Interview with Brittany Olinkiewicz

“I went to a lot of plays during my semester abroad in Madrid, and that’s where I first saw a play by José Luis Alonso de Santos. When I came back to Bennington, I chose a scene from three plays that exemplify the themes I’m interested in and directed them in the original Spanish. I want to know, if you’re performing in a language that isn’t your audience’s primary language, how does that affect the acting?”

Tanya Schmid ’11

While on study abroad in northern Chile, “we went to listen to a presentation by an NGO fighting against arsenic and lead contamination in their neighborhood. It was then and there that I realized I had found the project that had been awaiting me. Two weeks later I was in the neighborhoods and working with the NGO once again, this time with my camera, notebook, a bit of fear, and an open mind, beginning a project that would prove to be one of the most incredible, challenging, and rewarding experiences of my life.“

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Skip Navigation LinksLanguages

Go beyond the words.

Chinese. French. Italian. Japanese. Spanish.

When you walk into a language classroom at Bennington, you enter the world of words and ideas of the culture you are studying. By exploring this world, you learn to speak another language, as well as gain an understanding of another culture from its own perspective. That is, you learn to see and understand other ways of being and thinking that challenge how you currently experience the world. This process clarifies and transforms who you are in relationship to a world whose boundaries between countries and cultures are increasingly complex.

Learning languages at Bennington means integrating interests in other disciplines with your work in languages. Knowledge gained in coursework about the arts, sciences, social sciences, and literature enriches classroom discussions and shapes advanced work in the language.

Many students concentrating in a language also choose to study abroad, often researching a particular project or question.