Black Studies: Related Content
From March 21–22, Bennington College celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the College’s influential, improvisational Black Music Division with a symposium of events, history, and music surrounding the 1974 beginnings of the groundbreaking program.
Celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the improvisational music genius of the Black Music Division
In celebration of Black History Month, Bennington College is compiling a spotlight of the community's favorite Black authors and favorite books by Black authors.
The Guardian covered visiting faculty member Maboula Soumahoro, whose invitation to speak as part of a European parliament event discussing equality and inclusion in the workplace was rescinded after attacks by the French far right.
Bennington students who have studied French filmmaker Alice Diop's work in class reflected on their recent opportunity to meet Diop, her editor Amrita David, and her translator Nicholas Elliott ’96 during their visit to campus in November.
Over the summer, Roberta Martey '25 completed a Field Work Term internship in Kyoto, Japan, where she worked as an intern on a Social Kitchen project with the Africa Diaspora Network Japan.
More than 100 people attended the Ben Belitt Colloquium on Arts and Literary Culture in Tishman Auditorium on Bennington College’s campus on Wednesday, May 15, 2024. They joined panelists Pulitzer Prize Winner Jericho Brown, the MacArthur Award-winning novelist Jonathan Lethem ’86, celebrated poet Camille Rankine, and moderator and Bennington faculty member Benjamin Anastas to learn about the life and work of Queer Black poet and essayist Reginald Shepherd ’88, an underrecognized member of the Bennington literary community in the eighties. Below is a piece Lethem wrote for and read at the event.
This fall, Bennington College welcomes two new faculty members: Alex Creighton, who teaches Critical Writing, and Kaolack Ibrahima Ndiaye, who teaches Africana Dance.
Poet and Memoirist Safiya Sinclair ’10, author of the memoir How to Say Babylon, a National Book Critics Circle Award Winner and one of the most notable books of the year according to the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Atlantic, TIME Magazine, and many others, will address the 89th graduating class at the conferring of degrees on Saturday, June 1. We connected with her to learn more about her time at Bennington and how it influenced her career.
Roberta Martey ’25 studies Politics and Psychology at Bennington. She has a particular interest in Black Diasporic Studies and Environmental Advocacy and integrated her academic knowledge into a practical setting during her FWT at The Alliance of Rural Communities in Trinidad.
On the second Monday before opening night, rehearsal for this term’s faculty production—Sweat by Lynn Nottage—started with a fight. Student actors executed a choreographed-but-believable series of punches and holds. They threw each other across the barroom set while the assistant stage manager and fight captain Tennyson Perkins ’26 took careful notes to deliver to the breathless actors at the end of the scene.
Then they did it again. And again. And again. Each time, they incorporated Perkins’s tweaks, and each time, the action was clearer and cleaner.
Winston Foundation Grant funds 2024 Ben Belitt Colloquium on Arts and Literary Culture
Ryan Chigogo ’23, energy analyst at Charles River Associates, reflects on his time at Bennington College.
Article by Gaurav Aung '24
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.
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.
Choreographer, educator, and performer of traditional and contemporary dance. Keeper of his family’s traditional Gurunsi ways.
Poet and memoirist. Author of How to Say Babylon, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Kirkus Prize, and longlisted for the Women’s Prize in Nonfiction.
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.
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.
Trans* poet, curator, and artist. Author of I NEED MUSIC, Blackspace: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture Take This Stallion, and Mount Carmel and the Blood of Parnassus.
Anne Thompson is an artist whose curatorial practice focuses on political critique, site specificity and activities that move beyond institutional spaces.
A drummer and percussionist, Michael Wimberly is also a composer of note and has written for prestigious New York dance companies.
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.
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.
Trailblazing attorney who has spent a career working to highlight issues of gender bias in the legal profession.
Benjamin Anastas has received support for his work as a novelist, literary journalist, and critic from the Lannan Foundation and the MacDowell Colony.
Assistant Professor in Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of Washington, where she cares for patients at Seattle Children’s Hospital and Harborview Medical Center.
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.
Renowned choreographer of works performed by Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and the New York City Ballet
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.