Beto O’Byrne Receives New York City Small Theatres Fund Award
Beto O’Byrne, visiting artist in residence in theater and performance at Bard College, along with the collective he cofounded, Radical Evolution Performance Collective, has received a New York City Small Theatres Fund Award. The award, in the amount of $15,500, is bestowed by ART/New York, an arts service organization dedicated to supporting New York City’s community of nonprofit theaters, and the Howard Gilman Foundation, which provides funding and support to New York City–based performing arts organizations that are reflective of its vibrant cultural community.
Beto O’Byrne Receives New York City Small Theatres Fund Award
Beto O’Byrne, visiting artist in residence in theater and performance at Bard College.
Beto O’Byrne, visiting artist in residence in theater and performance at Bard College, along with the collective he cofounded, Radical Evolution Performance Collective, has received a New York City Small Theatres Fund Award. The award, in the amount of $15,500, is bestowed by ART/New York, an arts service organization dedicated to supporting New York City’s community of nonprofit theaters, and the Howard Gilman Foundation, which provides funding and support to New York City–based performing arts organizations that are reflective of its vibrant cultural community. One of 17 recipients elected from 182 applications, O’Byrne and Radical Evolution will receive two years of flexible funds to support their theater operations. Since its founding in 2011, Radical Evolution has been committed to creating artistic events that seek to understand the complexities of mixed-identity existence in the 21st century. The collective collaborates with people from many different identities to break down barriers between cultures and creative practices, and aims to seed the field of experimental and collaboratively created theater with practitioners who celebrate the intersectionality of perspectives and aesthetics of New York City.
At the 68th annual Obie Awards, the American Theatre Wing presented Assistant Dean of Students Corey Sullivan ’03 and other members of his arts collective, Theater Mitu, the Ross Wetzsteon Award for sustained innovation in the field. Theater Mitu was originally formed through Sullivan’s collaborations with visiting artists on a production for Bard’s Theater and Performance Program as an undergraduate at Bard. Since then they have worked together to push the boundaries of theater through innovative productions, global research and education initiatives, programs supporting emerging artists, and the creation of their Brooklyn-based performance and technology center, MITU580.
Assistant Dean of Students Corey Sullivan ’03 Wins Obie Award
Assistant Dean of Students Corey Sullivan ’03.
At the 68th annual Obie Awards, the American Theatre Wing presented Assistant Dean of Students Corey Sullivan ’03 and other members of his arts collective, Theater Mitu, the Ross Wetzsteon Award for sustained innovation in the field. Theater Mitu was originally formed through Sullivan’s collaborations as an undergraduate at Bard.
In 2001, then an undergraduate, Sullivan began collaborating with visiting artists on a production for Bard’s Theater and Performance Program. Their work together continued beyond the show’s run, and soon after, Sullivan joined the group in forming an interdisciplinary arts collective called Theater Mitu. Since then they have worked together to push the boundaries of theater through innovative productions, global research and education initiatives, programs supporting emerging artists, and the creation of their Brooklyn-based performance and technology center, MITU580.
Theater Mitu will be in residence at the Boston Museum of Science and Arts Emerson in spring 2025 to present Utopian Hotline, a project developed in partnership with the SETI Institute and Arizona State University’s Interplanetary Initiative. Part telephone hotline, part vinyl record, and part live performance, Utopian Hotline uses real voicemails left on a public hotline to create a moment of community—inviting audience members to re-imagine our shared future. Inspired by the 1977 NASA Voyager mission, which launched a vinyl-style recording of sounds found on Earth into space, as well as the uncertainty surrounding the Covid-19 pandemic, this immersive performance begs the question: “If we were to send another message into the distant future, what message would we send?”
Last summer, Theater Mitu premiered (HOLY) BLOOD! at their Brooklyn space, MITU580. Part live-scored silent film, part irreverent midnight movie, the piece created an original live soundscape merged with manipulated fragments of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s cult-classic film Santa Sangre. Projected across a shattered landscape of screens and sculpture, accompanied by explosive blood choreography enclosed in glass booths, the work remapped a story of circuses, blood cults, madness, and forgiveness.
Six Bard College faculty members have been named as recipients of grants from the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) for 2025. NYSCA Support for Organizations grants were awarded to Erika Switzer, assistant professor of music and director of the Postgraduate Collaborative Piano Fellowship at Bard, Lucy Fitz Gibbon, visiting faculty in vocal arts at the Bard College Conservatory of Music, Sarah Hennies, visiting assistant professor of music, and Suzanne Kite, distinguished artist in residence, assistant professor of American and Indigenous Studies and director of the Wihanble S’a Center for Indigenous AI at Bard. Additionally, Bard College received a Support for Organizations Award for 2025 in the amount of $40,000. NYSCA Support for Artist grants were awarded to DN Bashir, assistant professor of theater and performance at Bard, and Ann Lauterbach, professor of languages and literature.The NYSCA grants are intended to increase access to arts funding and recognize the substantial economic and social impact of New York state’s arts and culture sector.
Bard College and Six Faculty Awarded New York State Council on the Arts Grants
Clockwise from top left: Erika Switzer, Suzanne Kite, Lucy Fitz Gibbon, DN Bashir, Sarah Hennies, and Ann Lauterbach.
Six Bard College faculty members have been named as recipients of grants from the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) for 2025. NYSCA Support for Organizations grants were awarded to Erika Switzer, assistant professor of music and director of the Postgraduate Collaborative Piano Fellowship at Bard, Lucy Fitz Gibbon, visiting faculty in vocal arts at the Bard College Conservatory of Music, Sarah Hennies, visiting assistant professor of music, and Suzanne Kite, distinguished artist in residence, assistant professor of American and Indigenous Studies and director of the Wihanble S’a Center for Indigenous AI at Bard. Additionally, Bard College received a Support for Organizations Award for 2025 in the amount of $40,000. NYSCA Support for Artist grants were awarded to DN Bashir, assistant professor of theater and performance at Bard, and Ann Lauterbach, professor of languages and literature.The NYSCA grants are intended to increase access to arts funding and recognize the substantial economic and social impact of New York state’s arts and culture sector.
Erika Switzer and Lucy Fitz Gibbon will receive a grant in support of operational expenses and projects at Sparks & Wiry Cries, an organization, cofounded by Switzer and where Fitz Gibbon serves as managing editor, that curates opportunities for art song creators, performers, and scholars with innovative initiatives. These projects will include the upcoming Brooklyn premieres of Meltdown, a dramatic work for mezzo and piano trio which engages the layered stories and science of climate change through the lens of a female glaciologist, and Skymother, which weaves together the family history of composer Timothy Long (Choctaw, Muscogee Creek) with the Haudenosaunee creation story, Sky Woman.
Sarah Hennies, along with her duo partner, Tristan Kasten-Krause, a bassist and composer, will receive the grant for their new work Saccades for double bass and percussion at the Wassaic Project, an artist-run nonprofit contemporary art gallery, artist residency, and art education center. The piece is to be performed in total darkness with a single candle flame.
Suzanne Kite will receive a grant for the proposed project, Owáǧo Uŋkíhaŋblapi (We Dream a Score), her first full orchestral work for her organizational partner, the American Composers Orchestra (ACO). The piece continues Kite’s exploration of individual, collective, and societal dreaming practices, using an Indigenous AI framework. NYSCA funding supports the development of an AI app in collaboration with the Brooklyn-based design firm School. Members of the ACO and the public will submit their dreams to the app, which transforms language into Lakȟóta Visual Language symbols.
DN Bashir’s Hollow House, sponsored by JACK Arts Incorporated, follows a group of New York residents meeting at a farm-to-table restaurant in an old house in the Hudson Valley. Inspired by Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, it explores unspoken power dynamics and “the systems that hold us captive.”
Ann Lauterbach will be awarded a grant in support of her project called “The Meanwhile: Linear Ruptures and Simultaneous Narratives,” which will have a performance and possible exhibition at the Flowchart Foundation.
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).
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.
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.
Fisher Center, LUMA Theater4:00 pm – 5:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 The Bard Theater & Performance Program presents Good Penny by DN Bashir, Assistant Professor of Theater & Performance at Bard College, and directed by Katherine Wilkinson.
Saturday, April 19, 2025
Fisher Center, LUMA Theater7:30 pm – 8:30 pm EDT/GMT-4 The Bard Theater & Performance Program presents Good Penny by DN Bashir, Assistant Professor of Theater & Performance at Bard College, and directed by Katherine Wilkinson.
Saturday, April 19, 2025
Fisher Center, LUMA Theater2:00 pm – 3:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 The Bard Theater & Performance Program presents Good Penny by DN Bashir, Assistant Professor of Theater & Performance at Bard College, and directed by Katherine Wilkinson.
Friday, April 18, 2025
Fisher Center, LUMA Theater7:30 pm – 8:30 pm EDT/GMT-4 The Bard Theater & Performance Program presents Good Penny by DN Bashir, Assistant Professor of Theater & Performance at Bard College, and directed by Katherine Wilkinson.
Wednesday, March 26, 2025
Fisher Center, Studio North6:00 pm – 7:30 pm EDT/GMT-4 How do artists, comedians, and performers respond to crises? What tools and opportunities do comedy and laughter offer political and social movements in their confrontations with fascism and supremacy? Comedian and performance artist Morgan Bassichis, a longtime member of Jewish Voice for Peace, shares their experience at the intersection of comedy and political organizing.
Morgan Bassichis is a comedic performer who has been described as “fiercely hilarious” by the New Yorker. They are touring their current show, Can I Be Frank?, about the queer performance artist Frank Maya. Recent shows include A Crowded Field, which explored the use and abuse of Jewish holidays. Morgan is co-editor with Jay Saper and Rachel Valinsky of Questions to Ask Before Your Bat Mitzvah, published by Wendy’s Subway.
Sunday, March 9, 2025
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.
Saturday, March 8, 2025
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 8, 2025
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 7, 2025
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.