Fisher Center Artist Justin Vivian Bond Named 2024 MacArthur Fellow
Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College artist and collaborator Justin Vivian Bond is named a recipient of a 2024 MacArthur Fellowship. One of this year’s 22 recipients of the prestigious “genius grant” awarded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Justin Vivian Bond, an artist and performer, has a long relationship with the Fisher Center and Bard College as a Fisher Center performer, Spiegeltent curator, and teacher in the undergraduate Theater and Performance Program.
Fisher Center Artist Justin Vivian Bond Named 2024 MacArthur Fellow
Justin Vivian Bond. Photo courtesy of John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation
Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College artist and collaborator Justin Vivian Bond is named a recipient of a 2024 MacArthur Fellowship. One of this year’s 22 recipients of the prestigious “genius grant” awarded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Justin Vivian Bond, an artist and performer, has a long relationship with the Fisher Center and Bard College. They curated and hosted the Spiegeltent season for five years (2014–2018), and continue to return as a performer each summer to sold-out audiences. They have taught in Bard’s undergraduate Theater and Performance Program, and have received developmental support from Fisher Center LAB on multiple projects. MacArthur Fellows receive $800,000 stipends that are bestowed with no conditions; recipients may use the money as they see fit.
In a statement about their work, the MacArthur Foundation says, “Justin Vivian Bond (Viv) is an artist and performer working in the cabaret tradition weaving history, cultural critique, and an ethic of care into performances and artworks animated by wit, whimsy, and calls to action. Bond uses cabaret to explore the political and cultural ethos of the moment and tie it back to history to address contemporary challenges, in particular those facing queer communities. Bond’s decades-long journey across the landscape of gender has both informed their artistic practices and played a significant role in ongoing conversations around gender identity and LGBTQ+ rights.”
Justin Vivian Bond studied theater at Adelphi University (1981–1985) and received an MA (2005) from Central Saint Martins College, London. They have taught performance at New York University and Bard College and held a long-term residency at Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater (New York). Bond has appeared on stage at such venues as Carnegie Hall, the Sydney Opera House, and the Vienna Staatsoper, among others. They are the author of a memoir, Tango: My Childhood, Backwards and in High Heels (2011), and their art has been exhibited at The New Museum, VITRINE (London), and Participant, Inc. (New York).
The Wilma Theater in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, which is led by three co-artistic directors including Bard Theater and Performance alumna Morgan Green ’12, will receive the 2024 Regional Theatre Tony Award. This honor recognizes a regional theater company that has displayed a continuous level of artistic achievement contributing to the growth of theater nationally and is accompanied by a grant of $25,000.
Led by Co-Artistic Director Bard Alumna Morgan Green ’12, Philadelphia’s Wilma Theater Wins 2024 Regional Theatre Tony Award
Wilma Theater’s Co-Artistic Director and Bard alumna Morgan Green ’12. Photo by Johanna Austin
The Wilma Theater in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, which is led by three co-artistic directors including Bard Theater and Performance alumna Morgan Green ’12, will receive the 2024 Regional Theatre Tony Award. This honor recognizes a regional theater company that has displayed a continuous level of artistic achievement contributing to the growth of theater nationally and is accompanied by a grant of $25,000. The Wilma Theater was named this year’s recipient based on the recommendation by the American Theatre Critics Association. Green’s recent directing credits include premieres of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Fat Ham by James Ijames (digital, The Wilma Theater) and School Pictures by Milo Cramer ’12 (The Wilma Theater, Playwrights Horizons), who also majored in theater at Bard. In 2019, Green directed the Theater and Performance Program’s production of Promenade at the Fisher Center. This summer, Green and Cramer will return to Bard to present their performance of School Pictures in the Spiegeltent for SummerScape on July 20.
A high school student is assigned a five-paragraph essay on the subject: “Is Shakespeare’s Othello racist?” Her tutor, Milo Cramer ’12, wants to guide her toward a nuanced argument, but their tutee just wants an A. This and other scenes from tutoring sessions serve as the subject of Cramer’s one-person show School Pictures. It was excerpted on an episode of This American Life, where host Ira Glass says of Cramer’s work: “There’s just something in the intentional roughness and sincerity of what they’re doing that kind of matches the rawness of these kids and their feelings—and of Milo’s reactions to them.”
School Pictures, A One-Person Show by Milo Cramer ’12, Featured on This American Life
School Pictures by Milo Cramer ’12, directed by Morgan Green ’12. Photo by Johanna Austin
A high school student is assigned a five-paragraph essay on the subject: “Is Shakespeare’s Othello racist?” Her tutor, Milo Cramer ’12, wants to guide her toward a nuanced argument, but their tutee just wants an A. This and other scenes from tutoring sessions serve as the subject of Cramer’s one-person show School Pictures, a hybrid musical monologue that recently had its New York premiere at Playwrights Horizons. School Pictures was excerpted on an episode of This American Life, where host Ira Glass says of Cramer’s work: “There’s just something in the intentional roughness and sincerity of what they’re doing that kind of matches the rawness of these kids and their feelings—and of Milo’s reactions to them.”
Bard Faculty Members and Alumni/ae Awarded 2023 MacDowell Fellowships
Clockwise from top left: 2023 MacDowell Fellowship recipients Bard Visiting Artist in Residence Carl Elsaesser; Chaya Czernowin MFA ’88 (photo by Irina Rozovsky); Bard Playwright in Residence Daaimah Mubashshir (photo by Maya Sharpe); Hannah Beerman ’15 (photo by Joanna Eldredge Morrissey).
Two Bard faculty members and two alumni/ae are recipients of MacDowell Fellowships. Carl Elsaesser, visiting artist in residence at Bard College in Film and Electronic Arts, has been awarded a MacDowell Fellowship to MacDowell's Residency Program in the Film/Video Artists category for fall/winter 2023. Elsaesser’s residency will support the completion of his project, Coastlines, a feature-length film that intertwines the ethnographic intricacies of Maine’s coastline with the intimate video diaries of a Portland family, inviting a reevaluation of evolving identities and artistic representation within the private and public spheres. Drawing from queer phenomenology and traditional historical narratives, the film challenges perceptions and redefines the boundaries of storytelling, revealing Maine’s dual role as a backdrop and active participant in shaping inhabitants’ sense of self.
Daaimah Mubashshir, playwright in residence at Bard, received a MacDowell Fellowship in MacDowell’s Artist Residency Program for fall 2023 in Peterborough, New Hampshire, in support of their work on a new play about their great grandmother, Begonia Williams Tate, who defied all odds in Mobile, Alabama, in the late 19th century. Chaya Czernowin, a composer and Bard MFA ’88 in Music, and Bard alumna Hannah Beerman ’15, are also 2023 MacDowell Fellowship recipients. The MacDowell Fellowships are distributed by seven discipline-specific admissions panels who make their selections based on applicants’ vision and talent as reflected by work samples and a project description. Once at MacDowell, selected Fellows are provided a private studio, three meals a day, and accommodations for a period of up to six weeks.
Bard Student Trudy Poux ’26 Stars in TV Pilot Do Nothings, a Musical Comedy about Their Nonbinary Coming-of-Age Experience
Trudy Poux ’26 at a screening of Do Nothings.
Trudy Poux ’26, a current theater and performance major at Bard, plays the lead character in the TV pilot Do Nothings, which tells the story of Tamarin, a teenage singer-songwriter plagued by paralyzing stage fright. Produced in the Hudson Valley by their director, educator, and filmmaker mother Amy Poux, the show was inspired by Trudy’s real-life experiences. Trudy, who cowrote the script with their mother, says that LGBTQ+ screen narratives tend to focus on tragedy or the build up to coming out, “but thereʼs not a lot of media that shows what itʼs like to live day-to-day as a nonbinary person whoʼs already come out . . . The story is about everything else that happens in high school as well and itʼs really inspiring to see a story like that.”
The Hunt, A New Opera Directed by Ashley Tata, Is a New York Times Critic’s Pick
Ashley Tata.
The Hunt, a new Kate Soper opera directed by Assistant Professor of Theater and Performance Ashley Tata, was named a Critic’s Pick by the New York Times. This “darkly funny fairy tale,” writes Joshua Barone, “makes the medieval modern.” “Think Waiting for Godot, but with the female rebelliousness of a Sofia Coppola film,” he writes. Complementing the biting text set in “medieval and/or contemporary times,” Barone praises the production as much as the text: “Tata’s direction slowly dissolves pristine, satirized virginal presentation into something wilder, and free.” The opera premiered October 12, 2023, at the Miller Theatre in New York City.
The Fisher Center at Bard Presents the World Premiere of Elevator Repair Service’s Ulysses, Which Brings the Epic James Joyce Novel to Wild Theatrical Life, September 21–October 1
The Fisher Center at Bard continues its 20th Anniversary Season: Breaking Ground with the world premiere of Ulysses, from Elevator Repair Service, which the New York Times has called “one of New York City’s few truly essential theater companies,” September 21 – October 1 (opening Sunday, September 24).
James Joyce’s Ulysses has fascinated, perplexed, scandalized, and/or defeated readers for over a century. ERS takes on this Mount Everest of twentieth-century literature having staged modernist works including Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, and Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises—all with highly acclaimed results.
In the world premiere at the Fisher Center, seven ERS ensemble members—Dee Beasnael (7 Daughters of Eve), OBIE Award-winner Kate Benson (Fondly, Collette Richland), Maggie Hoffman (founding member, Radiohole), Vin Knight (Gatz, The Select (The Sun Also Rises), The Sound and the Fury, and more with ERS), OBIE Award-winner Scott Shepherd (Gatz, The Wooster Group), Christopher-Rashee Stevenson (Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge), and Stephanie Weeks (The Whitney Album)—sit down for a sober reading but soon find themselves guzzling pints, getting in brawls, and committing debaucheries as they careen on a fast-forward tour through Joyce’s funhouse of styles. With madcap antics and a densely layered sound design, ERS presents an eclectic sampling from Joyce’s life-affirming masterpiece.
Ulysses is directed by ERS Artistic Director John Collins, with co-direction and dramaturgy by Scott Shepherd and text by James Joyce. The production features set design by dots (The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, Public Obscenities), costume design by Enver Chakartash (A Doll's House, Is This A Room on Broadway) and Assistant Costume Designer Caleb Krieg, lighting design by Marika Kent (ERS’s Seagull) and Assistant Lighting Designer Matt Lazarus, sound design by OBIE Award-winner Ben Williams (The Whitney Album), sound engineering by Gavin Price, projections by Matthew Deinhart (El Amor Brujo, ANIMUS ANIMA//ANIMA ANIMUS) and Assistant Projections Designer Alessandra Cronin, and props by Patrícia Marjorie (Wolf Play, Flex) and Assistant Properties Designer Ned Gaynor. Maurina Lioce (Fondly, Collette Richland; Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge) is the Assistant Director and Stage Manager, and Jack Ganguly is the Assistant Stage Manager. Hanna Novak of ERS is the producer.
Ulysses is a Fisher Center LAB commission and is co-commissioned by Symphony Space, where the work was partly developed. Daphne Gaines, April Matthis, and Mark Barton contributed to the development of the work.
Performance Schedule and Ticketing
Performances of Ulysses take place in the LUMA Theater at the Fisher Center: Thursday, September 21, at 8pm Friday, September 22, at 8pm Saturday, September 23, at 8pm Sunday, September 24, at 3pm Thursday, September 28, at 8pm Friday, September 29, at 8pm Saturday, September 30, at 2pm Saturday, September 30, at 8pm Sunday, October 1, at 3pm
Critics are welcome as of Saturday, September 23, at 8 pm for an official opening on Sunday, September 24, at 3 pm.
Tickets start at $25 ($5 for Bard students through the Passloff Pass) and can be purchased here.
Credits The Fisher Center’s 20th Anniversary Season is dedicated to the founders of the Fisher Center who have cultivated extraordinary artistic experiences—past, present, and future. We honor the memory of Richard B. Fisher, a true champion of the arts and Bard College, and his visionary leadership. The Fisher Center is generously supported by Jeanne Donovan Fisher, the Martin and Toni Sosnoff Foundation, Felicitas S. Thorne, the Advisory Boards of the Fisher Center at Bard and Bard Music Festival, Fisher Center and Bard Music Festival members, the Ettinger Foundation, the Thendara Foundation, and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature. Fisher Center LAB has received funding from members of the Live Arts Bard Creative Council, the Lucille Lortel Foundation, and the Fisher Center’s Artistic Innovation Fund, with lead support from Rebecca Gold and S. Asher Gelman ’06 through the March Forth Foundation.
New York Times Profiles Bard’s Fisher Center: At 20, an Upstate Arts Haven Keeps Breaking New Ground
Photo by Peter Aaron ’68/ESTO
The Fisher Center at Bard has become an incubator for commercially promising new work like Justin Peck’s Illinois, while holding tight to its experimental roots. For the New York Times, Jennifer Schuessler visits Bard’s Fisher Center in its 20th anniversary season, on the heels of a sold-out, extended run of Illinois, to talk with Fisher Center Artistic Director Gideon Lester, Illinois director Justin Peck, choreographer Pam Tanowitz, President Leon Botstein, and others about the Fisher Center’s past and future. “Since opening 20 years ago,” she writes, “the center’s Frank Gehry building has emerged as a hothouse for the creation of uncompromising, cross-disciplinary, and sometimes hard to describe hits.”
Tania El Khoury Wins 2023 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts for Theater
Tania El Khoury. Photo by Nour Annan HRA ’23
Tania El Khoury, distinguished artist in residence in the Theater and Performance Program at Bard and director of the OSUN Center for Human Rights and the Arts, has won a 2023 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts for theater. The Herb Alpert Award in the Arts is an unrestricted prize of $75,000 given annually to risk-taking mid-career artists working in the fields of dance, film/video, music, theater, and the visual arts. The theater award panel honored El Khoury for “her serious and playful, and complex work, her breadth of imagination, and powerful sense of ethical responsibility. Studying the political potential of live art, treating audiences as fellow investigators and researchers, inventing new forms and new ways of engagement with each project, she is opening new paths of meaning and creation.” El Khoury says, “I create work that actively resists borders. The internal and external borders, the visible and invisible, borders within our bodies, colonial borders, cities as borders, the art industry as a border, and national borders as a way to make people disappear.”
The Herb Alpert Award honors and supports artists respected for their creativity, ingenuity, and bodies of work, at a moment in their lives when they are poised to propel their art in new and unpredictable directions. The Herb Alpert Award recognizes experimenters who are making something that matters within and beyond their field. El Koury is among 11 recipients of the prize, the most ever awarded in a year. Nominated by artists and arts professionals, finalists were invited to submit work samples, and two winners were selected in each field. This year, Gideon Lester, artistic director of the Fisher Center, professor of theater and performance, and senior curator at the Center for Human Rights and the Arts at Bard, was among the theater panelists.
Previous Bard recipients of the Herb Alpert Award include: Martine Syms MFA ’17, Visual Arts 2022 Adam Khalil ’11, Film/Video 2021 Sky Hopinka, Sherri Burt Hennessey Artist in Residence and assistant professor of film and electronic arts, Film/Video 2020 Pam Tanowitz, Bard’s first choreographer in residence at the Fisher Center, Dance 2019 Jacqueline Goss, professor of film and electronic arts, Film/Video 2007 Peggy Ahwesh, professor emeritus of film and electronic art, Film/Video 2000 George Lewis, music/sound faculty of the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard, Music 1999
Bard Hall7:00 pm – 9:00 pm EST/GMT-5 This is a workshop for everyone, but especially for embodied performers, to overcome stage fright and performance anxiety. All are welcome! Performers: Dress comfortably and be prepared to move. Refreshments will be served.
Led by Tatjana Myoko von Prittwitz (Buddhist Chaplain), Jubilith Moore (Artist in Residence, Theater & Performance), and Erica Kiesewetter (Professor of Orchestral Practice).
Sunday, October 27, 2024
Fisher Center, LUMA Theater4:00 pm – 5:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 The Dream Directed by Jorge Schultz Adapted by Dezi Tibbs and Jorge Schultz
Saturday, October 26, 2024
Fisher Center, LUMA Theater7:30 pm – 8:30 pm EDT/GMT-4 The Dream Directed by Jorge Schultz Adapted by Dezi Tibbs and Jorge Schultz
Saturday, October 26, 2024
Fisher Center, LUMA Theater2:00 pm – 3:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 The Dream Directed by Jorge Schultz Adapted by Dezi Tibbs and Jorge Schultz
Friday, October 25, 2024
Fisher Center, LUMA Theater7:30 pm – 8:30 pm EDT/GMT-4 The Dream Directed by Jorge Schultz Adapted by Dezi Tibbs and Jorge Schultz
Sunday, April 14, 2024
Fisher Center, LUMA Theater4:00 pm – 5:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 Set in a Gotham-like city in the not-so-distant future, Urinetown is a scathing satire with a tragic love story at its heart. In it, we see how a community is torn apart by an oppressive for-profit system, how figures of liberation rise up, and the impossible choices they are left with. Featuring music inspired by so many other musicals, this is a show that both celebrates and satirizes the tradition of musical theater.
Saturday, April 13, 2024
Fisher Center, LUMA Theater7:30 pm – 8:30 pm EDT/GMT-4 Set in a Gotham-like city in the not-so-distant future, Urinetown is a scathing satire with a tragic love story at its heart. In it, we see how a community is torn apart by an oppressive for-profit system, how figures of liberation rise up, and the impossible choices they are left with. Featuring music inspired by so many other musicals, this is a show that both celebrates and satirizes the tradition of musical theater.
Saturday, April 13, 2024
Fisher Center, LUMA Theater2:00 pm – 3:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 Set in a Gotham-like city in the not-so-distant future, Urinetown is a scathing satire with a tragic love story at its heart. In it, we see how a community is torn apart by an oppressive for-profit system, how figures of liberation rise up, and the impossible choices they are left with. Featuring music inspired by so many other musicals, this is a show that both celebrates and satirizes the tradition of musical theater.
Friday, April 12, 2024
Fisher Center, LUMA Theater7:30 pm – 8:30 pm EDT/GMT-4 Set in a Gotham-like city in the not-so-distant future, Urinetown is a scathing satire with a tragic love story at its heart. In it, we see how a community is torn apart by an oppressive for-profit system, how figures of liberation rise up, and the impossible choices they are left with. Featuring music inspired by so many other musicals, this is a show that both celebrates and satirizes the tradition of musical theater.
Sunday, March 3, 2024
Fisher Center, LUMA Theater4:00 pm – 5:00 pm EST/GMT-5 A weekend of performances created by the graduating seniors of Bard’s Theater & Performance Program.
Saturday, March 2, 2024
Fisher Center, LUMA Theater7:30 pm – 8:30 pm EST/GMT-5 A weekend of performances created by the graduating seniors of Bard’s Theater & Performance Program.
Saturday, March 2, 2024
Fisher Center, LUMA Theater2:00 pm – 3:00 pm EST/GMT-5 A weekend of performances created by the graduating seniors of Bard’s Theater & Performance Program.
Friday, March 1, 2024
Fisher Center, LUMA Theater7:30 pm – 8:30 pm EST/GMT-5 A weekend of performances created by the graduating seniors of Bard’s Theater & Performance Program.