, invited her to co-curate Where No Wall Remains, the 2019 edition of the institution’s biennial festival, which focused that year on the subject of borders and comprised eight new interdisciplinary artworks commissioned by El Khoury and Lester. El Khoury created a new work of her own for the festival, Cultural Exchange Rate, a multi-sensory performance installation that invites the audience to follow her own family’s relationship to borders and migration across a century of time. Cultural Exchange Rate continues to tour internationally in various languages, as do several other works by El Khoury.
While developing Where No Wall Remains, El Khoury and Lester began to imagine a longer collaboration. Their work on the biennial led them, along with Tom Keenan, Director of the Human Rights Program at Bard, to envision a center that explores art practices that intersect with human rights advocacy through public programming and an international low-cost MA Program in Human Rights & the Arts. In 2021, the three of them, along with scholar Ziad Abu-Rish, founded the Center for Human Rights and the Arts (CHRA), which is funded by the Open Society University Network (OSUN). El Khoury directs CHRA while continuing to pursue her artistic practice and teaching.
Lester and El Khoury have continued their curatorial work together with a second joint edition of the biennial, Common Ground: an international festival on the politics of land and food, produced by the Fisher Center in two installments: October 2022 and May 2023. In this festival, El Khoury premiered her work Memory of Birds, an interactive sound installation in the trees around the Fisher Center that evoked the imprint of political violence on contested lands. Common Ground also included three international editions, curated by artists in Palestine, Colombia, and South Africa, all of which were funded by CHRA.
Tania El Khoury said, “This generous grant from Mellon Foundation comes at a time when the live performance industry is experiencing a fundamental restructuring due to the recent pandemic and major shifts in public and private funding streams. The grant will allow me to further pursue my artistic and curatorial practices, deepen my experimentation with new models of collaboration and institution-building, and reflect on my trajectory as an artist working at the intersection of politics and research.”
The $2,000,000 Mellon Foundation grant makes it possible for the Fisher Center and CHRA to offer El Khoury tangible resources to develop and disseminate ambitious, forward-thinking work, of her own and by other artists. This new model of artist-institution engagement follows the Fisher Center awarding Pam Tanowitz an ongoing residency in which the institution has taken over touring (of work including Four Quartets and Song of Songs, which the Fisher Center commissioned and premiered to immense acclaim) and other administrative support for her company, including a salary for Tanowitz. The Mellon grant helps the Fisher Center become an artistic home for El Khoury, providing resources in three key areas:
Practice
Infrastructure
Livelihood
Gideon Lester says, “We are delighted to be partnering with Mellon to develop a new, comprehensive model of support for Tania that will allow her not only to create and disseminate her work, but to live an artist’s life with dignity. Tania is a visionary artist, curator, and thought leader, and it’s an honor for us to be able to help steward her creative practice and research. Institutions of higher learning have an essential role to play in the country’s artistic infrastructure. Mellon’s visionary philanthropy will help deepen and extend the Fisher Center’s commitment to long-term, holistic support for artists’ practice, infrastructure, and livelihood.”
The $2,000,000 Mellon Foundation grant comes amid a banner 20th anniversary year for the Fisher Center. The institution is currently producing its 20th Anniversary Season: Breaking Ground, including the 2023 Bard SummerScape festival, which also celebrates its 20th anniversary this year. The season culminates in a groundbreaking ceremony, on October 21, for The Fisher Center’s new 25,000-square-foot performing arts studio building, designed by Maya Lin, which will offer artists at all stages of their careers vastly expanded room to explore as they build works from the ground up.
About Tania El Khoury Tania El Khoury creates interactive and immersive installations and performances that reflect on the production of collective memory and the cultivation of solidarity. Her work is activated by tactile, auditory and visual traces collected and curated by the artist and her collaborators, and they are ultimately transformed through audience interaction.
El Khoury’s work has been translated to multiple languages and shown in 33 countries across 6 continents in spaces ranging from museums to cable cars. She is the recipient of the Herb Alpert Award, the Soros Art Fellowship, the Bessies Outstanding Production Award, the International Live Art Prize, the Total Theatre Innovation Award, and the Arches Brick Award.
El Khoury is a Distinguished Artist in Residence at the Theater and Performance Program and Founding Director of the OSUN Center for Human Rights & the Arts at Bard College. She holds a PhD in Theater Studies from Royal Holloway, University of London. El Khoury is a co-founder of Dictaphone Group, a research and live art collective in Lebanon, and is associated with the Forest Fringe collective of artists in the UK. taniaelkhoury.com instagram.com/taniaelk
Bard College Receives $93,000 from the Garden Conservancy for Blithewood Garden Rehabilitation
Blithewood Garden. Photo by Justine Zaki
Bard College has been gifted $93,000 from the Garden Conservancy to go toward construction drawings that will aid the rehabilitation of Blithewood Garden. The construction documents, which will be created by award-winning preservation architecture firms Jan Hird Pokorny Associates (JHPA) and Integrated Conservation Resources, Inc. (ICR), will be used as the blueprints for the restoration of Blithewood’s landscape.
“We are delighted that the Garden Conservancy is partnering with Bard to preserve the rich history of Blithewood Garden for future generations,” said Debra Pemstein, vice president of development and alumni/ae affairs at Bard College. “This generous contribution will help with ongoing restoration efforts to renew Blithewood’s iconic landscape for the Bard community and beyond.”
Blithewood Garden is considered a nationally significant Beaux Arts, Italianate garden with significant connections to the evolution of American landscape design and is one of the few intact Hudson River estate gardens that remain from the Gilded Age. Situated on a steeply sloping bluff approximately 130 feet above the Hudson River, Blithewood is a 45-acre section of Bard’s campus that was once part of a historic estate comprising a manor house, outbuildings, drives, gardens, lawns, and meadows. Bard College has partnered with the Garden Conservancy, a not-for-profit organization whose mission is to preserve and share America’s gardens, on the restoration of Blithewood Garden.
George Soros and the Open Society Foundations have pledged $500 million for Bard’s unrestricted endowment.
This pledge ranks among the largest commitments to higher education in the United States in recent memory. The pledge has challenged Bard to raise an additional $500 million over five years for its endowment. In April 2021, the College publicly announced that the first half of that amount, $250 million, was raised from trustees, alumni/ae, and friends, all of whom have made their own pledges due to their belief in Bard’s distinctive mission.
