The San Diego Tribune Declares Faculty Member Susan Sgorbati's Emergent Improvisation Performance One of This Year's Best
Locals go global to reach out and present someone.  
December 24, 2006
The delicious surprise of the 2006 dance picks is their geographic range, which includes Mexico, Israel, India, and even Slovenia. National and international groups dominate the list. That's less a negative reflection on local artists than a sign of an increasingly robust group of presenters, from UCSD's ArtPower! to tiny, volunteer-run Raag and Taal, which presents masters from India. The Top 10 dance performances last year were: [Read more.]

Art in America Features Visual Arts Faculty Member Andrew Spence
The World in Brief: For 30 years, Andrew Spence has playfully wielded a minimalist vocabulary to convey the essence of ordinary objects. His recent, chromatically intense paintings tend to guard their sources.   September 2006
Andrew Spence is one of several under-heralded, mid- to late- career painters who presented excellent, sure-handed shows at New York galleries this spring. The control that Spence, for one, exercises in his cool abstractions based on common objects is a welcome relief from the overheated randomness of a good deal of contemporary painting. [Read more.]

The International Herald Tribune Features Faculty Member Marguerite Feitlowitz's Opinion Piece 
The Shadow World of a 'Dirty War.'   August 18, 2006
The gray-haired Caucasian woman. The five men in black whose black masks had openings only for their eyes. The older man, graying at the temples. The young woman with shoulder-length blond hair. Who are these individuals who, according to testimony reported in The New York Times on July 7, are players in the "shadow world" of rendition, in which secretly captured prisoners are secretly transferred to obscure compounds in obscure countries to be tortured by cooperating foreign nationals or U.S. operatives in the Bush administration's "war on terror"? [Read more.]

The New York Times Reviews "The Dispute," Directed by Drama Faculty Member Jean Randich
A Ruler Sows a Garden of Eden to Reap Some Cheating Hearts.   August 18, 2006
"The Dispute" is a little bit sci-fi, a little bit satiric romantic comedy. It tells the story of a ruler who decides to answer the question, "Who is more likely to be unfaithful, a man or a woman?" once and for all by having four children reared, individually, in isolation, with only a couple of scientists for company. [Read more.]

Music Faculty Members Bruce Williamson and Rachel Rosales Perform in the Critically Acclaimed New Opera, Grendel: A Review by The New York Times
Never Mind the Monster, Watch Out for That Set.   July 9, 2006
Stagehands power-drilled screws into sheets of plywood on the stage of the New York State Theater one morning late last month. Four layers—comprising 1,100 sheets—were laid down over the spongy floor that usually supports the delicate limbs of dancers. [Read more.]

Longtime Bennington College Writer-in-Residence Donald Hall Named U.S. Poet Laureate: A Report by The Washington Post
Set to Verse: Donald Hall Is New Poet Laureate.   June 14, 2006
Donald Hall is to be the nation's new poet laureate, Librarian of Congress James Billington will announce today. And like many of his recent predecessors, the 77-year-old Hall intends to make his position more than an honorary one. [Read more.]

Dance Magazine Profiles Faculty Member Susan Sgorbati's Work Uniting Dance and Science
By Chance or By Design?   June 2006
How is dance improvisation like neurons in the brain? No, that's not a riddle, but the kind of question that rises in the new field of inquiry called complex systems. Scientists in this area look for principles of self-organization that cut across such apparently different phenomena as improvisation, brain activity, stock market behavior, and bird migration. [Read more.]

The New York Times: Bennington, VT "... home to one of the Nation's Top Private Colleges."
Escape's 36 Hours Visits North Bennington, VT.   April 14, 2006
North Bennington, in the southwestern corner of the state, epitomizes preserved, picturesque Vermont. But behind the frozen-in-time beauty, the village subtly offers up big-city perks, accessible nature, and bottomless history. [Read more.]

USA Today Reviews SAT Optional Policies with Dean of Admissions Ken Himmelman
More Universities are Going SAT-Optional, Schools, students say testing can't always predict success.   April 5, 2006
The words "SAT-optional" on a Drew University postcard in Dan Kagan's mailbox prompted him to take a road trip to the Madison, NJ, campus in February. Not requiring the SAT is a new policy for Drew University, and the West Hartford, CT, junior found it attractive; he worries that his test-taking skills are not on par with his résumé. [Read more.]

Visiting Chair to the Democracy Project, Mac Maharaj Featured for his Role in Ending South Africa's Apartheid, The Bennington Banner
In the Cause of Freedom, From S. Africa to Vermont, Maharaj champions democracy.   April 5, 2006
Freedom fighter, prisoner, torture victim, professor, father, and government official; it seems enough for several lifetimes but Mac Maharaj has lived through it all. Maharaj, a visiting faculty member at Bennington College, played a critical role in bringing democracy to South Africa and served as transportation minister under the nation’s first president, Nelson Mandela. [Read more.]

The Nation Talks with Dean of Admissions Ken Himmelman about Bennington's SAT Optional Policy
The Testing Bubble Bursts.   March 29, 2006
Looks like the $2.3 billion standardized testing industry forgot to devise a much needed self-examination. Two weeks ago, after two students paid fees to have their SATs rescored by hand, it was discovered that 4,000 students had received scores that were incorrectly low. [Read more.]

The New York Times Profiles Music Faculty Member Allen Shawn
The Shawn Boys Move Beyond Puppet Shows. February 19, 2006
LONG before Wallace Shawn wrote the plays The Fever and The Designated Mourner or began work on My Dinner With Andre, or immortalized himself as the comically arrogant kidnapper Vizzini in the movie The Princess Bride, his chief dramatic experience was staging musical puppet shows in his parents' Upper East Side with his little brother, Allen. The plays had to do with political conventions, processes, ancient China, and once, a music teacher, and although they usually clocked in at under 60 minutes, a production of Paradise Lost lasted four hours. [Read more.]

The San Diego Union-Tribune Reviews Dance Faculty Member Susan Sgorbati's Emergent Improv
Improv marries dance and science show marks idea exchange between the two. February 7, 2006
Dancers moving with electrodes pasted to their skulls? That's the image that might come up, when you hear that neuroscientists are curious about dance improvisation. [Read more.]

Devoted Bennington College Alumna Makes $1 Million Commitment to Alma Mater, The Rutland Herald
Alumna donates $1 Million to Bennington. January 12, 2006
A one million dollar pledge of funds to help with campus renovations marks the latest in a series of substantial monetary gifts received by Bennington College. Barbara Ushkow Deane, who graduated from the College in 1951, made the donation along with her husband, Maurice Deane, to continue work on the school's Carriage Barn, a former horse stable that has been converted to a concert and performance space, the College announced last week. [Read more.]

The New York Times Reviews Literature Faculty Member Dan Hofstadter’s Novel Falling Palace: A Romance of Naples by Shirley Hazard
In the Shadow of Vesuvius. December 11, 2005
The late, and greatly missed, John D'Arms, historian of the ancient world, once remarked that those of us long intimate with Naples give close scrutiny to the writings of our fellow Parthenophiles. This is not, I think, from a proprietary impulse (for who can be possessive toward a city that takes irresistible possession?), but from our seeking, in other votaries, an affinity for that incomparable and indefensible metropolis—the last fragment, as one Italian writer has defined it, "of the ancient world still afloat on the surface of modern times." [Read more.]

The New York Times Features Dean of Academic Affairs and Dance Faculty Member Terry Creach’s All-Male Troupe
All-Male, All-Human Troupe Explores Physical Universe. November 19, 2005
Men in the dance world enjoy princely status. Good male dancers can pretty much choose whom they want to dance for, and Terry Creach's continuing ability to attract such talent to his all-male company is testament either to the satisfactions of his choreographic process, which is collaborative, or the quality of his work, or both. [Read more.]

Bennington College’s Democracy Project Draws International Leaders, a Report by Vermont Public Radio
Democracy Project draws scholars and government activists to Bennington College. October 22, 2005
This week, scholars and government activists from several young democracies gathered at Bennington College. With students in the College's "Democracy Project," they discussed the many threats to their fragile political systems. [Read more.]

English Lord Named as the Chairman of Bennington College's Democracy Project, CollegeNews.org
English Lord becomes chairman of College's Democracy Project.   October 11, 2005
A prominent British politician and businessman arrived at Bennington College last week to become the chairman for the advisory committee for the Democracy Project. Richard Holme, the Lord of Cheltenham and a leader of the Liberal Democratic Party of the United Kingdom, also visited several classrooms and spoke on Thursday at a discussion in the Usdan Gallery with College President Elizabeth Coleman and nearly 200 students. [Read more.]

National Public Radio’s Morning Edition features music faculty member, Milford Graves’ groundbreaking cardiovascular discoveries
Music of the Human Heart May Hold Clues to Healing.
February 28, 2005
In the 1960s and '70s, jazz drummer Milford Graves played with Albert Ayler, Paul Bley, and others in the New York avant-garde. These days he's still a musician, but he also spends a great deal of time exploring how music can help heal the human heart. [Read more.]

The Boston Globe Magazine examines the advantages of private education with Lucas Westcott ’00
Two Voices: Educated Decisions.   January 1, 2005
Private colleges and university can confer prestige, but are the eye-popping costs worth it when you can have a public education at half the price? Is a private education worth more than a public one? [Read more.]

Voice of America Features Sultana Noon, a Pakistani Student Studying Capital Punishment at Bennington College
Pakistani Student at Vermont College Studies Capital Punishment.   November 11, 2005
Going to a college where students can design their own education is what attracted Pakistani native Sultana Noon to Bennington College in Vermont. [Read more.]

The New York Times Education Life Highlights Bennington College Students for Savvy Winter Fashion
The Chill Effect.   January 16, 2005
Even while swaddled against the cold, college students express stand-out personal style—as photographed here by fellow students. [Read more.]

Back to Bennington in the News