Faculty

Beverly Acha is a New York-based visual artist working in painting, printmaking, and drawing. Her work engages visual and spatial languages of landscape, architecture, and diagrams. Through a process-based practice that embraces formal and material play, Acha’s work investigates the spaces between knowing and seeing, experience and memory, and the real and imagined.

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 has received support for his work as a novelist, literary journalist, and critic from the Lannan Foundation and the MacDowell Colony. 

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.

Antonio Sergio Bessa is chief curator emeritus at the Bronx Museum of the Arts. A scholar of concrete poetry, Bessa has organized several critically acclaimed exhibitions on themes related to text-based art, and has published essays on concrete poetry.

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 works with communities besieged by the fossil fuel industry to develop a more transformative grasp of environmental justice for people, politics, and critical theory.

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.

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.

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.

Lily Carone is a horticulturist, artist, and educator based in western Massachusetts. Her work reflects and engages with ecology, both in subject and material.

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.

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.

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?

Bruna Dantas Lobato '15 is the author of the upcoming novel Blue Light Hours (Grove Atlantic, 2024) and translator of Stênio Gardel's The Words that Remain (New Vessel Press, 2023), shortlisted for the 2023 National Book Award for Translated Literature, among others.

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.

For over 35 years, Joe Donahue - the award-winning host of WAMC/ Northeast Public Radio’s The Roundtable - has been widely recognized for fostering insightful, thought-provoking conversation. Donahue offers his listeners some of the world's most fascinating people and subjects. He is a lifelong advocate of reading and writers and hosts the nationally syndicated, The Book Show.

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. 

Matthew Edwards is the piano instructor for the student that wants to learn multiple styles of music including classical, blues, jazz, and pop styles.

David Eichelberger's ceramic work investigates the value of time and applied effort through process and intentional mark-making. He is the Director of the Marlboro Studio School in Marlboro, Vermont, and co-owner and operator at TWO|ONE Ceramics in Brattleboro, VT.

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.

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.

Julia Ferrari, artist, poet, letterpress printer, has been making handmade books for the past 30 years.

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.

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.

Tilly Grimes is an Irish/Greek theater, opera, and film designer based in New York.

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.

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.

Sharif Jamal is a visual artist and archivist from Afghanistan. He focuses on preservation activities to prolong the life of archival records.

Dina Janis is the Artistic Director of the Vermont Public Theater and a lifetime member of the Actors Studio.

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.

Sahraa Karimi is a film director and screenwriter from Afghanistan. Despite facing numerous obstacles, she has become a leading figure in the Afghan film industry and has won numerous international awards for her work.

Emma Kast’s work focuses on the history of political economic thought. Her recent research locates notions of deservingness in theories of capitalism.  

Virginia Warnken Kelsey, mezzo-soprano, is internationally celebrated for her heartfelt and dynamic interpretations of Baroque opera, oratorio, and contemporary chamber music. She maintains an active career in an adventurous assortment of musical and artistic settings.

Amirtha Kidambi is invested in the creation and performance of subversive anti-hegemonic music, from free improvisation and avant-jazz to experimental bands, noise and new music. She is an educator, activist and organizer working to challenge systems of white supremacist, colonial, capitalist, and patriarchy, and is co-founder and co-organizer of South Asian Artists in Diaspora and Musicians Against Police Brutality.

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.

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.

Maxwell Levis is a mental health researcher focused on advancing personalized suicide prediction and prevention mechanisms. His work leverages critical theory, psychodynamic perspectives, and big-data resources to inform psychotherapeutic and psychoeducational interventions.

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.

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.

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.

Bronwyn Maloney '13 is an artist and animator based in New York. Her work uses hand-drawn techniques in digital programs, and sound, to create films about sensual experience.

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.

Caitlin McDonough MacKenzie is a plant ecologist studying the impacts of climate change on forests and alpine habitats.

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. 

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.

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.

Maia Nichols brings an interdisciplinary background in psychology and fine arts to media studies, visual culture and material culture studies. An artist trained in art history, her research focuses on craft, design and colonial histories of care.

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.

Fortune Ononiwu is an organic chemist with an interest in the extraction, isolation, characterization, and bioactivity evaluation of natural products derived from plant and fungi, as well as their partial or total synthesis.

Darcy Otto is a computer scientist who studies the foundations of computation, artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and AI Ethics.

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.

A graduate of The North Carolina School of the Arts, Mary-Louise Parker has performed in over thirty professional theater productions regionally and both off and on Broadway. She originated roles in plays by Paula Vogel, Adam Rapp, Craig Lucas, Sarah Ruhl, Simon Stephens, John Patrick Stanley, Sharr White, Terrence McNally, and others.

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.

Nicolette Polek '15 is the author of Bitter Water Opera (Graywolf Press, forthcoming April 2024) and Imaginary Museums (Soft Skull Press, 2020). She is a recipient of the Rona Jaffe Writers’ Award, and is currently based in New York.

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.

Mariam Rahmani is a writer and translator.

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.

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 francophone cinema, literature, 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.

Cecilia María Salvi is a Ph.D. candidate in cultural anthropology at The Graduate Center, CUNY. She studies the artistic and literary movement of editoriales cartoneras in Latin America.

Known for her “inventive instrumental colors and tender, snappy vocal writing” (The New York Times), composer Kamala Sankaram moves freely between the worlds of experimental music and contemporary opera.

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. She works with historically and systemically disadvantaged and marginalized individuals and communities, combining decolonial and intersectional feminist theories in explaining how systems of oppression are maintained. She examines the role of stigma, stereotypes, and prejudice in intergroup conflict.

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.

Elliott Sharp is a composer, multi-instrumentalist, author, and visual artist. His work draws on fractal geometry, chaos theory, and genetics, as well as radical sonics and improvisation.

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. 

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.

Jia Tolentino is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of the essay collection Trick Mirror.

John Umphlett MFA '99 is an innovator and inquisitive thinker, consistently searching for new experimental processes. Entranced within material parameters and properties, he finds ways to fuse those findings with the ephemeral human body.

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.

A drummer and percussionist, Michael Wimberly is also a composer of note and has written for prestigious New York dance companies. 

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.

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.