Awards & Honors
Alumni news
The National Endowment for the Arts honored Kathryn Posin’s ’65 dance company with a $10,000 Art Works award.
Joanna Pousette-Dart ’68 was one of nine artists in 2017 to receive a Art Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters.
Tim Daly ’79 is the 2017 recipient of the Unbridled Charitable Foundation Inc. National Arts Advocates Award.
SJ Chiro ’87 won the Grand Jury Award at the Seattle International Film Festival last month for her film Lane 1974, and was selected for an international debut at the Shanghai International Film Festival.
The popular design blog, Remodelista awarded Cemre Durusoy ’97 the 2017 Considered Design Award for Best Professional Kitchen.
Adnan Iftekhar ’97 was selected as a 2017 Google Innovator.
A short story collection, Unaccompanied Minors, by Alden Jones MFA ’01 won the Lascaux Book Prize. It was the third prize the book has won. Her third book, Cheryl Strayed’s Wild: Afterwords, a hybrid work of criticism and memoir, will be published by Fiction Advocate.
Dancer and choreographer Melinda Ring MFA ’01 was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Cosmo Whyte ’05 was one of four artists to be named a finalist for the $50,000 Hudgens Prize.
“Something for a Young Woman,” a story Genevieve Plunkett ’10 originally published in New England Review was chosen by Laura Furman ’68 to be included in the 2017 O. Henry Prize Stories.
Shawna Kay Rodenberg MFA ’12 won the 2016 Jean Ritchie Fellowship in Appalachian Writing awarded by Lincoln Memorial University.
Rachel Feingold MFA ’14 was awarded a 2017 Literature Translation Fellowship by the National Endowment for the Arts, jointly with Roman Kostovski, to complete an English translation of Czech writer Hana Andronikova’s novel Heaven Has No Ground.
“Planes,” a story by Libby Flores MFA ’14 placed second in this year’s Hayden’s Ferry Review Flash Fiction contest.
Cassie Pruyn MFA ’14 won the 2017 Walt McDonald First Book Prize in Poetry. Her book-length collection, Lena, was published this spring by Texas Tech University Press.
Erin Kate Ryan MFA ’14 won a 2017 Minnesota Emerging Writer grant. She is also a 2016 Minnesota State Arts Board Artists Initiative grantee. Both awards support work on her novel about Paula Jean Welden, the sophomore who went missing from Bennington College in 1946.
Carlos Mendez-Dorantes ’15 was one of 60 students nationwide to be awarded a Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, to support his graduate research into cancer at City of Hope.
Lydia Martín MFA ’16 won The Ploughshares Emerging Writer’s Award for her story “The Adjustment Act.”
In August, the Academy of American Poets announced that Frances Revel ’17 won the Promising Young Poet Award.
“The Promotion,” a story by Grace Singh Smith MFA ’17, was listed as a “notable” story in the Best American Short Stories 2016. It was originally published in the Santa Monica Review.
Five alumni from Bennington’s MFA in Writing program were distinguished in The Best American Essays 2017 for their notable essays published in the previous year: Megan Galbraith MFA ’15: “Sin Will Find You Out,” Catapult; Peter Grandbois MFA ’03: “Honor,” North Dakota Quarterly; Faculty member Dinah Lenney MFA ’03: “A Longer Reach,” Los Angeles Review of Books; Sue Repko MFA ’12: “The Gun Show,” The Southeast Review; Walter Robinson MFA ’14: “This Will Sting and Burn,” The Sun.