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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Aleah Black

Aleah Black is an interdisciplinary artist and educator. They create poetry and puppets, songs and stories, and a general ruckus. Aleah's most recent play, Thicket, premiered in New York City, April 2023. Thicket is a large-scale puppet play that includes tabletop puppetry, mask work, paper mache giants, and a full band. Aleah's past playwriting/directing efforts include multiple full length plays (including How to Eat the Thing That Eats You at Dixon Place) as well as multiple puppet pageant scripts that are now used by school communities around the country. Aleah organizes large scale community actions; they host open to the public song circles and chant spaces in New York City. They run the online account "Gendersauce" for an audience of over a quarter of a million followers; Gendersauce is a meme page that fuses poetry, education, and tomfoolery. Aleah's teaching practice includes workshops taught through their online page, as well as classes at the Brooklyn Waldorf School, where they are the Social & Emotional Learning teacher for students K-8. They have created liberatory curriculum for several Waldorf Schools in the USA and have a consulting practice for schools that are working to create arts, theater, music, or SEL curriculum. Aleah was a puppet apprentice to Amy Trompetter of Redwing Blackbird Theater and is an alum of the Bard College Theater & Performance program. They currently live and teach in Lenapehoking/Brooklyn, NY. They are delighted to return to their alma mater to work and play with Bardians.

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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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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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Amy Trompetter

Amy Trompetter creates giant puppet operas, outdoor pageants & hand puppet shows. A major retrospective of her puppetry, 'canta storias' & banner paintings plus  "skirt-as-stage Punch & Judy" activism was recently featured at Puppeteers of America/Coney Island USA.  In ‘23 she received a major grant to work in her community creating “Unveiling the Vortex”, a giant puppet spectacle honoring 3 women; Hannah  Arendt. Sojourner Truth & Sunksqua Mama Nuchwe. Amy is excited to bring this collaboration with internationally recognized puppeteers to the Kingston community & to Bard students this fall with a Sept. 30 culmination in Academy Green Park, Kingston.  Her previous Bard puppetry collaborations from '16 to the present include: "Puppetry as Activism" with jazz aficionado Arturo O'Farrrell performed at a Rikers Island holding facility, '16; & "Requiem for Anna Politkovskaya" in collaboration with Georgian born composer,  Alexander Bakshi, at Bard’s Fisher Center, Annandale, NY, ‘18 & Union Theological Seminary, NYC, ‘07. She directed & designed Rossini’s "The Barber of Seville", giant puppet opera, Festspielhaus St. Polten, Austria,’07, St. Ann’s Warehouse ’03, & Arts at St. Ann’s, Brooklyn, NY ’83-’84. Over the past 30 years she led workshops in street pageantry with giant puppets plus “Punch & Judy,' performing in 7 languages on 5 continents & most memorably in Taguatinga, Brazil ‘18 honoring slain national hero, Marielle Franco. She led communities in puppet & mask performance in Italy, France, Nicaragua, Mexico, Japan, Botswana, Bangladesh, China, Thailand & Myanmar. She was a touring member of Bread and Puppet Theater, ‘68-’86. She taught at Antioch, Bates, & Barnard/Columbia Theater Departments & Bard Prison Initiative. She brings giant puppetry to street actions, prisons & community centers in upstate NY.  Amy is founder of Redwing Blackbird Theater, a puppet workshop & performance space, 413 Main St. in Rosendale, NY 12472.  

redwingblackbirdtheater.com

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Gideon Lester

Gideon Lester is Artistic Director and Chief Executive of the Fisher Center at Bard and Senior Curator at the OSUN Center for the Arts and Human Rights. A Tony Award-winning 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 projects include Common Ground, an international festival on the politics of land and food (co-curated with Tania El Khoury); Daniel Fish’s Oklahoma! (Tony and Olivier awards); Pam Tanowitz’s Four Quartets; Ronald K. Brown and Meshell Ndegeocello’s Grace and Mercy; Ashley Tata’s Mad Forest, Peter Sellars' “This body is so impermanent…”, and Justin Peck’s staging of Sufjan Stevens’ Illinois. He was previously co-curator of Crossing the Line Festival, and Dramaturg 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 masters 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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Beto O'Byrne

Beto O’Byrne hails from East Texas and is the co-founder of Radical Evolution, a multi-ethnic, multi-disciplinary producing collective based in Brooklyn, NY.  The author of 20 plays, screenplays, and original tv pilots, his works have been produced and developed in San Antonio, Austin, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, Portland, and New York City. He was the 2017 playwright-in-residence at the Stella Adler School of Acting, and a 2050 Playwriting Fellow at New York Theatre Workshop, and his works have received residencies at the New Ohio Theatre, Pregones Theater, Sol Project, Tofte Lake Arts Center, Kitchen Dog Theater, and more. In addition to his work in the theatre, Beto is a musician and the creator of A Revolutionary Chorus, a punk choral project, and the creative visionary and lead writer of the World of Kir fantasy series. Beto teaches classes and workshops on creative writing, theatre, and activist/political performing arts theory and practices at universities, colleges, and community spaces across the country. MFA, Dramatic Writing: University of Southern California.  www.betoobyrne.com 

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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 Kelly Tata

“I make multi-media works of theater, contemporary opera, performance, cyberformance, live music and immersive experiences. This output comes from my belief that theater, live performance, and works made through the alchemical combination of rigor, craft and inspiration and that exist at the intersection of multiple media have the power to bypass an audience’s habituated ways of thinking, perceiving and feeling that they may see better the world around them. I am simultaneously an advocate of art for art’s sake and the necessity of art to keep (or make) a society healthy.”
Director Ashley Kelly Tata’s works have been called “fervently inventive,” by Ben Brantley in the New York Times, “extraordinarily powerful” by the LA Times, like something that “reaches out across the centuries and punches you in the throat” by Alexis Soloski in the New York Times and Tata’s production of Kate Soper’s Ipsa Dixit was named a notable production of the decade by Alex Ross in The New Yorker. These works have been presented in venues and festivals throughout the US and internationally including at the Fisher Center’s Summerscape Festival at Bard, Theatre for a New Audience, Ars Nova, PS21, LA Opera, Austin Opera, The Miller Theater, National Sawdust, EMPAC, BPAC, The Crossing the Line Festival, the Holland Festival, The Prelude Festival and The National Centre for the Performing Arts in Beijing. Tata’s MFA in directing was earned at Columbia University under the mentorship of Anne Bogart and Brian Kulick. In turn Tata has taught, guest taught or been a guest artist at Columbia University, Mannes School of Music and The College of the Performing Arts at The New School, Harvard University, MIT, Marymount Manhattan College, Colgate College, and LIU Post and is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Theater & Performance and the Artistic Producer of Theater & Performance at Bard College.
“In my work with younger artists I advocate and assist in enabling the sounding of brave truths and idiosyncratic, precious and unique voices to manifest however the impulse finds its way. In this pursuit I encourage young artists to explore a work from many different angles and to find what is interesting and will hold their fascination as a way in. In our collective work I encourage collaboration with colleagues who’s skills, perspectives and experiences complement and supplement one’s own.”
Tata is a recent recipient of a MAP Grant to help fund a project in development that intends to be a sonic installation with a virtual reality embed couched within a live music theater performance. More succinctly described as a “VR Opera about Trees” it is the first in what intends to be a developing practice of making performance works with Nature as collaborator. This work is being supported with residencies at the Brooklyn Academy of Music where Tata is a member of their inaugural residency cohort, a residency at Coffey Street Studios and from the Little Island Festival. 
Tata has been a 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 a Robert L. B. Tobin Director/Designer grant. 
Tata has also worked as an associate director with Robert Woodruff, Jay Scheib, Daniel Fish, David Levine, David Lang, Annie Dorsen and Richard Jones among others in such venues as St. Ann’s Warehouse (on the critically acclaimed production of Oklahoma!), Brooklyn Academy of Music, The Lincoln Center Theater Festival, The Park Avenue Armory, Spoleto Festival, USA, Fort Worth Opera and LAOpera at REDCAT. 
More at www.tatatime.live

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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.