Faculty

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Miriam Felton-Dansky

Miriam Felton-Dansky is Associate Professor of Theater & Performance and Director of Bard's Undergraduate Theater & Performance Program. Her research and teaching interests include experimental and avant-garde performance, the politics of attention and spectatorship, and theater in the digital age. Her book Viral Performance: Contagious Theaters From Modernism to the Digital Age was published by Northwestern University Press in 2018. Her articles and essays have appeared in publications such as Theatre Survey, Theatre Journal, Theater, PAJ, ASAP/J, and Artforum.com, and she was a theater critic for the Village Voice from 2009-2018. She is a regular cohost of the On Tap theater and performance studies podcast, and a contributing editor for Theater, where she guest co-edited the "Digital Dramaturgies" trilogy (2012-2018). BA: Barnard College; MFA/DFA: Yale School of Drama. At Bard since 2012.
Phone: (845)758-7960
Email: [email protected]

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Brooke Berman

Brooke Berman is an award-winning playwright, screenwriter, filmmaker and memoirist whose work has been produced and published across the US and abroad.  Originally trained as an actor and solo performer in the experimental theater, Brooke began performing her own work on the Lower East Side of Manhattan before receiving formal training in playwriting from the Juilliard School and Maria Irene Fornes. Her play Hunting and Gathering,which premiered at Primary Stages, directed by Leigh Silverman, was named one of the Ten Best of 2008 by New York Magazine.  She is currently developing her play 1300 LAFAYETTE EAST with Leigh Silverman and is in pre-production for her feature POLLY FREED, based on her play OUT OF THE WATER.
 
Brooke’s plays have been produced and developed across the US at theaters including: Primary Stages, The 2nd Stage, Steppenwolf, The Play Company, Soho Rep, Williamstown Theater Festival, Naked Angels, MCC, New Dramatists, New Georges, The Womens Project, The Humana Festival, and The Bay Area Playwrights Foundation. In the UK, her work has been developed at The Royal Court Theatre, The National Theatre Studio and Pentabus. Her plays are published by Broadway Play Publishing, Playscripts, Backstage Books and Smith & Kraus.
 
As a filmmaker, Brooke wrote and directed the short film, UGGS FOR GAZA. UGGS premiered at the Aspen International ShortsFest where it won an Audience Special Recognition award and later played festivals including Toronto and Santa Fe. ALL SAINTS DAY, a short film she wrote, directed by Will Frears, won Best Narrative Short at the Savannah Film Festival and played at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2008. She adapted her play SMASHING for Natalie Portman and has written features for The Mark Gordon Company, Vox Films, Red Crown, and Fugitive Films.
 
Brooke’s memoir, No Place Like Home, published by Random House, was called “Highbrow/Brilliant” by New York Magazine’s Approval Matrix.  The book made Elle.com’s “Top Ten Summer Reads,” LA Magazine’s summer reading roundup and the EW piece “If You Like GIRLS, You’ll Love …” 
 
Brooke is the recipient of a Berilla Kerr Award, a Helen Merrill Award, two Francesca Primus Awards, two LeCompte du Nuoy awards and a commissioning grant from the National Foundation for Jewish Culture.  She was a resident playwright at New Dramatists, where she served on the Board of Directors and the Executive Committee, earned a Calloway Award, and developed countless plays. She has received support for her work from the MacDowell Colony and the Corporation of Yaddo and commissions from Arielle Tepper Productions and CTC in Minneapolis. 
 
Brooke attended Barnard College and is a graduate of The Juilliard School. She is a member of the Dramatists Guild, PEN and an alumna of the MCC Playwrights Coalition and New Dramatists. As a teacher, she was a guest artist in the New York City public school system through MCC Theater, and has taught at ESPA, Eugene Lang College, UCSB, Fordham University and Barnard College as well as privately through the “24 With 5 Teaching Collective” which she co-created at New Dramatists.  She spent five years as the Director of the Playwrights Unit for MCC Theater’s Youth Company, a free after-school program for NYC youth.  She has mentored with the Young Storytellers Foundation in Los Angeles and Young Playwrights in New York. 

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Tania El Khoury

Director, OSUN Center for Human Rights & the Arts. Tania El Khoury is a distinguished artist in residence in Theater & Performance and the director of the OSUN Center for Human Rights & the Arts at Bard. She is a live artist whose work focuses on audience interactivity and is concerned with the political potential of such encounters. Tania’s work has been translated to multiple languages and shown in 32 countries across six continents. She is the recipient of the Soros Art fellowship and the Bessies Award for Outstanding Production 2019, the International Live Art Prize 2017, the Total Theatre Innovation Award, and the Arches Brick Award 2011. Tania is associated with Forest Fringe in the UK and is the co-founder of Dictaphone Group, a research and performance collective in Beirut creating site-specific performances that question our relationship to the city and its public space. Her PhD thesis in Theatre Studies from Royal Holloway, University of London, was funded by Arts and Humanities Research Council and was supervised by both the Geography and Drama departments. In 2019, she co-curated the 2019 edition of the Live Arts Bard Biennial at the Fisher Center; Where No Wall Remains: an international festival about borders included nine newly commissioned projects by artists from the Middle East and the Americas.
https://taniaelkhoury.com

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Jack Ferver

Jack Ferver is a New York based writer, choreographer, and director. Their genre defying performances, which have been called “so extreme that they sometimes look and feel like exorcisms” (the New Yorker), explore the tragicomedy of the human psyche. Ferver’s “darkly humorous” (the New York Times) works interrogate and indict an array of psychological and socio-political issues, particularly in the realms of gender, sexual orientation, and power struggles. Their visionary direction blurs boundaries between fantastic theatrics and stark naturalism, character and self, humor and horror.

Ferver’s works have been presented in New York City at the New Museum; New York Live Arts; The Kitchen; The French Institute Alliance Française, as part of Crossing the Line; Abrons Arts Center; Gibney Dance; Performance Space 122; the Museum of Arts and Design, as part of Performa 11; Danspace Project; and Dixon Place. Domestically and internationally, Ferver has been presented by the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College (NY); American Dance Institute (MD); Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (IL); Portland Institute of Contemporary Art (OR); the Institute of Contemporary Art at MECA (ME); the Institute of Contemporary Art (MA); Diverse Works in collaboration with the Contemporary Arts Museum of Houston (TX); and Théâtre de Vanves (France).

Ferver’s work has been critically acclaimed in the New York Times, La Monde, Artforum, the New Yorker, Time Out NY, Modern Painters, the Financial Times, the Village Voice, and ArtsJournal. Ferver has received residencies and fellowships from the Maggie Allesee National Center of Choreography at Florida State (2012); Baryshnikov Arts Center (2013); the Watermill Center (2014); the Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art (2014); and Live Arts Bard, the commissioning and residency program of The Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College (2014); and Abrons Art Center (2014-2015). They are a 2016 recipient of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant.

Ferver teaches at Bard College in Theater and Performance and for the graduate Vocal Art Program. They have also taught at NYU Tisch, SUNY Purchase, and have set choreography at The Juilliard School. As an actor they have appeared in numerous films and television series and plays. They are currently working on a solo work to be presented in collaboration with the visual artist Marc Swanson at Mass MoCA and a new play with the playwright Jeremy O Harris.

http://www.jackferver.org/

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Neil Gaiman

Neil Gaiman is listed in the Dictionary of Literary Biography as one of the top ten living post-modern writers and is a prolific creator of works of prose, poetry, film, journalism, comics, song lyrics, and drama. His work crosses genres and reaches audiences of all ages. His most recent adult novel, The Ocean at the End of the Laneis a #1 New York TimesBestseller; other adult works include Neverwhere, Stardust, Anansi Boys,and Good Omens(with Terry Pratchett); the award-winning Sandmanseries of graphic novels; and the short story collections Smoke and Mirrors and Fragile Things. His novels for younger readers include Coralineand The Graveyard Book, which was awarded the Newbery Medal, the highest honor given children’s literature, as well as the Locus Award for Best Young Adult Book and the Hugo Award for Best Novel. The awarding of the 2010 UK Carnegie Medal makes Gaiman the first author ever to win both the Newbery Medal and the Carnegie Medal with the same book. His most recent book, Fortunately, the Milk(“the funniest work of literature since Catcher in the Milk”) has been on bestseller lists since publication, and a recent reading and performance of the entire book sold out Central Hall in Westminster. His work has been adapted for film, television, and radio, including Stardust(2007), directed by Matthew Vaughan, and the animated feature film Coraline(2009), which secured a BAFTA nomination for Best Animated Film and was nominated for an Oscar in the same category. In March 2013, BBC Radio broadcast a new six-episode production of Neverwhere, with a star-studded cast that includes James McAvoy, David Harewood, Benedict Cumberbatch, and Romola Garai. Gaiman has written and directed for film and television, and his 2011 episode of Doctor Who, “The Doctor’s Wife,” caused The Times(London) to describe him as “a hero” and won the Hugo, Ray Bradbury, and SFX awards. Make Good Art, the text of a commencement speech Gaiman delivered at Philadelphia’s University of the Arts, was published in a volume designed by renowned artist Chip Kidd; his recent speech in support of libraries and reading will be published as a book in 2014. More than 1.8 million people follow him on Twitter. Born in Hampshire, he currently lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with his wife, the rock star Amanda Palmer, with whom he sometimes performs. 

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Gideon Lester

Gideon Lester is Artistic Director of the Fisher Center at Bard and Senior Curator at the Open Society University Network’s Center for the Arts and Human Rights. A festival director, creative producer, and dramaturg, he has collaborated with and commissioned a broad range of American and international artists across disciplines, including Romeo Castellucci, Justin Vivian Bond, Brice Marden, Sarah Michelson, Nature Theater of Oklahoma, Claudia Rankine, Kaija Saariaho, and Anna Deavere Smith.  Recent and current projects include Where No Wall Remains, an international festival on borders (co-curated with Tania El Khoury); Daniel Fish’s Oklahoma! (Tony award); Pam Tanowitz’s Four Quartets; Ronald K. Brown and Meshell Ndegeocello’s Grace and Mercy; Ashley Tata’s Mad Forest, and Peter Sellars’ upcoming “This body is so impermanent…” He founded and directs Live Arts Bard, the Fisher Center’s residency and commissioning program. He was previously co-curator of Crossing the Line Festival, and Acting Artistic Director at the American Repertory Theatre. He was director of Bard’s undergraduate Theater & Performance Program from 2012-2020, and has previously held faculty positions at Columbia and Harvard.  He holds a bachelor’s degree in English Language and Literature from Oxford University, and a diploma in dramaturgy from Harvard’s Institute for Advanced Theater Training, where he was a Fulbright and Frank Knox scholar.
Phone: (845)758-7949
Email: [email protected]
 

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Chiori Miyagawa

M.F.A., CUNY Brooklyn College. Playwright and dramaturg. Plays produced Off-Broadway and nationally. Seven plays published in various anthologies. Playwriting fellowships: New York Foundation for the Arts, Van Lier, McNight. Recipient: Radcliffe Institute Fellowship, Rockefeller Bellagio Residency,Critic Beinecke Playwright-in-Residence at Yale School of Drama, Rockefeller Multi-Arts Production Fund (twice), Asian Cultural Council Fellowship. Resident playwright, New Dramatists. Coartistic director, Crossing Jamaica Avenue, a New York–based theater company; board member, ART/N.Y. At Bard since 1999.
Phone: 845-758-7938
E-mail: [email protected]

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Jubilith Moore

Jubilith Moore is a performer, director, writer, teaching artist, and producer, who has extensive training in traditional Japanese and contemporary American theater. She studies shimai (dance) and utai (chant) with Kinue Oshima and Richard Emmert, and has also trained in komai (dance), kyogen (comic performance), and kotsuzumi (drum). Moore has served as master instructor in noh training at Hampden-Sydney College and as guest teaching artist and lecturer at Willamette University, San Francisco State University, Towson University, Vassar College, and the Center X Center Theatre Festival in Kigali, Rwanda. She has been artist in residence at San Francisco School of the Arts and International Schools Theatre Association, and is a founding member of Theatre Nohgaku, an international ensemble that has performed throughout the United States and Europe. Honors include, among others, the 2020 Della Davidson Prize, Dresher Ensemble Artist Residency, Theatre Bay Area CA$H | Creates Award, and a Japan Foundation Fellowship for travel to Japan to research noh and kyogen. BA, Bard College. Additional training in Japanese dance, chant, performance, and drum. At Bard since 2021.
 

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Daaimah Mubashshir

Daaimah Mubashshir is based in NYC. Her work has been commissioned by the Guthrie Theater and 3 Hole Press. Current Residencies and Awards include a 2020-2022 WP Theater Lab Fellowship, 2019-2022 Core Writer Fellowship (Playwrights Center, MN), a 2018 Audrey Residency (New Georges), a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, a Catwalk Institute Residency, a Foundation of Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant and a proud alumna of Fire This Time Festival. Published works include Molasses and A Blue Coat - Kenyon Review Online, The Zero Loop (No Tokens Journal), Come with Me - Solve for X in The Occasional 2, edited by Will Arbery (53rd State Press), and The Immeasurable Want of Light (3 Hole Press). Selected full length plays include The Immeasurable Want of Light (3 Hole Press), Room Enough (Fire This Time Festival, Pride Plays), The Chronicles of Cardigan and Khente and Emily Black is A Total Gift (New Georges). Daaimah is also the Artistic Director of {EDAP} which produces moving image, text and performance to give audiences kinetic experiences of black bodies freeing themselves from the bondage of our past.
 

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Lindsey Liberatore

B.F.A. Marymount Manhattan College, M.F.A. ART/MXAT at Harvard University. An NYC based actor, singer, teaching-artist and corporate coach, Lindsey’s performance credits include everything from off-Broadway, international and immersive theater to commercial voice-over. Professionally, she has had the pleasure of working with Sarah Benson, Neil Gaiman, The Lisps and Enthuse Theatre. Lindsey is currently pursuing certification in Knight-Thompson Speechwork® and developing a solo piece titled, CATLADY. Liberatore is a certified yoga instructor (500 RYT YogaWorks), and Roll Model ® Method body worker. A devoted student of Buddhism, she leads mindfulness meditation courses for companies all over the US and weaves awareness practices into all of her classes. 

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Bhavesh Patel

Bhavesh Patel is a graduate of NYU’s Grad Acting MFA Program under Zelda Fichandler. Bhavesh (pronounced BAH-vesh) has been a private acting coach for over 15 years, has assistant directed at The Juilliard School, has taught for the University of Albany, The New School, and most recently at Bard College. He has starred on Broadway in The Nap, Present Laughter opposite Kevin Kline and in the original cast of the Tony-winning War Horse at Lincoln Center. Off-Broadway credits include Indian Ink at Roundabout and A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Public's Shakespeare in the Park. He was featured opposite Matthew McConaughey in the film Gold and has recurred or guest starred on many major NY TV series including The Good Wife, Madam Secretary, New Amsterdam, The Mysteries of Laura, Bull, Law & Order: SVU, Blue Bloods, and White Collar.

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Jonathan Rosenberg

B.A., University of Pennsylvania; M.F.A., New York University. Work produced at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Dance Theater Workshop, Home for Contemporary Theater and Art, Theater for the New City, and Public Theater (workshop), all New York; Flynn Theater, Burlington; Berkshire Theatre Festival; A Contemporary Theater, Seattle; Institut International de la Marionnette, Charleville-Mézi ères, France; Bedlam Theatre, Edinburgh; Wits Theater, Johannesburg; and at Juilliard Drama Division, NYU Graduate Acting Program, Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University, SUNY Purchase Acting Conservatory, others. Associate artistic director, DearKnows Theater Company (1989–91). Recipient: National Endowment for the Arts Director Fellowship Award; Fox Foundation Fellowship Award. Has taught in Juilliard Drama Division, Conservatory of Theater Arts and Film at SUNY Purchase, Fordham University Theater Program, and at Colorado College and University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. At Bard since 2005.
Phone: 845-758-7918
E-mail: [email protected]

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Ashley Tata

Ashley Tata ​makes multi-media works of theater, contemporary opera, performance, cyberformance, live music and immersive experiences. These have been presented in venues and festivals throughout the US and internationally including Theatre for a New Audience, LA Opera, Austin Opera, The Miller Theater, National Sawdust, EMPAC, BPAC, The Crossing the Line Festival, the Holland Festival, The Prelude Festival, The National Centre for the Performing Arts in Beijing, and the Fisher Center at Bard. Tata's work has been called “fervently inventive,” by Ben Brantley in the ​New York Times​, “extraordinarily powerful” by the ​LA Times​ and a notable production of the decade by Alex Ross of the ​New Yorker​. Since the pandemic-induced theatrical shut down, Tata has continued to make, directing a live cyberformance of Caryl Churchill’s ​Mad Forest​ which transferred from Bard College’s Fisher Center, Off-Broadway to TFANA, a Zoom-accessed Virtual Nightclub and dance party called ​The Boot w​ith Beth Morrison Projects, a music video for rock band Sylvan Esso which aired on Colbert’s YouTube Covid channel, a physically-distanced adherent, landscape-integrating adaptation of John Luther Adams’s ​Ten Thousand Birds​ with ensemble Alarm Will Sound at PS21 in Chatham, NY and a multimedia live-streaming event from National Sawdust to mark the release of the quarantine-created album ​Con Alma​ with Paola Prestini and Magos Herrera and broadcast to Canal 22 in Mexico and WNET All-Arts. Tata also works in the realm of immersive entertainment, escape rooms and advertising and was the Creative Director of Immersive Escape Productions devising environmental, multi-platform, immersive escape rooms, created an experience for musician St. Vincent tailored for the drop of her album, ​Masseduction​ and led the team that was awarded a gold medal in Medical, Marketing & Media awards in 2018 for an immersive escape experience tailored for the release of a cholesterol-reducing drug for Amgen. Tata has earned an MFA in directing at Columbia University and has taught, guest taught or been a guest artist at Columbia University, Mannes School of Music, Harvard University, MIT, Marymount Manhattan College, Colgate College, Bard College and LIU Post. Member of the Lincoln Center Theater’s Directors’ Lab, the recipient of the Lotos Foundation's Emerging Artist Award in Arts and Sciences and a winner of the 2017 Robert L. B. Tobin Director/Designer grant. Tata is currently in residence at 153 Coffey a multi-disciplinary warehouse space in Red Hook, Brooklyn and one of the inaugural members of the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s residency cohort. www.tatatime.live ig/twitter: @tatatime_

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Jean Wagner

B.A. Wesleyan University, M.A. Smith College. Co-Founder and Artistic Director of Voice & Vision Theater, a New York City based Theater Company that develops and produces new plays and performance works by women.  Jean has developed and directed many new works for V&V including Chiori Miyagawa’s I Have Been to Hiroshima Mon Amour, which was produced in 2009 at The Ohio Theater, The Good Life, a one-woman show by Yeardley Smith at The Culture Project (NYC), Ana Traina’s In Audela (The Culture Project), Dulcitius by medieval playwright Hrotswitha of Gandersheim at the Metropolitan Museum of Art at the Cloisters,  Maricela de la Luz Lights the World by Jose Rivera at the Connelly Theater and  Wendy Kesselman’s The Black Monk.  Other directing credits include Colette Burson’s A Dry and Thirsty Land at HERE Arts Center, The Notebook by Wendy Kesselman at Boston’s Wheelock Theater, Hans in Luck by librettist Margie Duffield and composer Dan Ashkenaze at BRIC (Brooklyn) and new works at New York Stage & Film Company, Manhattan Class Company, Brooklyn Arts Exchange (BAX) and the Mabou Mines/Suite. She was Associate Director of the 1998 Broadway revival of The Diary of Anne Frank, and Twelve Dreams at Lincoln Center Theater, both directed by James Lapine, and is a member of New York Theatre Workshop’s “Usual Suspects,” The League of Professional Theater Women and the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society; and is an alum of Lincoln Center Theater’s Director’s Lab. In 2008 she received the Lucille Lortel Women’s Visionary Award from the League of Professional Theater Women. She has been on the faculty of the Bard College Theater and Performance Program since 2000.
Phone: (845)758-7937
Email: [email protected]