Our Programs
Programs in the Division of the Arts include:
- Architecture
- Art History and Visual Culture
- Dance
- Film and Electronic Arts
- Music
- Photography
- Studio Arts
- Theater and Performance
Coursework and Requirements
As a student progresses to the Upper College, the coursework increasingly consists of smaller studio discussion groups and seminars in which active participation is expected. Advisory conferences, tutorials, and independent work prepare the student for the Senior Project. This yearlong independent project may be a critical or theoretical monograph, a collection of essays, or, for a large proportion of students, an artistic work, such as an exhibition of original paintings, sculpture, or photography; performances in dance, theater, or music; dance choreography or musical composition; or the making of a short film with sound. In designing their Senior Project topics, students may have reason to join their arts studies together with a complementary field or discipline, including programs or concentrations in other divisions. Plans for such integrated or interdivisional projects are normally created on an individual basis with the adviser.
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Photo by Paula Court
Live Arts Bard
“When I was a student at Bard, I was drawn to the Fisher Center because of Live Arts Bard. LAB is pushing the frontiers of these art forms, all of which are becoming more open and fluid.” —Sam Miller ’15
Live Arts Bard (LAB) is the interdisciplinary residency and commissioning program of Bard’s Fisher Center. Since its launch in 2012, Fisher Center LAB has supported residencies, workshops, and performances for hundreds of artists, incubating new projects and engaging audiences, students, faculty, and staff in the process of creating contemporary performances.
Live Arts Bard (LAB) is the interdisciplinary residency and commissioning program of Bard’s Fisher Center. Since its launch in 2012, Fisher Center LAB has supported residencies, workshops, and performances for hundreds of artists, incubating new projects and engaging audiences, students, faculty, and staff in the process of creating contemporary performances.
Arts News and Events
Featured News
Bard Professor Tania El Khoury Awarded 2026 Creative Capital Award
The award will support her project A Choreography of State Violence.
Bard Professor Tania El Khoury Awarded 2026 Creative Capital Award
Tania El Khoury, distinguished artist in residence, associate professor in theater and performance, and director of the Center for Human Rights and the Arts at Bard.
El Khoury’s project, A Choreography of State Violence, is an installation performance that examines state violence from a choreographic perspective, exploring how what are perceived as incidental and individualized cases of violence perpetrated by the state are, in fact, conceptualized and rehearsed with calculated dramaturgy.
“Creative Capital remains unwavering in our mission to support individual artists creating new work as a powerful catalyst for freedom of thought and freedom of expression in our democracy,” said Christine Kuan, president and executive director of Creative Capital. The Creative Capital Award will in 2026 support the creation of 49 new works in visual arts, film, dance, theater, music/jazz, and literature, as well as technology, multidisciplinary, and socially engaged forms in all disciplines.
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 35 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.
Post Date: 01-16-2026
Recent News
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Bard Alumna Anne Bogart ’74 Inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame
Bard Alumna Anne Bogart ’74 Inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame
American theater and opera director and cofounder of SITI Company Anne Bogart ’74 was inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame on November 17. In order to receive the award, the only nationally recognized hall of fame honoring lifetime achievement in the American theater, the awardee must have given 25 years distinguished service to the American theater and at least five major production credits on Broadway. Bogart, who studied drama and dance at Bard and received an honorary doctorate of fine arts from the College in 2014, teaches at Columbia University, where she is a professor and head of the directing concentration.Anne Bogart ’74.
In December 2022, Bard’s Fisher Center presented the world premiere of SITI Company’s reimagining of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, codirected by Anne Bogart and Tony Award winner Darron L West. The work, commissioned by the Fisher Center, was the final production in SITI Company’s 30th anniversary “Finale Season.”
Bard’s Theater and Performance Program offers an interdisciplinary, liberal arts-based approach to the making and study of theater and performance, and embraces a wide range of performance practices, from live art and interactive installation to classical theater from around the globe.
Post Date: 12-16-2025
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Jack Ferver’s My Town Reviewed in the New York Times
Jack Ferver’s My Town Reviewed in the New York Times
My Town, a semi-autobiographical show written by Bard Assistant Professor of Theater and Performance Jack Ferver, was reviewed in the New York Times. The play, a one-person retelling of Our Town by Thornton Wilder, follows a schoolteacher and interrogates rural American life through dance-theater. Gia Kourlas writes that My Town, which Ferver performed at NYU Skirball last week, is “purposefully enigmatic” and “a feat of constant storytelling and choreography.”Assistant Professor Jack Ferver.
Ferver discusses their inspirations for My Town, including industrialization, Martha Graham’s choreography, and the Wizard of Oz. They say the questions that animate Our Town, and by extension My Town, are, ‘How are you living? And are you really paying attention? Are you present?’”
Bard’s Theater and Performance Program offers an interdisciplinary, liberal arts-based approach to the making and study of theater and performance, and embraces a wide range of performance practices, from live art and interactive installation to classical theater from around the globe.
Post Date: 11-25-2025
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Professor Anne Hunnell Chen Recognized by Wikimedia
Professor Anne Hunnell Chen Recognized by Wikimedia
Assistant Professor of Art History and Visual Culture Anne Hunnell Chen was recognized with the 2025 Award for “Outstanding Professional Advancing Open Access to Cultural Heritage” from the Wikimedia Foundation. This international award was given for Chen’s work on the International Digital Dura-Europos Archive (IDEA), which she founded. IDEA is an initiative using digital tools and a Linked Open Data set (LOD) to facilitate archaeological knowledge about the Dura-Europos site in Syria, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.Professor Anne Hunnell Chen.
The awarding committee said, “Anne Chen’s work is worthy of the highest recognition, by the advanced use of LOD methods, the sheer scope of collaboration between the digital humanities and across Wikimedia projects, and the focus on an immensely important and underrepresented cultural geography like Syria.” They also recognized the importance of her work at the present moment, “when the organizations that helped fund this work are currently being severely defunded.”
The Art History and Visual Culture Program at Bard introduces students to visual material across a broad range of periods and societies.
Post Date: 11-18-2025
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M. Gessen Writes About the Responsibilities of Citizenship for the New York Times
M. Gessen Writes About the Responsibilities of Citizenship for the New York Times
In an op-ed for the New York Times, Distinguished Visiting Writer M. Gessen wrote about how Americans can learn from citizens of other countries that grapple with human rights issues. Speaking to Jewish citizens of Israel, Gessen discusses what it means to benefit from government actions one disagrees with. Gessen spoke with Michael Sfard, a human rights lawyer who represents Palestinians in Israeli courts, and Ella Keidar Greenberg, who refused to enlist in the Israeli army. “Being an idle bystander is doing something,” Greenberg says of her decision. “I’m either maintaining the system or dismantling it.”M. Gessen. Photo by Lena Di
“To be a good citizen of a bad state, one has to do scary things,” Gessen concludes. “It may be using your body to shield someone more vulnerable, [or] withdrawing your economic cooperation, weighing… flying under the radar against taking a risk.”
Post Date: 11-05-2025
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Artist Jeffrey Gibson Profiled in the Financial Times
Artist Jeffrey Gibson Profiled in the Financial Times
Bard College Artist in Residence Jeffrey Gibson was featured in the Financial Times ahead of his recent exhibition coinciding with Art Basel Paris. Gibson reflects on the trajectory of his artistic career, following his ups and downs before becoming the first Indigenous artist to represent the US at the Venice Biennale in 2024. Gibson shares that he nearly abandoned art in his 40s before moving to the Hudson Valley, finding his current studio, and beginning to experiment with his current “psycho-prismatic” art.Artist in Residence Jeffrey Gibson. Photo by Brian Barlow
Gibson’s art includes sensory objects like flashes, jingle dress dance, and op-art patterns to produce a feeling of “luminous, multisensory release.” His upcoming show This Is Dedicated To The One I Love is focused on bright paintings inspired by prisms and nebulas. These pieces reflect his childhood, which he spent surrounded by many different cultures, and impart the sense that humanity is “encased by this planet… on the same, massive, phenomenal organism.”
Post Date: 11-05-2025
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Kelly Reichardt’s New Film The Mastermind Reviewed in the New York Times
Kelly Reichardt’s New Film The Mastermind Reviewed in the New York Times
The Mastermind, the latest film by S. William Senfeld Artist in Residence Kelly Reichardt, starring Gaby Hoffmann ’04, was reviewed as a New York Times Critic’s Pick. The film, set in the 1970s, follows an unemployed family man and amateur art thief J.B. Mooney, played by Josh O’Connor, as he sets out on his first heist. “Reichardt’s movies are intimate, discreet and don’t ostentatiously deviate from narrative film conventions,” writes Manohla Dargis. “She doesn’t broadcast her ideas visually or with speeches but instead lets them percolate, so they trickle into the stories.”Kelly Reichardt, S. William Senfeld Artist in Residence.
Reichardt has taught in Bard’s Film and Electronic Arts Program since 2006, which integrates a wide variety of creative practices with the study of history and criticism of the medium.
Post Date: 10-28-2025
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