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Two Bard College Professors Receive 2025 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant

L–R: Drew Thompson, associate professor at Bard College and Bard Graduate Center (photo by Alessandro Fresco); and Miriam Felton-Dansky, associate professor and director of Bard College’s undergraduate Theater and Performance Program (photo by Ashley Smith/Wide Eyed Studios)

Miriam Felton-Dansky, associate professor and director of Bard College’s undergraduate Theater and Performance Program, and Drew Thompson, associate professor of Africana and Historical Studies at Bard and associate professor at Bard Graduate Center, have received 2025 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grants. Felton-Dansky was awarded a grant in the category of Articles for “Vetting Regimes: The US Politics of Artist Visas from the Berlin Wall to the Muslim Ban,” and Thompson was awarded a grant in the category of Books for Coloring Surveillance through Polaroids: The Poetics of Black Solidarity and Sociality.

In its 2025 cycle the Arts Writers Grant has awarded a total of $1,040,000 to 31 writers. The program supports writing about contemporary art and aims to ensure that critical writing remains a valued mode of engaging with the visual arts. The grant has funded over 450 writers over 20 years, providing more than $13.5 million of support. “The Arts Writers Grant honors excellence in the field, and celebrates the generative role arts writing plays in creative and intellectual spheres,” said Joel Wachs, president of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

Felton-Dansky will receive a grant in support of her research into the history and evolution of US visa classifications for international performing artists. Her article will examine how the O and P visa systems, established in 1990, have shaped which performers can enter the US to present work on American stages and how these administrative processes have evolved over the past three decades. The research traces the origins of these visa categories and their role in international cultural exchange, drawing on archival materials, immigration policy analysis, and case studies from the performing arts sector.

“This project emerged from conversations with valued colleagues in the arts community at Bard, which I am proud to be a part of,” Felton-Dansky said. “I am honored by the meaningful recognition and support of this grant, which will allow me to pursue my research about the politics of international artist visas at a time when conversation about our immigration system has never been more urgent. My work on the article will feature prominently in my forthcoming book, The January Years: Infrastructures of New Performance in New York.”

Thompson will be awarded a grant in support of his book project, Coloring Surveillance through Polaroids: The Poetics of Black Solidarity and Sociality, which studies the practices of Black artists in order to understand the role of Polaroids in African and African-American histories. The book explores why Black artists use Polaroids and what their projects reveal about the relationships between Polaroids and Black life, in the context of everyday histories of labor, activism, and artistic expression. Artists under study for the project include Dawoud Bey, Lorna Simpson, Zarina Bhimji, Kay Hassan, Djabulani Dhlamini, Anthony Barboza, Zun Lee, and others.

“I am grateful for the support and community that the Arts Writers Grant provides,” Thompson said. “The prestigious honor is an opportunity to be more expansive and imaginative with my curatorial and writing practice. I developed many of the ideas behind this project through my undergraduate and graduate teaching, a testament to the creativity and spirit of collaboration that flourishes at Bard.”

Post Date: 12-11-2025

Jack Ferver’s My Town Reviewed in the New York Times

My Town, a semi-autobiographical show written by Bard Assistant Professor Jack Ferver, was reviewed in the New York Times. The play, which Ferver performed at NYU Skirball last week, is a one-person retelling of Our Town by Thornton Wilder following a schoolteacher and interrogating rural American life through dance-theater.

Bard Student Production of Brecht’s Puntila and Matti Reviewed in the Millbrook Independent

A mainstage production of Puntila and Matti, His Hired Man (1948) by Bertolt Brecht, conducted by the Theater and Performance Program at Bard, was reviewed in the Millbrook Independent. “This excellent and robust student production, set in Finland, evokes striking, trenchant parallels to our contemporary situation in the United States, where power has been translated from a dysfunctional democracy to totalitarian improvisation,” writes Kevin T. McEneaney.

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Jack Ferver’s Dance Performance My Town Included in a New York Times Roundup

Jack Ferver’s Dance Performance My Town Included in a New York Times Roundup

Jack Ferver.

The upcoming dance performance My Town by Assistant Professor of Theater and Performance Jack Ferver was included in a roundup by the New York Times. In “10 Things We’re Excited About This Fall,” the Times showcased theater and artistic performances happening throughout the country over the next few months. This included My Town, Ferver’s dance-theater piece which will be performed at the NYU Skirball Center on November 21–22.

My Town is a queer reimagining of Thorton Wilder’s play Our Town. The Times describes the performance as “Ferver’s surreal brand of dark humor” that presents “a raw and exacting piece of dance-theater that looks at small-town life, [exploring] a more haunting side of existence.” Ferver has taught at Bard since 2013 in the Theater and Performance Program and the graduate Vocal Arts Program.

Read the Preview

Event Information

Post Date: 09-10-2025

Article by Miriam Felton-Dansky Wins Award From the University of Toronto Press

Article by Miriam Felton-Dansky Wins Award From the University of Toronto Press

Miriam Felton-Dansky, director of the Theater and Performance Program.

An article coauthored by Miriam Felton-Dansky, director of the Theater and Performance Program at Bard College, has won the 2024 Modern Drama Outstanding Article Award from the University of Toronto Press. “Interface Theatre: Watching Ourselves Disappear,” which Felton-Dansky wrote together with Jacob Gallagher-Ross of the University of Toronto, is a timely analysis and assessment of theatrical responses to and engagement with digital culture. The essay explores the concept of what they have termed “interface theatre,” illuminating a genre in which live performance lays bare the invisible architectures of digital life. This new conceptual framework explains how theatre can not only depict but also embody the logics of algorithmic life, revealing how interfaces shape identity, surveillance, and the perception of self. The essay also received an honorable mention for the 2025 Outstanding Article Award from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, one of the largest scholarly organizations in the field.

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: 08-19-2025

Beto O’Byrne Receives New York City Small Theatres Fund Award

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.

Post Date: 07-15-2025

Assistant Dean of Students Corey Sullivan ’03 Wins Obie Award

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.

For more information on the company’s work, visit www.theatermitu.org

Read about the 68th annual Obie Award winners

Post Date: 02-04-2025

Bard College and Six Faculty Awarded New York State Council on the Arts Grants

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.

Read the NYSCA Announcement Here

Post Date: 12-10-2024

Fisher Center Artist Justin Vivian Bond Named 2024 MacArthur Fellow

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).

Learn more about Justin Vivian Bond from the MacArthur Foundation

Post Date: 10-02-2024