Honors For Bennington College Faculty Members Span the Disciplines

April 12, 2006

The contributions and achievements of several Bennington College faculty members representing a diverse range of disciplines were recently recognized in a variety ways. In their respective roles on campus and in their fields, a historian, ceramicist, lighting designer, poet, photographer, and an ecologist all garnered important honors for their commitment and work.

Michael Giannitti, drama faculty member at Bennington College since 1992, was awarded a second Fulbright Senior Specialist grant. Having used his first award to teach in Romania in Fall of 2004, Giannitti will use this grant to teach lighting design at the New Zealand Drama School in Wellington, New Zealand, for six weeks this summer. Giannitti, who holds a MFA degree from the Yale School of Drama, designs lighting for theater and dance performances nationwide including venues on Broadway, the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis, and the Studio Theatre in Washington, DC, where he recently was named the resident lighting designer.

Yoko Inoue, a visiting art faculty member since 2004 from Brooklyn, New York, recently received a Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance Art Award for 2005-06. Inoue was also one of 20 artists chosen to receive a 2005 award from the prestigious Painters and Sculptors Grant Program of the Joan Mitchell Foundation. Both awards recognize Inoue’s innovative work in installation art and multi-disciplinary projects. Inoue, who has also recently received a Guggenheim Fellowship, earned her MFA at Hunter College, and has exhibited her work in numerous galleries and museums, including the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Art in General, and Momenta Art in New York City.

Photographer Jonathan Kline, a faculty member since 1998, has been awarded a Fine Arts Award from the American Scandinavian Foundation in New York. This recognition will allow him to continue his ongoing Ecliptics Project this summer in the Arctic Circle, a project that deals with extended exposures of the orbiting sun. Kline, who earned his MFA at the Rochester Institute of Technology, will spend two months on the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, which is within 850 miles of the North Pole. Kline’s work can be seen in the collections of the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, the Princeton Museum of Art, and the National Park Service, Ellis Island, among others.

Ed Ochester, a poet and member of the core faculty of Bennington's graduate program in writing and literature, has been honored with the 2006 George Garrett Award for Outstanding Community Service in Literature from the Association of Writers & Writing programs (AWP). The award is a tribute to Ochester’s “exceptional donations of care, time, labor, and money to support writers and their literary accomplishments.” The professor emeritus of English at the University of Pittsburgh serves as editor of the Pitt Poetry Series and is the founding editor and current co-editor of the critically acclaimed literary magazine, 5AM.

Eileen Scully was honored by the American Historical Association with the 2005 Eugene Asher Distinguished Teaching Award after being nominated by two Bennington students. Established in 1986, the national award recognizes outstanding teaching and advocacy for history teaching at two-year, four-year, and graduate colleges and universities. The award is named for a leading advocate of history teaching. Scully, who earned her PhD in American History from Georgetown University, has been a member of the history faculty since 2000 and also serves as the coordinator for the newly established Democracy Project.

Meanwhile, ecologist Kerry Woods, member of the science faculty for 20 years, has been invited to chair the 2007 Annual Meeting of the 9,000-member Ecological Society of America, a position typically held by individuals from large research universities. Woods, who earned his PhD in ecology and evolutionary biology from Cornell University, has studied a range of ecosystems and his current research¯which involves many Bennington students¯addresses the dynamics of old-growth forests in Michigan and landscape patterns and history in Vermont.