News and Events

Bard College has received an $80,379 grant as part of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation’s (NYS DEC) Invasive Species Grant Program that provides funding for aquatic and terrestrial invasive species spread prevention, early detection and rapid response, lake management planning, research, and education and outreach. Bard’s grant will support the removal and prevent the spread of invasive species from the College’s Annandale campus in the field between the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts and Robbins House on North Campus. Invasive species including the tree of heaven (Ailanthus altissima), a rapidly growing deciduous tree native to China, and oriental bittersweet (Celastrus orbiculatus), an aggressive climbing perennial vine, are destroying the meadow by outcompeting and displacing native plant species. The NYS DEC grant will fund a project to remove the invasive woody plant material, which will be cut, chemically treated, and dug out. Then, the meadow will be replanted with a mix of native grasses and wildflowers. This meadow restoration project will begin in the summer of 2024 and is expected to take one to two years to fully complete.

“Bard is incredibly grateful to restore our beautiful meadow back to its prior glory. Its overall appearance and the quantity of ecosystem services it can offer will be immediately enhanced with this unique opportunity to reclaim a central landscape on the Bard campus,” said Bard’s Director of Horticulture and Arboretum Amy Parrella. “Meadows serve as important habitat and provide food for a number of pollinators and mammals; serve as natural reservoirs for water, capture and store carbon from the atmosphere, and help maintain biodiversity in our environment. Unfortunately, invasive plants tend to be aggressive and would eventually take over our meadow in a matter of a few years. This grant will allow Bard to proactively halt this invasion and reverse the damage that has already occurred.”

“We are committed to protecting New York’s waterways, forest lands, and agricultural crops from dangerous invasive species,” Governor Kathy Hochul said. “This funding supports projects across the state that will help prevent the spread of invasive species in New York, protecting our natural resources, economy and public health from the negative impacts of this threat.”

This grant is supported by the NYS Environmental Protection Fund (EPF), a critical resource for environmental programs such as land acquisition, farmland protection, invasive species prevention and eradication, recreation access, water quality improvement, and environmental justice projects. Governor Hochul’s proposed 2024-25 Executive Budget maintains the EPF funding at $400 million, the highest level of funding in the program’s history. 

The Center for Environmental Sciences and Humanities (CESH) at Bard College has received a $44,892 sub-award through the Research Foundation for SUNY Albany as part of a federal grant with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The grant will support a project with the overarching goal of improving air quality and public health across underserved neighborhoods in New York State by establishing a community driven network platform to enhance understanding of sustainable outdoor and indoor air quality. The Principal Investigator for this grant is Dr. Aynul Bari at SUNY Albany.

Through the Community Sciences Lab within CESH, Bard will provide technical and analytical support for the project over two years for study sites in the Hudson Valley, including sites in Kingston, Red Hook, Annandale-on-Hudson, Newburgh, and Poughkeepsie. Specifically, CESH will provide and install weather stations, with air quality and meteorology sensors, at Newburgh and Poughkeepsie sites; and support Dr. Bari’s group in monitoring indoor and outdoor air quality in 40 homes in the Hudson Valley over the next three years—testing for a broad range of air pollutants, including black carbon, volatile organic compounds, ultrafine particles, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, and ozone. Bard student involvement will include supporting monitoring efforts (indoor and out) and using the air quality data to assess air quality challenges in the Hudson Valley in classes.

“We are incredibly thankful to Dr. Aynul Bari and the Research Foundation for SUNY Albany for including us in this EPA grant,” said M. Elias Dueker, associate professor of Environmental and Urban Studies at Bard. “We look forward to using these funds to expand our indoor and outdoor air quality work with groups like the Kingston Air Quality Initiative and the Hudson Valley Air Quality Coalition. The right to breathe clean air inside and outside our homes is not something we can take for granted as we wrestle with important climate-based challenges, including increased wildfire smoke plumes from other parts of the country, flood-induced molding of our aging housing stock, and increased wood burning in our valley communities.”

The Community Sciences Lab (CSL) was created to support the work conducted by CESH. Built on the success of the Bard Water Lab and its partnership with the Saw Kill Watershed Community (SKWC), CSL expands CESH’s reach by allowing us to refocus our work on projects that address the interconnectedness of land, air, water, and communities. CSL projects include: Saw Kill Monitoring Program, Roe Jan Monitoring Program, Kingston Air Quality Initiative, Bard Campus Station, Hudsonia Eel Project, and Amphibian Migration.

Bard College is pleased to announce that it has received $69,886 from the Hudson River Foundation for Science and Environmental Research, Inc., a New York nonprofit corporation based in New York City. The funding will support a two-year project to update and improve water quality datasets that will be used to strengthen community advocacy and better address public health, policy, and management questions.

The principal investigators on the project, Elias Dueker, associate professor of environmental and urban studies, and Gabriel Perron, associate professor of biology, will work with students to analyze microbiological micropollution samples and then synthesize those results with historical water quality data obtained from Bard and community partnership programs that monitored the Saw Kill tributary from the mid ’70s to early ’80s, and from 2015 to present. Bard faculty members Krista Caballero, Jordan Ayala, Beate Liepert, and Josh Bardfield, who helped write the grant, will also participate in the project during its second year.

“This partnership with Hudson River Foundation allows the Bard Center for Environmental Science and Humanities to strengthen its commitment to using science as a tool for environmental and social change,” said Deuker. “We hope this unique effort to utilize and elevate community-fueled science will serve as a model for contemporary and meaningful approaches to creating climate resilient communities in the Hudson Valley.”

The research will be presented to community groups, and community member participation will be solicited. The results will be published in white papers and academic journal articles with the hopes that the information will be used to inform tributary stewardship and management decisions. Bard will partner with the Saw Kill Watershed Community and the Hudson River Water Association to disseminate the results.

The Hudson River Foundation (HRF) seeks to make science integral to decision-making about the Hudson River and its watershed and to support science-based stewardship of the river for all who live, work, and recreate there. As the primary resource and advocate for science and environmental research on the Hudson River and its watershed, the HRF connects the scientific community, policy makers, and the general public with a wealth of information and analysis. For the general public, HRF offers research results, reports, and opportunities for education regarding efforts to restore and sustain the Hudson’s waters. For the scientific community and policy makers, HRF is the gateway to scientific information, research opportunities, and dialogue about technical issues facing the river. For more information, visit hudsonriver.org.
 

In the program’s second year, two Bard alumnae, Maryam Monalisa Gharavi MFA ’18 and Alisha B. Wormsley MFA ’19, were awarded Anonymous Was A Woman Environmental Art Grants. The grants, given by the New York Foundation for the Arts, support environmental art projects led by women-identifying artists in the United States and US Territories that inspire thought, action, and ethical engagement. Maryam Monalisa Gharavi was awarded a grant for Oil Research Group (ORG), which “investigates two environments contiguously: oil, the world’s most important non-renewable resource, and data, the information environment that fertilizes the production of shared meaning.” Alisha B Wormsley was awarded a grant for Children of NAN: A Survival Guide, “a film for future Black femmes that spans Black womxn’s relationship to craft, land/space, and spirit.” Anonymous Was A Woman awarded $309,000 in total to 20 projects led by women-identifying artists this year.

The Center for Environmental Sciences and Humanities at Bard College is pleased to announce the findings of the Kingston Air Quality Initiative (KAQI) after three consecutive years of research and data collection.

KAQI began in January 2020 as a partnership between Bard’s Community Sciences Lab and the City of Kingston Conservation Advisory Council’s Air Quality Subcommittee. Since then, Kingston residents and Bard College students, staff, and faculty have facilitated both indoor and outdoor air quality monitoring projects throughout Ulster County. Standing as the first air quality study of its kind in Kingston, KAQI’s monitoring efforts focus on a regional assessment of air pollution as measured from the roof of the Andy Murphy Neighborhood Center on Broadway in Kingston.

KAQI’s main monitoring efforts focus on a regional assessment of air pollution from fine particulate matter (PM2.5), made up of microscopic particles that are the products of burning fuel, and is released into the air through exhausts from oil burners, gas burners, automobiles, cooking, grilling, and both indoor and outdoor wood burning. PM 2.5 particles are so tiny, they stay suspended in the air for long periods of time, allowing them to travel long distances before depositing. When these particles are inhaled, they can enter the bloodstream through the lungs, creating or exacerbating health issues. The World Health Organization (WHO) states that “small particulate pollution has health impacts even at very low concentrations – indeed no threshold has been identified below which no damage to health is observed.”

After 3 years of monitoring in Kingston, air quality trends associated with daily activities are observable. The findings show that air pollution in the city is variable and appears to have a seasonal context—higher levels of pollution are shown during colder months (associated with fuel burning), and lower levels are generally seen in spring and summer. The difference between levels seen during 2020—when COVID shut down many activities and resulted in a decrease in vehicles on the road—and pollution levels detected in years since is also significant.

Two important measures of PM2.5 air quality are the annual mean standard and the 24-hour average standard. Kingston’s PM2.5 air quality met the annual standards of both the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the WHO, although it came close to exceeding the latter. For the 24-hour standard, air quality met the EPA’s but exceeded the WHO’s.

As of January, 2023, a revision was proposed to change the EPA's primary public health-based annual standard from its current level of 12.0 micrograms per meter squared  to the range of 9.0-10.0 micrograms per meter squared. This revision would lean closer toward, but not come close to meeting, the WHO's PM 2.5 annual standard of 5 micrograms per meter squared.  Based on the EPA annual mean calculations, these values come close to exceeding the WHO annual standard.
 
One factor associated with instances of air quality breaching the WHO’s 24-hour threshold is the development of atmospheric inversions, which occur when the temperature of the atmosphere increases instead of decreases with altitude and surface level air parcels are unable to rise up, trapping any present air pollution at ground level. Being in the Hudson Valley, Kingston is more susceptible to inversion events as the air is blocked from all directions.  It's possible that, if Kingston residents were aware of when these events are occurring, we could start making different decisions about woodburning and car use during these times to make our air cleaner for all. Another potential factor may be pollutants from smoke carried from wildfires on the West Coast.

More detail about KAQI’s findings can be found at the Center for Environmental Sciences and Humanities website: https://cesh.bard.edu/kingston-air-quality-initiative-kaqi/

“While our annual averages meet EPA standards, as many residents of Kingston and the surrounding areas know, air quality at ground level can vary widely from neighborhood to neighborhood,” said Lorraine Farina, co-founder of KAQI  and the Hudson Valley Air Quality Coalition, and former Kingston CAC air quality sub-committee chair. “The average adult takes in 1000 breaths per hour, and exposures to dangerous fine particulate matter very much depend on whether wood is being burned nearby, as burning wood is dirtier and more polluting than burning oil, gas, or coal. There is no safe level of exposure to PM 2.5, so the expanding neighborhood-level monitoring efforts of the Bard Community Science Lab will help residents understand the actual air quality right where they are breathing, so we can all make choices that benefit both our health and that of the planet.”

“I want to thank Bard and the Community Sciences Lab for allowing Kingston to participate in this initiative,” said Steve Noble, the mayor of Kingston. “I am pleased to see that our air quality is superior to many of the places around us, but it’s a profound reminder that our daily activities do impact our health, and the health of our environment. We appreciate Bard’s investment in monitoring Kingston’s air, as it has been an invaluable learning tool. Together with Kingston’s Conservation Advisory Council, we will continue to monitor local air quality alerts, and will continue to work together with leaders in our region on policy and initiatives for cleaner air.” 

Dr. Eli Dueker, co-director of the Bard Center for Environmental Sciences and Humanities, added, “Clean air is something we often take for granted in the Hudson Valley. Our findings show that meeting annual EPA standards (particularly current standards) is one thing, but on a day-to-day basis, our air quality is sometimes degraded and can be unhealthy. After all, we are not breathing on an average yearly basis—we are breathing on a second-by-second basis. We can make decisions as a community to keep our own air clean – for example, we could reduce or even stop our wood-burning in city limits (particularly on days with atmospheric inversions), reduce our car use, and make our homes more energy efficient.”
The Center for Environmental Sciences and Humanities at Bard College, in collaboration with KAQI, has been working on a handful of air quality related projects centralized around community needs and concerns. These include:

• Developing a publicly-accessible atmospheric inversion monitoring system for the Kingston area.
• Neighborhood-level air quality monitoring, through the fast-developing Hudson Valley Library Air Quality Network. Using outdoor real-time air quality monitoring devices stationed at public libraries, air quality data is free and accessible online. We are always looking for new locations throughout the Hudson Valley to add to the network and provide more localized data for residents. If any libraries are interested, please reach out to [email protected].
• In partnership with SUNY-Albany, conducting indoor and outdoor air quality monitoring in homes with woodsmoke, mold and structurally-related air quality challenges.

For more information or ways to get involved, please visit https://kingston-ny.gov/airquality or https://cesh.bard.edu/kingston-air-quality-initiative-kaqi/.

“Stacy Burnett has a powerful idea to shake up the big-business of prison re-entry: hire formerly incarcerated people to mentor folks who are newly released,” writes Katie Boyle MS ’07, director of enrollment and marketing for Bard’s MBA in Sustainability, on the Lead the Change blog. Burnett, a current MBA student and alumna of the Bard Prison Initiative, pitched the idea at the Mid-Hudson Valley Regional Business Plan Competition alongside her business partner Charlene Reyes. The idea, which Burnett and Reyes developed when they were both students in the Bard Prison Initiative, won first place in the Learn, Work, and Play category. Also competing were three undergraduate Bard teams led by current students Sabina Chiva ’25, Nathan Cho ’24, Abby Frazier ’23, Khadija Ghanizada ’23, Alua Samat ’25, and Clayton Webb ’23.

Produced in Association with the OSUN Center for Human Rights and the Arts at Bard, the Biennial Continues May 4–7, 2023

Festival Features World Premiere Performances from Kenyon Adams in Collaboration with Omar Tate, Osayi Endolyn, and Ambrose Rhapsody Murray; Tara Rodríguez Besosa; Tania El Khoury; and Kite

Festival Is Part of the Fisher Center’s Milestone 20th Anniversary Season: Breaking Ground

The Fisher Center at Bard presents four world premiere performances for the second half of Common Ground: An International Festival on the Politics of Land and Food, curated by the artist Tania El Khoury, who serves as Director of the OSUN Center for Human Rights and the Arts at Bard (CHRA), and Fisher Center Artistic Director and Chief Executive Gideon Lester. Common Ground—the 2022-2023 iteration of the Fisher Center LAB Biennial, for which the Fisher Center commissions new work that grapples with some of the most pressing questions of our time—has gathered artists whose practices engage with food sovereignty, climate change, and land rights. The concluding offerings in Common Ground’s international program, which began last fall at harvest time, take place at the beginning of the growing season, May 4–7. Multiple artists here emphasize food’s fundamental relationship to communion, sharing food with audiences/participants as a core facet of their new works.

New works play out through various modes of inviting interaction, providing opportunities to collectively imagine together a more equitable, sustainable, and healthful future. Interdisciplinary artist Kenyon Adams, collaborating with chef and artist Omar Tate (Honeysuckle Provisions, Netflix’s High on the Hog), James Beard Foundation Award-winning food and culture writer Osayi Endolyn, and visual artist Ambrose Rhapsody Murray, creates a “blues Eucharist” with COMMUNION: a ritual of nourishment and commemoration (May 5–7). Architect, activist, and farmer Tara Rodríguez Besosa’s Somos OtraCosa (May 5–7) introduces audiences to the queer homestead OtraCosa—in the mountains of San Salvador, Puerto Rico—through an installation and decolonized living manuscript. With Memory of Birds, Tania El Khoury builds a sound installation in the trees around the Fisher Center, evoking the imprint of political violence on contested lands (May 4–7). In Aǧúyabskuyela (May 4–7), Oglála Lakȟóta performance artist and composer Kite (MFA ’18) explores the practice, amongst the Lakȟóta people, of sharing cakes with images of the deceased in frosting at funerary wakes—and considering various forms of loss with guest speakers. (See below for descriptions and schedule of each project.)

For complete Biennial information visit the Fisher Center website or call 845-758-7900.

Beyond the programming presented in person at the Fisher Center, the 2022–23 Biennial is truly global, as the subjects of foodways, seed preservation, and the right to access food and land are inherently interconnected. International editions of the program have been held in Colombia, Palestine, and South Africa—curated by Juliana Steiner, Emily Jacir, and Boyzie Cekwana, respectively. These three international programs are supported by the OSUN Center for Human Rights and the Arts at Bard (CHRA). Documentation from these programs will be on display at the Fisher Center during the festival, with an in-person curator’s panel (May 6). 

Videos of video works commissioned by CHRA on the politics of food from Ama Josephine Budge, Brian Lobel with Season Butler, Alexandre Paulikevitch, and Emilio Rojas with Pamela Sneed will be on display throughout the festival.

The fourth edition of the Biennial, Common Ground, kicked off in October 2022. Fall programming included the U.S. premiere of When [Salmon Salmon [Salmon]], a trilogy of performative installations from the acclaimed Cooking Sections (Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe), tracing the effects of salmon farms on multiple ecologies, and the world premiere of The Belly is a Garden, a performance and walk through the cultivated Bard Farm and the wild spaces that surround it with celebrated seed keeper, artist, and chef Vivien Sansour, created with live artist Adrienne Truscott as dramaturg.

Common Ground follows the 2019 LAB Biennial, Where No Wall Remains, the first that Tania El Khoury and Gideon Lester curated together, which focused on borders—political, personal, and geographic—as sites of significance and contention. That festival moved beyond the walls of the Fisher Center to include a land art project by Emilio Rojas, who used the traditional “three sisters” crops to grow a vast map of the U.S./Mexico border at the Bard Farm, and a site-specific dinner in a former church, created by Mirna Bamieh, who traced the history of ingredients and dishes forgotten or erased during the occupation of Palestine. Those two projects resonated in the sociological, political, geographic, and historical context of the Hudson Valley, an agricultural region undergoing swift gentrification while still containing areas of significant poverty and even food apartheid.

The Fisher Center LAB Biennial is a curatorial platform that reimagines the Fisher Center as a site for performance and installations. Art works are installed in backstage areas, rehearsal studios, even storage rooms, to create a playful dialog with Frank Gehry’s building, and inviting audiences and artists to engage with it in unconventional and surprising ways.  Previous editions of the biennial have included The House is Open (2015) which explored the dynamic relationship between the visual and performing arts worlds, and We’re Watching (2018) which focused on surveillance.

The 2022–23 biennial is also inspired by the various social and political initiatives happening in the Hudson Valley, some of them on BIPOC-run farms that are experimenting with sustainable and equitable farming practices, often rooted in indigenous practices of seed preservation and in collaboration with the original stewards of the land.

Gideon Lester, Artistic Director of the Fisher Center, said, “The subject matter of the 2022–23 Fisher Center LAB Biennial is both vast and timely, encompassing questions of ethics, politics, history, science, and aesthetics. We’ve commissioned some of the world’s most imaginative artists to address these urgent concerns. Taken together, the wide-ranging works they’re creating for Common Ground will provide audiences with a complex, multi-dimensional opportunity to explore foodways, land politics, and their central importance in sustainability, social justice, and climate action. The festival is a thrilling demonstration of what’s possible when the Fisher Center collaborates with the OSUN Center for Human Rights and the Arts and a reflection of Bard’s commitment to sustainability, advocacy, and support for marginalized communities in the region, and to the study and implementation of new directions in regenerative farming practices and food science.”

Tania El Khoury, Director of the OSUN Center for Human Rights and the Arts at Bard, said, “Common Ground is about connections: between different species; between our food and art practices and the land on which we are settlers; and in between artists and seed and food activists across the U.S., Colombia, Palestine, and South Africa.”

Spring 2023 Common Ground Schedule and Descriptions

Kenyon Adams
COMMUNION: a ritual of nourishment and commemoration
World Premiere

May 5 at 8 pm
May 6 at 8 pm
May 7 at 4 pm

Sosnoff Stage Right
Live Performance

In what ways does a meal distinctly allow commemoration, and also provide nourishment? And where are the joy-working and life-sustaining spaces of the future?

COMMUNION: a ritual of nourishment and commemoration is a participatory “blues Eucharist” – inspired by Kenyon Adams’ early experiences in the Black Protestant churches of his childhood in the Southeast region of the United States. In collaboration with chef Omar Tate (featured in the Netflix series High on the Hog), writer Osayi Endolyn (The Rise: Black Cooks and the Soul of American Food: A Cookbook), and visual artist Ambrose Rhapsody Murray, Kenyon is creating an offering to the audience, with poems, prayers, movement, music, and food. The ritual applies the distinct paradox that imbues a Eucharistic meal: the partaking of which is simultaneously a commemoration of death as well as a claim of unity with that which cannot die or be diminished. COMMUNION seeks to construct new spaces and traditions of testimony and witness.

This work is part of the artist’s own reckoning with death in the pandemic and the ways it has disproportionately affected BIPOC communities, as well as the ongoing violence against black bodies within American society. COMMUNION is the second installment of a ritual trilogy, WATCHNIGHT: WE ARE ALMOST TO OUR DESTINATION. The first part, Prayers of the People, was presented by the Fisher Center in 2018, in collaboration with the Hannah Arendt Center.

All tickets $25
$5 tickets available for Bard students through the Passloff Pass

Tara Rodríguez Besosa
Somos OtraCosa
World Premiere

May 5 from 5–7 pm
May 6 from 1–6 pm
May 7 from 1–3 pm

Sosnoff Backstage
Interactive Installation

Architect, activist, and farmer Tara Rodíguez Besosa is creating an installation and resource center to introduce the public to OtraCosa, an off-grid DIY queer homestead in the rural, mountainous community of San Salvador, Puerto Rico. For the past year Tara has been mapping and cataloging the species and food systems of OtraCosa, creating a decolonized, living manuscript of the different human and non-human exchanges that provide nourishment, healing, and life. Tara, inspired by the Drake Manuscript, is creating their own decolonized version of a living manuscript, handmade by them on the farm. Throughout the festival Tara will guide audiences through the installation and its manuscript, inviting us to explore the principles and practices of OtraCosa and those who steward its land.

Free and open to the public

Tania El Khoury
Memory of Birds
World Premiere

May 4 from 5–7 pm, on the half-hour
May 5 from 5–7 pm, on the half-hour
May 6 from 1–6 pm, on the half-hour
May 7 from 1–3 pm, on the half-hour

Fisher Center Lawn
Interactive Sound Installation

Memory of Birds is an interactive sound installation in trees, in collaboration with a trauma therapist and migrating birds. The work explores political violence that gets buried in the soil of contested lands. Through a  guided somatic experience, Memory of Birds transforms into a work that eats itself, designed to be forgotten.

Limited Capacity
All tickets $10
$5 tickets available for Bard students through the Passloff Pass

Kite (MFA ’18)
Aǧúyabskuyela

May 4 at 7:30 pm, with guest Corey Stover
May 5 at 6 pm, with guest Lou Cornum
May 6 at 6 pm, with guest Jolene K. Rickard
May 7 at 2 pm, with guest Alisha Wormsley

Veterans of Foreign Wars Red Hook Post 7765
30 Elizabeth St, Red Hook, NY
Transportation available from the Fisher Center, check website for schedule.
Live Performance

Sharing cakes at funeral wakes is a practice common amongst the Lakȟóta people; often these cakes have an image of the deceased imprinted in the frosting. Kite, an Oglála Lakȟóta performance artist and composer, explores this tradition in a performance in which she decorates funerary cakes made from local indigenous ingredients while speaking with friends, relatives, and elders about traditions, kin, land, and species they have lost. As we face death in the world, Kite hopes to turn towards protocols for mourning to process the death of beings, human and non-human. Cake and coffee will be served.

All tickets $10
$5 tickets available for Bard students through the Passloff Pass

More Common Ground
in Colombia, Palestine, and South Africa
LUMA Theater Lobby
 
Common Ground also includes three international programs, curated by Juliana Steiner (Colombia), Emily Jacir (Palestine), and Boyzie Cekwana (South Africa), supported by CHRA in collaboration with students and faculty at Universidad de los Andes in Bogotà, Al-Quds Bard College in East Jerusalem, and University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. Documentation from these programs will be on display at the Fisher Center during the festival.
 
Common Ground Curators Panel
May 6 at 1 pm
Resnick Studio
 
CHRA Video Commissions on Food Politics
Works from Ama Josephine Budge, Brian Lobel with Season Butler, Alexandre Paulikevitch, and Emilio Rojas with Pamela Sneed
LUMA Theater Lobby
 
CHRA has commissioned international artists to create digital commissions on the politics of food. First released online in 2022, these four videos will be on display during the festival.

Common Ground: An International Festival on the Politics of Land and Food is presented as part of the Fisher Center’s 20th Anniversary Season: Breaking Ground, which features genre-defying new visions for dance, theater, opera, and public discourse and culminates with the groundbreaking for a new performing arts studio building designed by Maya Lin (October 2). The Fisher Center’s new 25,000-square-foot building which will offer artists at all stages of their careers vastly expanded room to explore as they build works from the ground up.

Funding Credits

The Fisher Center LAB Biennial has received grants from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, the Educational Foundation of America, in support of COMMUNION, and the Julia Child Foundation for Gastronomy and the Culinary Arts.

Kite is a 2022 Rethinking Place: Bard-on-Mahicantuck Artist-in-Residence.

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, 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.

A special thank-you to all who have made this special season possible. Thank you for your contribution to our artistic home.

About Fisher Center LAB

Fisher Center LAB is the Fisher Center’s artist residency and commissioning program, providing custom-made and meaningful support for innovative artists across disciplines. Since its launch in 2012, Fisher Center LAB has supported residencies, workshops, and performances for hundreds of artists, incubating new projects and engaging audiences, students, faculty, and staff in the process of creating contemporary performances. LAB strives to provide artists with the environment, resources, and funding they need to experiment, dream, and fully realize their artistic potential. Where possible, Fisher Center LAB builds long-term relationships for artists, powering their work by taking on administrative and producing support of their practices and companies. Productions developed by Fisher Center LAB often premiere in the annual Bard SummerScape festival and frequently tour around the country and across the world.

A new project to further connect Bard’s Montgomery Place Campus to main campus, supported by a $40,000 grant from the Hudson River Greenway, won approval from the Red Hook Town Planning Board. Now, Bard may “move forward on the construction of a pedestrian and cyclist path” connecting the two, writes Victor Feldman for the Daily Catch. The path, which will be ADA compliant, is part of an overall effort to make Bard’s trails and paths more accessible. “This is a very ambitious effort,” said Amy Parrella, director of grounds and horticulture, when the project was first announced and detailed to the Red Hook Town Board in 2022. The project is on track to begin construction in the fall of 2023.

Through a global initiative led by Bard College, more than 250 colleges, universities, and high schools worldwide will engage students and teachers in 40 countries to move from “Climate Despair to Climate Repair.” Now in its fourth year, the Global Teach-in is meant to help participants move from despair to determination, working together to change the future. 

On Wednesday, March 29, Bard will host its own teach-in from 5–8 pm in the Bertelsmann Campus Center. A free, low-carbon dinner will be provided alongside “People and Planet Working on Climate Repair,” a panel discussion led by Professors Felicia Keesing and Eban Goodstein. The evening will culminate in discussion groups focused on climate solutions. In addition to the teach-in, 40 Bard courses will integrate climate discussion into their classes this week, and on March 30, a Climate Game Night will be held in Kline Commons.

The Worldwide Teach-in is a project of the Graduate Programs in Sustainability at Bard College in partnership with educators across the world. The project has received support from the Open Society University Network, Lever for Change, an affiliate of the MacArthur Foundation, and the United States Embassy in Kyrgyzstan.

Bard College is pleased to announce that it has received a $26,532 grant from the New World Foundation and the Partners for Climate Action Hudson Valley for the project “Bard Bee-Lives: Making Space for At-Risk Pollinators.” Managed by Laurie Husted, Chief Sustainability Officer at Bard, the project was the result of a student proposal by Quincy Ross and Masha Kazanstev and developed in the spring of 2022 in an Open Society University Network (OSUN) social entrepreneurship practicum: Leading Change in Organizations.

The project will transform a twelve-acre cornfield into a pollinator habitat on Bard’s Montgomery Place Campus, and will support pollinator health, cultivate biodiversity, support sourcing and propagating native seeds, build soil health, and manage invasive species. It is a critical early step in the “Pollinate Now” initiative, a bioregional strategy for habitat restoration in the Hudson River Estuary Watershed, developed by Partners for Climate Action Hudson Valley together with Landscape Interactions. 

The “Bard Bee-Lives” project is designed to attract and sustain a wide range of native bee, butterfly, and moth species that are currently at risk of local extinction in the Hudson Valley. Bard is committed to properly implementing the site-specific design and to continue the long-term habitat management required of this effort, with the hope that the varied habitat meadow will eventually be self-sustaining with limited intervention. The list of native plants and the site design developed during the project will be publicly shared, allowing for it to be replicated throughout the region at different scales.

“This new pollen, nectar, and habitat-rich plant community will support more than 100 species of pollinators and will strengthen the ecosystem services this plot of land had previously lost as a cornfield,” said Amy Parrella, Director of Horticulture and Arboretum at Bard. “This will also be a native planting and bee nesting demonstration site for residential homeowners, landscape professionals, and farmers.”

The New World Foundation is rooted in a long tradition of advancing ever-compelling challenges to economic equity, democratic rights, and civic participation in the United States. As a national community foundation, it aims to strengthen community-based organizations and local leadership, working from the bottom up to build coalitions around issues that converge in place, creating alliances locally and building movements nationally. Partners for Climate Action Hudson Valley is an organization which develops programs, gives grants, and offers strategic and operational consulting in order to combat barriers to local ecological action. 

For the third year in a row, the Bard MBA in Sustainability Program has been ranked as the Best Green MBA in the Princeton Review’s 2023 Business Schools rankings. Bard also moved up in the top 10 list for Best MBA for Nonprofits, to the no. 2 slot in the United States, surpassing the MBA programs at Harvard, Columbia, and Georgetown.

The honors were based primarily on a survey of more than 17,800 students enrolled at 224 MBA programs during the past several academic years. The student survey asked students more than 90 questions about their school's academics, student body, and campus life, as well as their career plans.

Alua Samat ’25, a Bard College student and activist for sex education, partnered with four other students from Bard and the American University of Central Asia (AUCA) to create Not a Shame, an online game which is being designed to be a resource for teenagers across the globe. In development as part of the online OSUN Network Collaborative Course Social Entrepreneurship, the game will differ from other existing sex education games in that it seeks to be more accessible to communities with specific cultural sensitivities and needs, and where global languages such as English or Russian are not widely spoken. Samat has collaborated with others for years to combat the stigmas that surround sexual education for teenagers. Reliable information on sex and family planning are sparse in Kazakhstan, where she is from, and young people can be left with no options but to learn from dubious online sources presenting inaccurate or harmful material, a contributing factor to the rate of teen pregnancy in Central Asia, which is over six times higher than in developed countries. Not a Shame intends to serve as an approachable and trustworthy information source which can be adapted to help teenagers in their local languages and with accompanying narratives that are relevant to their lives and cultures. 

In December 2022, it was announced that Samat’s team would be awarded a prize of $1,500 in the annual pitch competition sponsored by Bard’s MBA in Sustainability. Bermet Suiutbekova, the group’s instructor at AUCA, said that the game “will bring a positive change to Central Asian countries. With the help of $1,500 in prize money from the competition, the team is planning to release the beta version of the product in June of 2023 and go to market in July of 2024.”

As part of one of 26 women-led projects in 17 countries, Associate Professor of Biology Brooke Jude will participate in a project to regenerate natural fabric dyeing processes with traditional Moroccan weavers as part of a Daughters for Earth grant awarded to Around the World in 80 Fabrics. “These grants, totaling over $600,000, are a part of our mission to deliver critical resources into the hands of the women on the frontlines of climate action,” says Daughters for Earth of this year’s grant winners. Professor Jude will lead microbial dye foraging alongside our natural plant dye research as part of a team that “will bring together traditional weavers, researchers, designers, textile experts, scientists, anthropologists, and businesswomen to create sustainable dyeing processes that Ain Leuh Women's Cooperative can use.” The cooperative, which was founded by local women in the Atlas Mountain region of Morocco, has used traditional weaving techniques to support their families for decades. Today, because of the pressures of demand from global trade, synthetic dyes are used more frequently, produced with chemicals that impact weaver health and the environment. The collaboration between the Ain Leuh Cooperative, Artisan Project, Around the World in 80 Fabrics, the Microbe Institute, and Bard College will help to create “an open-source natural dye, plant, and microbial resource book with a map and dye recipes,” with the goal of improving the health of Ain Leuh weavers and the health of the local ecosystem.
 

The growing field of sports sustainability is only about 15 years old, writes Bret McCormick for Sports Business Journal, and professionals find their way into those jobs from dozens of entry points. Aly Criscuolo, who graduated from Bard’s MBA in Sustainability program in 2019, is currently sustainability and corporate social responsibility director for New York Road Runners (NYRR), a running nonprofit that organizes several activities and races, including the New York City marathon since 1970. Criscuolo’s capstone project for Bard focused on making triathlons more sustainable, and now she leads NYRR’s efforts to make their races, as well as its internal functioning, more environmentally sustainable. “If I had walked into my role at New York Road Runners without that MBA experience, I would not have known what to do on my first day,” she said. “The education, the hands-on experience, walking in on Day One, I knew exactly where to begin, what my first six months would look like. I had the confidence as well, which I would not have had without the MBA.” As sustainability becomes more of a priority in the business world, higher education will need to meet the demand for more graduates with training and expertise in the field. 

Associate Professor of Environmental and Urban Studies M. Elias Dueker, Associate Professor of Biology Gabriel G. Perron, and Bard biology graduates Daniella Azulai ’17 and Mary Reid ’21 have copublished a new study, “Bacteria communities and water quality parameters in riverine water and sediments near wastewater discharges,” in the peer-reviewed journal Scientific Data. ​​Over five months, they monitored microbial contaminants relating to the treated water outflow of the wastewater treatment plant operated by Bard, which releases into the Saw Kill, a tributary of the Hudson River and also the source of fresh water for the campus. This is the first of many datasets and research papers that they hope to publish on Bard’s water system. Preliminary data analyses provide insight into the impacts of watershed-wide usage of the Saw Kill as both drinking water source and treated sewage receiver. Future use of this dataset will include a focus on endotoxins and antibiotic resistant bacterial genes, water contaminants only now gaining broader attention in water quality and microbiological sciences.

All of the sampling was conducted as a joint Bard Summer Research Institute project between Dueker’s lab and Perron's lab in summer 2015. Lab members included: Marco Spodek ’17, Beckett Lansbury ’16, Yuejiao Wan ’17, Pola Kuhn ’17, Haley Goss-Holmes ’17. Coauthors Azulai and Reid worked on this project both as undergraduate and post-baccalaureate students.

“This project demonstrates the power of community asking scientific questions, and academia–students, faculty, and staff–being able to help answer those questions through careful observational and applied research,” said Dueker. “Our hope is that this database serves as a tool for researchers and communities around the world trying to respond to stewardship challenges in a science-based and community-accessible way.”

“Each year, thousands of pounds of solid waste is created at the end of colleges’ academic years. But, several area schools are taking steps to reduce that total,” writes Saba Ali for the Poughkeepsie Journal. Local area college students have worked to collect, sort, and donate items that can be used by others, and colleges like Bard are beginning to institutionalize such sustainability efforts for future generations. “Bard College tries to match up the items that may be needed in the community, such as donating binders, which are distributed to the Red Hook Central School District, or used towels to an animal shelter. The college also ends up with anywhere from 60 to 100 abandoned bicycles each year, which are donated to organizations in Red Hook and Kingston.” Many donations also go to Bard’s Free-Use Store and Bard Food Pantry.

As the world contends with a looming famine crisis, Gidon Eshel, research professor of Environmental and Urban Studies, rejects the narrative of inevitability, offering pragmatic solutions to save millions from going hungry. In the short term, the global livestock feed stockpile of “over 250 million tons of wheat, barley, oats, and other cereals” could be redirected to “lifesaving human food,” Eshel writes for Bloomberg. Long term, reductions in the consumption of beef could accomplish similar ends toward more efficient utilization of wheat and grains. Regardless, famine is not a foregone conclusion, Eshel argues, but rather one that the world, collectively, is choosing. “If, as predicted, millions will soon go hungry, it will not be a ‘Putin famine’ but a readily preventable famine of choice, arising because the people and leaders of wealthy nations have decided that preventing it is too inconvenient,” he concludes.

Bard Senior Vice President and CFO Taun Toay Discusses the College’s Sustainability Efforts in an Interview for DOE’s Better Climate Challenge “Decarbonization Download” Series

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) recognized Bard College for committing to reduce portfolio-wide greenhouse gas emissions by at least 50% within 10 years and to work with DOE to share successful solutions and decarbonization strategies. As a partner in DOE’s Better Climate Challenge, Bard College is one of only 50 organizations across the U.S. economy that are stepping up to the Challenge and driving real-world action toward a low-carbon future. As a place of higher education, Bard College’s campus and buildings are its biggest carbon footprint. Bard is the only small liberal arts college in the country that is converting its built environment to carbon neutral as a Better Climate Challenge partner. 

Bard College has set ambitious pollution reduction goals including to cut energy use in campus buildings through efficient lighting and HVAC retrofits, to eliminate fossil fuels by converting to geothermal, to generate 10% of electricity with on-campus solar (and micro hydropower), and to purchase off-site renewable electricity for the remaining 90%. This will be supported by Net Zero design goals for all new construction. As Bard College undertakes this challenge, DOE will support its efforts with technical assistance, peer-to-peer learning opportunities, and a platform for the organization to demonstrate its commitment to being part of the solution to climate change.

“Better Climate Challenge partners like Bard College are committing to decarbonize across their portfolio of buildings, plants, and fleets and share effective strategies to transition our economy to clean energy,” said U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm. “Their leadership and innovation are crucial in our collective fight against climate change while strengthening the U.S. economy.”

“Colleges and universities should take leadership roles on such pressing issues as global climate change,” said Bard College President Leon Botstein. “We’re gratified to be working with the Department of Energy as we move forward with our ambitious goals, and we encourage others in higher education to follow suit.”

“Bard is pleased to join a who’s who of 80 global companies committed to mitigating climate change. As an early adopter of geothermal and narrowing in on our carbon neutrality target, Bard is the only college to represent higher education along with four universities throughout the nation to be a first mover with the DOE,” said Taun Toay, senior vice president and chief financial officer of Bard College.

“Decarbonization Download: 5Qs with Bard College” is a video interview featuring Toay discussing Bard College’s sustainability goals, including the development of a Climate & Energy Master Plan that will provide a roadmap to transform campus infrastructure from being dependent on fossil fuels to being operated on 100% renewable energy. Watch the interview here.

In March, Bard College also launched the Worldwide Teach-In on Climate and Justice, a flagship event organized by the Graduate Programs in Sustainability (GPS) at Bard College, with support from the Open Society University Network. Bard’s Worldwide Teach-In on Climate and Justice brought together climate-concerned educators and students at universities and high schools from around the globe for bottom-up conversations about changing the future. Building on a foundation of more than 300 participating organizations this year from Liberia to Colombia, Taiwan to Vienna, and Florida to Alaska, the teach-in organizers hope to engage 1,000 colleges, universities, and other institutions next year, targeting at least 100,000 participants worldwide.

The DOE Better Climate Challenge is the government platform that provides transparency, accountability, technical assistance, and collaboration to identify decarbonization pathways and provide recognition for leadership across the US economy. The Better Climate Challenge builds on over a decade of DOE experience through the Better Buildings Initiative. Through Better Buildings, DOE partners with public and private sector organizations to make commercial, public, industrial, and residential buildings more efficient, thereby saving billions of dollars on energy bills, reducing emissions, and creating thousands of jobs. To date, more than 950 Better Buildings partners have shared their innovative approaches and strategies for adopting energy efficient technologies. Discover more than 3,000 of these solutions in the Better Buildings Solution Center.

The town of Red Hook has moved to stage two of the Audubon certification project, developing a vision plan with action items to support sustainability in areas including agriculture, economic development and tourism, public safety, and transportation. The sustainability designation project is being led by Chief Sustainability Officer at Bard and Chair of Red Hook’s Conservation Advisory Council Laurie Husted and Nick Ascienzo of the Ascienzo Family Foundation. “It’s such a difficult thing to define. We have a system to do it in higher education. It was exciting to think we could look at this as a municipality,” Husted said.
 
“What I think about as we celebrate our progress is that we inherited decisions that were made before we were born, and we are passing on a legacy to people who aren’t born yet,” said Erin Cannan, vice president for civic engagement at Bard. “What do we want this moment to mean for them?”