Fall 2025

The Graduate Seminar in Public Action is required of all students in the MFA in Public Action program. This seminar focuses on their current professional work. Each student will identify at the beginning of each term the professional work to be accomplished. This can be located at Bennington College or in another professional venue anywhere in the world. This professional

Graduate Teaching Fellows in Dance are integrated into the dance program as teaching assistants. In consultation with their academic advisors and the dance faculty, MFA candidates develop an assistantship schedule of approximately ten hours weekly; the courses they develop and teach are listed in the curriculum. All Teaching Fellows bring

Halfway through John Milton's epic poem, Paradise Lost, he admits to the reader in his call to the Muses that he has "fallen on evil days" and into unwelcome solitude, caught "[i]n darkness, with dangers compassed round." Milton wrote Paradise Lost under epically gnarly circumstances -- jailed and fined for backing the failed removal and execution of the King, going blind,

This 2-credit course will explore working with classical and natural alternative processes including Cyanotypes, Anthotypes, and Chlorophyll prints among others. Students will learn the histories of each process and see how artists are working with those processes in today’s day and age. The Cyanotypes will be produced on fine art paper

In 2006, the long-running reality television show Survivor decided to do something novel for its thirteenth season: they split contestants into tribes based on race. Controversy immediately followed. Advertisers pulled out and elected officials lobbied CBS not to air the season. But CBS stuck to their guns and released

How have psychologists defined feelings over the years, and how is the field continuing to change?  We will begin with the 19th Century, when scientists like Wundt and Charcot brought human perception and mental health symptoms out of the realm of metaphysics.  After briefly considering Darwin’s view of emotion and new perspectives on artwork from early asylums, we

Bennington’s campus supports beautiful examples of temperate deciduous mixed hardwood forests. This class is a deep dive into forest ecology, land use change, and forest succession at a local scale. Students will explore the local forest community composition, structure, and function over the last 15,000 years and discuss the environmental conditions, disturbance

Students propose an independent study plan with approval from Donna Faye Burchfield and select an approved thinking partner/mentor.

Credits to be determined between faculty and student.

Variable Credit, 1-3 Credits

Through mentor approved independently paced work, students develop and schedule their own weekly, planned creative practices using student-initiated resources and/or classes. Mentors guide students through the designed plan that can include a combination of practices, techniques, technologies and methodologies. The study format

This course allows students to self-design course work by combining topics and approaches from the Practice LABs and the Study LABs to meet required hours. The Individualized LABS take the form of a series of self directed intensive workshops and study immersions.

Viewed from the outside, the French-speaking world offers enticing images of beauty, pleasure, and freedom. From the inside, however, it is a complicated, often contradictory world where implicit codes and values shape the most basic aspects of daily life. This course will give you an insider’s perspective on a cultural and communicative system whose ideas, customs, and

“Disability justice culture is simultaneously beautiful and practical. Poetry and dance are as important [to disability justice culture] as a blog post about accessible bathroom hacks—because they are interdependent.”
- Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

This course will introduce students to the basic concepts of disability justice and disability justice culture

Instrumental Study on Guitar.  Continued studies from Beginning Guitar. Advanced study in fret-board harmony and theory.

Instrumental Study on Guitar. Continued studies from Beginning Guitar. Advanced study in fret-board harmony and theory, play in different tunings, increase chord vocabulary and repertoire.

This course is intended for students with some playing and reading experience, who have passed Piano Lab I or its equivalent. The goals of this course are to gain ease and dexterity at the keyboard, further developing a confident piano technique, musical expression, and the skill of reading musical notation. Students will expand upon a repertoire of scales and chords. They

Intermediate Video builds on the concepts and technical skills introduced in Intro to Video, and has a different theme each term. This semester of Intermediate Video will be focused on the following thematic, conceptual and formal questions. Documentary as a form or genre has expanded over the past century to encompass a wide range of

For students with some prior singing experience. This class is designed to refine awareness and coordination of the mind and body and develop a reliable vocal technique applicable to all styles of singing and speaking performance.  <

For students with some prior singing experience. This class is designed to refine awareness and coordination of the mind and body and develop a reliable vocal technique applicable to all styles of singing and speaking performance.  <

For students with some prior singing experience. This class is designed to refine awareness and coordination of the mind and body and develop a reliable vocal technique applicable to all styles of singing and speaking performance.  <

For students with some prior singing experience. This class is designed to refine awareness and coordination of the mind and body and develop a reliable vocal technique applicable to all styles of singing and speaking performance.  <

An introduction to 16mm film techniques, students will shoot and edit analog 16mm film, develop by hand and finally will transfer film to video. Through screenings, experiments and hands-on workshops students will learn about cinematography and the photochemical process. Taking advantage of the special tactile, tangible nature of

In this introductory course, we will read, examine, discuss, and design in conversation with a selected literature of recorded audio, sound design practice, and history. This course will provide the foundational technical, historical, and contextual/cultural support to your knowledge of working in music and sound design in music, theater,

Have you ever imagined speaking in the language of computers, and transforming your ideas into actions that computers can perform? This course is a gateway to discovering the art and science of programming, a crucial skill that serves as the backbone of computer science. But computer science transcends mere programming. Our actual aim is to nurture your ability to think like

This course provides its students with a deep and expansive exploration of the field of psychology. As a diverse field of study, psychology is broadly defined as the study of human behavior. Psychology has numerous sub-areas of study that take different research approaches to examine biological, social, and cultural factors and

This foundational class covers modes of reasoning used in quantitative sciences and mathematics. While learning the art of mathematical modeling, i.e. translating the physical systems/real-life situations into mathematics, we will apply problem solving and practice effective communication of mathematics. This process involves isolating the essential variables and