Spring 2026 Course Search

In this course, films are used as textbooks to learn the French language and explore the French-speaking world. In order to hone their language skills (listening, speaking, reading and writing), students will listen to selected film dialogues to improve their listening comprehension, read and analyze excerpts from scenarios and reviews to strengthen their understanding of syntax and widen their vocabulary, mimic the pronunciation of actors and write on film to improve their spoken and written French.

We will study and perform from the string band traditions of rural America. Nova Scotia, Quebecois, Irish, New England, Scandinavian, African-American dance and ballad traditions. In addition, these will be experienced with listening, practice (weekly group rehearsals outside of class), and performing components. Emphasis on ensemble intuition, playing by ear, and lifetime personal music making skills (transposition, harmonizing, etc.).

That writers of color earn less than their white peers in advances and fees is anecdotally well known. But we lack exhaustive data. Gearing up for such data collection the next few years in a faculty-driven project at Bennington, this course provides an overview of the broader ethical and social landscape around diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in publishing. Major inquiries will include:

This course serves as an introduction to rhythms, songs, and musical practices from Africa and the African Diaspora, including Brazil, Cuba, Haiti, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic. Students will learn these traditional folkloric rhythms using indigenous percussion instruments from these territories and provinces. Class discussions will convey history, culture, language, and dance from these regions. Students will also have opportunities to create rhythms and arrangements in collaboration in our “break-out” segments.

This course serves as an introduction to rhythms, songs, and musical practices from Africa and the African Diaspora, including Brazil, Cuba, Haiti, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic. Students will learn these traditional folkloric rhythms using indigenous percussion instruments from these territories and provinces. Class discussions will convey history, culture, language, and dance from these regions. Students will also have opportunities to create rhythms and arrangements in collaboration in our “break-out” segments.

Miles Dewey Davis III (May 26, 1926 – September 28, 1991) was an American icon whose approach and innovation on the trumpet set him apart from the mainstream. Davis explored new approaches to creating and composing music. Davis was a trumpeter, bandleader, and composer. He is among the most influential and acclaimed figures in the history of jazz and 20th-century music. When you hear a Miles Davis recording, you know it's Miles. Davis's five-decade career kept him at the forefront of many major stylistic developments in jazz.

Learning to draw is as much about learning how to use your hand as it is about learning how to see. The focus of this course is on learning to draw from observation and developing close looking skills. Drawing from observation fundamentally alters our day-to-day experience by heightening our attention to details and the specificity of our surroundings. In this course, you will work with various materials, including ink, compressed and vine charcoal, graphite, and/or collage to represent a range of subjects.

This course is a seminar focusing on films that were made by filmmakers and collectives which saw themselves as inaugurating a new kind of filmmaking modeled neither on the commercial American filmmaking, nor on the European “Auteur” Cinema, instead crafting a third position, a cinema that was implicated in anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist struggles of the time. These works challenged ideas of authorship, questioned the role of the filmmaker in political transformation, and proposed alternatives to the forms of production that filmmaking made use of.

This production course introduces students to the fundamentals of working in video and the language of film form. Drawing on the energy, intensity and criticality of avant-garde film and contemporary video art practices, students will complete a series of projects exploring dimensions of cinematography, mise-en-scène, editing and sound design before producing a final self-determined project. Concepts crucial to time-based media such as apparatus, montage and identification will be introduced through screenings, discussions and texts by a diverse range of artists, filmmakers, and theorists.

Self-reflexive narratives, improvisation, non-linearity, slow cinema, alternative representations of time and space, experimental film grammars, poetic scripts, collective direction, Brechtian techniques.  All of these processes and more will be explored in this hands-on production based course. Working collaboratively and on your peers’ work in various roles is required for this course. This course is appropriate to students doing advanced work in film and video as we will be taking a project from research, writing and structuring to post-production in the span of a term.

This course is an introductory survey course of U.S. history that pays particular attention to changing norms around gender and sexuality, and how people contested or subverted those norms. Topics include: same-sex intimacy in Early America, turn of the century panics around miscegenation and white slavery, the invention of hetero and homosexuality, cross-dressing in the American West, and the HIV/AIDS crisis.

Social psychology is the scientific study of how people think about, influence, and relate to one another. This course will explore social thinking, influence, and social relations that shape our lived experiences through a U.S. contextual lens. Social psychologists are increasingly concerned with the effects of the various systems of domination on outcomes such as health and wellbeing, relationships with others, personal and social identities, as well as political views and participation.

Qualitative inquiry seeks to discover and to describe in narrative reporting what particular people do in their everyday lives and what the actions mean to them. This course is intended for students who wish to learn more about the impact of theoretical frameworks on their ongoing knowledge projects at Bennington College.

Students will work towards completing one moving image piece or body or work of their own devising during the course of the semester. This course is primarily intended for seventh- and eighth-term students with a Plan concentration in Film/Video who have already taken Advanced Projects I in the prior fall, but exceptions may be made by permission of the instructor.

This course is a hands-on color laboratory where students will explore the tactile, material, and physical characteristics of pigments. Working with both earth and synthetic colors, we’ll grind, mix, and transform pure pigments into drawing materials including watercolor paints and chalk pastels. If time allows, we will also make inks. Outside of class, students will complete a short research project/presentation, and create a self-directed body of drawings using the materials created in class.

This course is an introduction to the magic of copper plate Intaglio. We will explore various techniques to prepare our plates including hand working and acid etching with materials such as rosin resists and sugar lifts. By the end of term, we will be printing in color. Ultimately, the overall goal of our endeavors will be to begin a dialog about artistic production in a contemporary context while also exploring the unique history of the intaglio process.