Faculty

Ilegvak is a Yup’ik culture bearer, climate and Tribal sovereignty advocate, and a 2022 United States Artists Fellow from Alaska. His hand-sewn visual practice repurpose skin from self-harvested traditional foods.

Barbara Alfano brings a background in journalism, translation, and short-story writing in Italian to her study of 20th- and 21st-century Italian fiction.

Jen Allen is a pianist, composer and author. She frequently performs in New York, the Northeast US and in venues throughout the world, as the leader of her own groups or as a member of other creative music ensembles.

Joseph Alpar's research focuses on the anthropology of music in Turkey and the Middle East, and the relationships between music, spirituality, modernity, marginalization, social expression, and identity.

Benjamin Anastas's recent work as a literary journalist appears in the Oxford American, Travel + Leisure, Bookforum, and other magazines. 

David Anderegg has informed and comforted millions of parents with his books and writings on children and the mind, backed by extensive research and a longtime psychotherapy practice.

Meltem Ballan is a neurodiverse computer engineer and neuroscientist. She researches the effects of AI and studies Sustainable AI solutions on different disciplines, behavioral interventions and software tools as medical treatment, reducing the environmental effects of blockchain and fashion using AI. She is passionate about TRUE Diversity and Inclusion in the STEM domain, particularly AI and Data Science.

When natural disaster strikes, its effects are not experienced outside of history: Lopamudra Banerjee’s work brings together issues of the environment and development to explore how the poor experience such events in disproportionate ways.

Barry Bartlett creates ceramic sculptures that take on questions of conflict, evolution, warfare, suburban sprawl, kitsch, and commemoration.

Sara Bebus is a conservation and animal behavioral biologist with broad interest in both basic research and applied conservation and animal welfare.

Michael Bisio returned to New York in 2006 after spending 30 years on the West Coast and quickly became an integral part of the New York City creative music community. Since 2009, he has been bass instructor at Bennington College and a member of the Matthew Shipp Trio.

J Blackwell '95's recent works are called Neveruses (never•uses). Neveruses are lumpish, androgynous painting-objects comprised of scavenged plastic bags and colored fibers such as wool yarn and silk thread. These hybrid devices are neither useful nor redundant, although both are implied.

Terry Boddie’s work as a photographer and multidisciplinary artist explores the intersection of history, migration and memory and how these forces impact historical and contemporary photographic representation.

Thomas Bogdan’s vocal performance, in genres ranging from old music to new, avant-garde multimedia performance and cabaret, has received wonderful reviews from critics around the world.

David Bond teaches on the environment and public action. Trained as an anthropologist, Bond studies oil spills and their imprint on environmental science and governance. His work shows how toxic disruptions can fix vital relations with new forms of knowledge and care.

Shawtane Bowen is a writer, actor, and producer. He is a founding member of Astronomy Club, the first all-Black house team at the Upright Citizen's Brigade Theater in New York. Their series, Astronomy Club: The Sketch Show, debuted in Fall 2019 on Netflix to much critical acclaim. 

Colin Brant’s luxurious, color-drenched, paintings and drawings present an inquiry that is both reverent and skeptical, offering examinations of landscape as personal, politicized, and perpetually evolving historical space.

Digital-chamber-punk bands, nine-piece rockestras, 21st century medieval quartets: Kitty Brazelton’s ability to create new genres as a composer, performer, singer, and instrumentalist is rooted in a study of even the most traditional forms of music.

Nicholas Brooke creates music across disciplines, from collages of recordings with live theater, to home-built instrumentariums inspired by gamelan. He has received Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and New Music USA fellowships and premieres at the Lincoln Center Festival, Spoleto, and MASS MOCA.

mayfield brooks (they/them) is a movement-based performance artist, vocalist, urban farmer, writer, and wanderer based in Lenapehoking also known as Brooklyn, New York.

An inorganic chemist, John Bullock investigates the reaction pathways and mechanisms of short-lived species generated at electrodes. He is also interested in reforming the undergraduate chemistry curricula by de-emphasizing traditional boundaries between sub-disciplines within the field.

Kathy Bullock specializes in African American music and culture. A Professor Emerita of Berea College, she brings a wealth of experience, teaching and performing throughout the US, the UK and West Africa, particularly in the areas of sacred, folk and classical traditions.

Brian Campion facilitates all programs and initiatives connected to state and federal policy; he also serves as a Vermont State Senator.

A dramaturg, theater historian, and author of American Cinderellas on the Broadway Musical Stage (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), Maya Cantu specializes in twentieth-century American theater.

Franny Choi is a poet and essayist. Books include The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On and Soft Science, winner of the Elgin Award for Science Fiction Poetry.

Noah Coburn is a political anthropologist who focuses on Afghanistan and South Asia, studying violence, governance, and how people negotiate the overlap of politics, power, and culture.

Tracey Cockrell is an interdisciplinary artist who frequently collaborates with other artists, writers, & musicians. Using sympathetic resonance as a metaphor and as a means of sound propagation, she builds sculptures and experimental musical instruments that explore the origins of language and challenge the authority of language for making meaning.

Rabbi Michael Cohen, a longtime environmental activist, has written extensively on the impact of ecological issues on the Middle East peace process.

Michael Corey is a data scientist working in responsible/ethical AI, privacy, blockchain, and visualization. A lapsed sociologist, he focuses on user-centered product development and applies social science to technological questions.

Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig is a dramatist who writes for audio, stage and screen. Her play Snow in Midsummer was recently produced by Oregon Shakespeare Festival and the Royal Shakespeare Company and will be staged in New York by Classic Stage Company in the summer of 2022.

7-string guitar player, NEA grant recipient and Grammy-nominated producer who has produced and performed with some of the biggest acts in the business.

The work of astronomer Hugh Crowl addresses questions of how the massive collections of stars, gas, dust, and dark matter that we call galaxies assemble. How do galaxies form and evolve? Specifically, how do environmental conditions such as the flow of gas in and out of galaxies affect that process?

Nicole Daunic’s research as a dancer and dance scholar examines the intersection of movement and power in choreographic and improvisational dance practices in order to consider the politics of how we move together.

Annabel Davis-Goff is a novelist, essayist, social justice advocate, and a driving force behind Bennington College’s Incarceration in America and Prison Education Initiatives.

Alisa Del Tufo's career has been dedicated to making impact at the nexus of practice and policy; individual and community change; intellectual pursuit and activism with the goal of ending violence in the lives of women and girls addressing racism and other deep social challenges. She has founded three organizations: Sanctuary for Families, CONNECT, and Threshold Collaborative.

Thorsten Dennerline produces paintings, drawings, and artists’ books. The main focus of his work originates from an interest in poetry, which has led to collaborative projects with writers in book form, and in paintings and drawing projects that explore the poetic possibilities of the landscape.

Circle-making in dance is a way to kinesthetically experience and to embody inclusion, connectivity, and collectivity. Parijat Desai’s current work involves retooling Gujarati circle dance ritual, within community and performance practice. She also asks how individual expression remains alive within collective. Her ongoing research happens through choreography and storytelling with hybrid movement and theatrical vocabularies. 

The acclaimed poetry of Michael Dumanis weaves together memories of childhood, diaspora, and dislocation.

Anaïs Duplan '14 is a trans* poet, curator, and artist. He is the author of upcoming book I NEED MUSIC (Action Books, 2021), and a book of essays, Blackspace: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture (Black Ocean, 2020). He founded the Center for Afrofuturist Studies, a residency program for artists of color, at Iowa City’s artist-run organization Public Space One. 

Alexis Elton is an artist utilizing site-as-material forming connections with plants, soil, and other living beings. Her work is situated where art and agrarian systems meet to create ephemeral sensory encounters.

Judith Enck is senior fellow and visiting faculty member in the Center for the Advancement of Public Action. She is the President of Beyond Plastics and former EPA Regional Administrator, appointed by President Obama.

Mansour Farhang’s long career in international relations has included a diplomatic post and many distinguished research and teaching positions. He previously taught at Bennington for more than 30 years at Bennington.

Marguerite Feitlowitz is the author of the internationally acclaimed A Lexicon of Terror: Argentina and the Legacies of Torture and four volumes of literary translation, many essays, fiction, and criticism.

Luiza Folegatti is a Brazilian multidisciplinary artist and visual anthropologist. Her practice combines research on gender, migration, photography, and Latin American studies with social advocacy for immigrant rights.

Janet Foley applies her expertise in inorganic chemistry to study the effects of pollutants in Vermont groundwater, to understand the effects of ocean acidification on coral reefs, and to explore the photochemistry and medicinal applications of gold compounds.

Razan Francis' work centers on the visual culture of the Islamic world with a focus on Iberia and the Mediterranean. She explores the relationship of cultural identity and artistic practice in multi-ethnic and multi-religious environments and the discourse of images and craftsmanship in Islamic cultures.

Andy Galindo is an international Human Rights Lawyer, working as an independent consultant. She has been teaching human rights and training human rights defenders, members of international and regional organizations and government officials from all over the world, in the use of international human rights mechanisms and strategic litigation.

Violinist Joana Genova is active as a chamber musician, teacher, orchestral player and a soloist. She is Co-Artistic Director of Taconic Music in Manchester, VT and the second violinist of The Indianapolis Quartet. 

Mariam Ghani is an artist, writer, and filmmaker. Her work looks at places, spaces and moments where social, political and cultural structures take on visible forms, and spans video, sound, installation, photography, performance, text and data. 

Michael Giannitti has extensive professional experience as a lighting designer and educator. He has designed lighting at many of the most prestigious venues around the country and has taught abroad as a two-time Fulbright Specialist Grant recipient.

Manuel Gonzales is the author of The Miniature Wife and Other Stories, which won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction and the John Gardner Prize for Fiction, and the novel The Regional Office is Under Attack!

Levi Gonzalez is a dance artist whose work highlights the porous boundaries between audience and performer, and employs a queer corporeal logic to resist narrow definitions of knowledge and experience.

In Camille Guthrie's fourth collection of poems, DIAMONDS, she writes about the trials and surprises of divorce, parenting, country life—and the difficulties and delights of being alone, looking at art, and falling in love.

A scholar of contemporary Spanish fiction, Sarah D. Harris's research and teaching interests include sequential art, twentieth and twenty-first century Peninsular film, trauma, collective memory and forgetting, migration, monstrosity, and gender and identity studies.

Maria Dahvana Headley is a New York Times-bestselling novelist, translator, poet, and dramatist whose work unearths hidden meanings, characters, and possibilities in stories we think we know. Her version of the literary world is one in which all the genres merge, all the storytellers are equally thrilling, and there are definitely dragons.

John Hultgren's work explores the theoretical and ideological foundations of environmental political struggles.

Yoko Inoue’s multidisciplinary art practice anthropologically examines complex relationships between people and objects, the commodification of culture, and the assimilation and transformation of cultural meaning and values. Using ceramic medium she explores the socio-political and economic implication of products and globalization.

Kirk Jackson is an actor/director with four decades of experience on and off Broadway and regionally. A graduate of the Yale School of Drama, he has assisted Ivo van Hove on multiple productions in New York City and, recently, began to direct operas.

Shelley Jackson's research currently focuses on using expressive arts therapy in counselor supervision. She has published in the areas of school counseling, multicultural counseling, and expressive arts.

Dina Janis is the Artistic Director of the Dorset Theatre Festival where she directs for their Main Stage, in addition to overseeing their acclaimed New Play Development Programs including DTF Women Artists Writing Group, Pipeline Series of New Plays, and the Commissioning and Fellowship Program.

Blake Jones studies the underlying mechanisms of development, sociality, learning and memory in free-living animals. His research integrates theories and techniques from climate-science, ecology, physiology, genetics, and cognitive neuroscience.

Timothy Kane approaches mathematics with a classic perspective, considering its historical and theoretical development a universal human endeavor. He has been active in restorative justice through the Prison Education Initiative.

Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s work has been translated into more than thirty languages. His latest novel The Family Clause (FSG) was a finalist for the National Book Award.

John Kirk teaches classes in the history of American and Celtic traditional music in addition to mandolin, fiddle, banjo, ukulele, mountain and hammered dulcimers, and traditional music ensemble.

Kyoko Kitamura uses her unique career trajectory – musician, former journalist, former executive director of an arts organization – to study musical creativity and how it connects to the world at large.

Jonathan Kline’s artwork straddles the divide between photography’s contemporary, hybrid, and digital nature and its most traditional and original forms

Celebrated playwright Sherry Kramer believes every play is created in the audience, and her classes are a treasure hunt to discover how a play shapes our experience and how it makes things matter.

Jen Kutler is a multidisciplinary artist and performer. She modifies found objects that are cultural signifiers of power, gender, queerness and intimacy to create atypical instruments and sculptures.

Annette Lawrence’s art transforms raw data into drawings, objects, and installations. Her work is grounded in examining what counts, how it is counted, and who is counting.

How do social factors shape our use of language, and how does language use in turn impact our construction and perception of society? A sociolinguist, Thomas Leddy-Cecere addresses these questions through his research in Arabic and contemporary American English.

Pianist who has taught and performed through the United States and Italy, and prizewinner of the American National Chopin Competition and the New York Leschetizky Society.

John Limbert has had a fifty-year career as an academic, American diplomat, prisoner, and novelist. He first visited Iran in 1962 and has since lived and worked in nearly a dozen countries in the Middle East and Islamic Africa. 

Ginger Lin, a native of Taiwan, has 30 years of experience teaching at the cross-section of language, literature, history, and philosophy.

Jen Liu is a New York-based visual artist working in video, performance, and painting, on topics of national identity, economy, and the re-motivating of archival artifacts. She is a 2017 recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship in Film/Video, as well as the NYSCA/NYFA Fellowship in Digital/Electronic Art.

Mary Lum’s paintings, collages, and wall works, which have been praised by critics and exhibited widely, draw attention to the overlooked but subliminally powerful architecture of modern life.

Vanessa Lyon's teaching and research range from early Renaissance to modern and contemporary visual culture with a focus on European painting. She is especially interested in transhistorical and transcultural approaches to gender, race, and representation in early modern visuality, and the legacies of the 'Old Masters' in subsequent art and its histories.

Rachel Lyon's novel Self-Portrait With Boy was a finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. Her short work has recently appeared in One Story, the Rumpus, and elsewhere.

Anina Major (she/her) is a visual artist from the Bahamas whose work investigates the relationship between self and place. Anthropological research and oral histories play fundamental roles in her practice as she engages with ceramic material to map migrations of tradition and identity.

Amie McClellan is a cell biologist who utilizes baker’s yeast with a very serious goal in mind: to explore how “molecular chaperones” participate in helping proteins attain and maintain their structure and function, and how this relates to human diseases that arise when this process goes awry.

Jesse McDougall is an author, a Co-Founder and Director of Regenerative Agriculture at Regenerative Food Network, Inc, and farmer at Studio Hill—a regenerative 4th-generation family farm in southwestern Vermont. He is also an holistic management accredited professional and a Savory Institute Hub Leader.

Andrew McIntyre’s mathematical research concerns problems in geometry related to mathematical physics. His teaching is student centered and historically driven.

Catherine McKeen is a philosopher whose research focuses on ancient Greek thought, gender, and politics. 

A combined interest in LGBTQ studies, comparative literature, film studies, and Eastern European culture is at the center of Alexandar Mihailovic’s writing and teaching. Among other subjects, he writes and teaches about artificial intelligence in literature and popular culture, postcolonial women writers and filmmakers, and Russian Jewish literature.

Farhad Mirza '12 is an interdisciplinary artist.

Kathryn Montovan uses mathematical modeling and analysis to understand complex ecosystem interactions and to discover the potential evolutionary causes of insect and animal behaviors. Her teaching is based on active learning techniques and is focused on engaging students of all levels in authentic mathematical inquiry.

Steve Moog is a cultural anthropologist whose work focuses on everyday acts of resistance enacted by anarchist punks in Indonesia. He utilizes collaborative multimodal ethnography and anarchist methodologies in his research and teaching.

Josef Mundt is a mathematician whose interests lie in the visualization of data, building mathematical confidence and connections, and helping others think of mathematics as an art form.

Mina Nishimura is a Tokyo-born dance artist whose works focus on ever-changing relationships between internal landscapes and external forms. Buddhism-influenced philosophies and butoh-based principles are reflected across her somatic, performance and choreographic practices. Nishimura is a 2019 recipient of Foundation of Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists award.

Vahidin Omanovic is a peacebuilder born in Bosnia and from Herzegovina.

Carol Pal is a historian who works on the intellectual history of early modern Europe. A former auto mechanic and pastry chef, she now focuses on the histories of science, medicine, the Republic of Letters, and knowledge production—with an emphasis on how women were always part of the picture.

Leah Pappas is a documentary linguist who collaborates with language communities in Indonesia. She researches language and gesture to understand how socially-mediated interaction with the environment results in linguistic diversity.

Nathaniel Parke is a regional freelance cellist and is also on the faculty of Williams College.

Aysha Peltz’s ceramics blur the lines between utility and art, as the material properties of clay itself—the way it swells, fissures, and tears under its own weight—create a certain kind of poetry.

Ann Pibal’s widely recognized and highly acclaimed paintings have been exhibited extensively, in the United States, Europe, and Asia.

Senem Pirler is an intermedia-sound artist whose interdisciplinary work crosses over into sound engineering, sound art, video art, performance, and installation. Pirler’s recent work has been exhibited at EMPAC, Roulette, BAC, Montalvo Arts Center, Mount Tremper Arts, and Collar Works. 

Jonathan Pitcher is a scholar of Latin American literature, philosophy, and history whose research interests exceed any one discipline: identity, exile, film, politics, travel, art, architectural ideology, puppetry, and the aftermath of the Boom, to name a few.

Teddy Pozo is a nonbinary trans* scholar and artist studying haptic media: touch, intimacy, and bodies in video games, media history, and virtual worlds.

Prazak teaches anthropology and African studies, specializing in economic development and cultural change in East Africa, using multidisciplinary research strategies to address globalization, inequality, culturally-based ways of knowing, gender-based violence, and politics of the body.

Jean Randich is an award-winning director, writer, and librettist specializing in new works, musical theatre, opera, and re-envisioned classics. She is cofounder and co-artistic director of Collider Theater in New York City.

Sue Rees has exhibited her set designs, animations, installations, and video works worldwide and has worked collaboratively with choreographers, directors, and musicians in the United States, Europe, and India.

Choreographer, dancer, and visual artist Dana Reitz weaves movement and light scores that continually shift perception of time and space. Often performed in silence, they reveal musical nuance. She has collaborated with Jennifer Tipton, created works for Mikhail Baryshnikov, and toured extensively.

A poet and a scholar of contemporary Latin American Literature and Culture, Lena Retamoso Urbano's research and teaching interests include 20th and 21st century Latin American and Spanish poetry, Transnational surrealism, 20th century Latin American narrative, intertextuality, and Queer theory.

Michael Sylvan Robinson '89 (he/they) is an internationally-exhibited genderqueer fiber artist, activist, and leader in arts education; their contemporary fiber art intersects fashion, sculpture, street art and queer activism through innovative use of textile collage and text-based art techniques.

Jennifer Rohn has appeared in theatre productions on and off Broadway, in the United States and Europe, and in films and television, collaborating extensively with the renowned director Robert Wilson.

Chris Rose is a teaching artist exploring embodiment in music education. A passionate improviser, Rose plays trumpet, piano, and organ, bending and blending genres whenever possible.

Noëlle Rouxel-Cubberly teaches French language through the lenses of French film, historical correspondence, and other aspects of French cultural life.

Kerry Ryer-Parke '90 performs in a range of musical styles, from oratorio, opera, and early music to folk, jazz, and rock, in addition to directing the Bennington Children’s Chorus and Bennington Voice Workshop.

Beatriz Santiago Muñoz is an artist whose expanded moving image work is entangled with Boalian theater, expanded cinema and feminist practices. She tends to work with non-actors, and incorporates improvisation into her process. Her recent work is on the sensorial unconscious of anti-colonial movements and feminist experiments with language and narrative. 

Özge Savaş is a critical and applied social psychologist whose work is in conversation with decolonial, intersectional feminist, liberation, community, and cultural psychologies. Her work with displaced people focuses on issues like home-making and citizen-making, while she also works with transnational women's rights activists in understanding global gender inequities. 

Charles Schoonmaker is an Emmy Award-winning costume designer for theatre, dance, opera, and television.

Tim Schroeder applies physical and chemical principles to understand interactions between deep-Earth and shallow-Earth systems. His courses are based on the idea that geology begins as an observational science, but that understanding Earth observations requires a physical sciences context.

Eileen Scully is an award-winning scholar of American diplomacy and international history. Her recent work explores historical understandings of human trafficking and international customary law on the coming, going, and staying of destitute, physically disabled migrants.

Susan Sgorbati is a professional mediator and educator whose creative research has led to collaboration across disciplines and borders as both an artist and a driver of social change.

Stephen Shapiro’s research on early-modern French literature and culture focuses on aristocratic memoirs, the history of sexuality, culinary culture, and the history of the city of Paris. He is currently looking at the development of a modern gay culture in 18th-century Paris.

Allen Shawn’s work as a composer and pianist comprises a large catalogue of orchestral and chamber music, chamber operas, songs, piano music, and music for ballet, theatre, and film; he is also celebrated for his writings on Arnold Schoenberg and Leonard Bernstein, as well as his compelling memoirs.

Donald Sherefkin is an architect whose projects range from urban loft renovations to rural retreats to sacred spaces, extending from the heart of New York City to New England.

Elizabeth Sherman is known for her work on amphibians and, more recently, on coral reefs and climate change; she collaborates with student researchers in her study of how animals work — both individually and as part of larger ecosystems.

Simonds is a poet and critic. She is the author of eight books of poetry and a novel. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Poetry Magazine and elsewhere. 

Maboula Soumahoro is a French scholar and writer whose work focuses on US and African-American studies, the African diaspora (Black Atlantic).

Rotimi Suberu’s research on Nigerian government and politics and international relations have prompted invitations to consult for the Nigerian government, the World Bank, the National Endowment for Democracy, Freedom House, and the Forum of Federations.

Anne Thompson is an artist whose curatorial practice focuses on political critique, site specificity and activities that move beyond institutional spaces.

Paul Voice is a scholar of moral and political philosophy with interests in problems of justice, liberalism, and pluralism.

Oliver Wadsworth is an award-winning actor and writer who has worked extensively throughout the U.S. His upcoming projects include plays at Living Room Theatre and The Rep in Albany.

Emily Waterman is an applied developmental scientist who aims to improve the lives of adolescents and young adults by preventing sexual and dating violence.

Elizabeth White is an artist whose work ranges in form from photography to digital collage, installation, drawing, and social practice. Informed by a background in sociology and media studies as well as visual arts, she is interested in the social impact of photography and related technologies, and the politics of visual culture. 

Bruce Williamson is a jazz composer and multi-instrumentalist/recording artist who has collaborated and performed with such luminaries as Bobby McFerron, Fred Hersch, Julie Taymor, and Mark Rylance in a variety of genres, and whose work has been featured in Academy Award-winning film scores.

Michael Wimberly was born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio during the civil rights era, surrounded by the toxic fumes of steel mills and buoyed by a sea of blue-collar workers. This is where Wimberly’s early beginnings in soul, funk, rock, jazz, and classical music began. Beating rhythms on the hoods of cars and boxes while dancing to the pulsating music of James Brown, Sly Stone, Funkadelic, and Aretha Franklin…the spirit of revolution was in the air.

Kerry Woods is an ecologist whose recent work includes long-term studies of old-growth forests, landscape ecology of the Taconic Mountains, and collaborative biogeographic analyses of global temperate forests. His work has been supported by NASA, NSF, US Forest Service, and the Mellon Foundation.

Mark Wunderlich is author of three critically acclaimed books of poetry, and his poems, interviews, reviews, and translations have appeared in journals such as Slate, The Paris Review, and Poetry, and in more than 30 anthologies. His most recent book, God Of Nothingness, was published by Graywolf in 2021.

Born in Niigata, Japan, Kota Yamazaki was first introduced to butoh under the teaching of Akira Kasai, then graduated from Bunka Fashion College (Tokyo) with BA in Fashion Design. He is a recipient of Bessie Award 2007, FCA Award 2013, NYFA Fellowship 2016, and Guggenheim Fellowship 2018.

Christina Yang is an independent curator/writer/educator based in New York. 

Ikuko Yoshida teaches Japanese language and culture, and her research interest areas are second language acquisition, pedagogy, critical thinking in foreign language learning, technology, and Japanese aesthetics. She is a certified instructor of ikebana—traditional Japanese flower arrangement.