Spring 2026 Course Search

This class is an extension of the Black Music Division at Bennington College that brought dancers and musicians together for live performance in the composition of Improvisation. It is co-taught by Susan Sgorbati and Michael Wimberly. 

Musicians and Dancers will study and practice together a Solo Practice and an Ensemble Practice, building compositional structures for performance. 

According to "All Englang," Joan Acocella's essay in The New Yorker, Geoffery Chaucer, author of The Canterbury Tales, "was the freshest, clearest, and sweetest of the great English poets." She goes on to say that, living in the 14th century, he was also perhaps the first great English poet. Still.

This beginning-level dance course requires no previous dance training and welcomes absolute beginners who would like to start a day with physical practice and body attunement. Students are introduced to some basic principles of dancing by learning various movement patterns, choreographed sequences and by engaging in improvisational and compositional movement practice.

The Scriptorium, a “place for writing,” is a class for writers interested in improving their critical essay-writing skills. We will read to write and write to read. Much of our time will be occupied with writing and revising—essai means “trial” or “attempt”—as we work to create new habits and productive strategies for analytical writing.

The Scriptorium, a “place for writing,” is a class for writers interested in improving their critical essay-writing skills. We will read to write and write to read. Much of our time will be occupied with writing and revising—essai means “trial” or “attempt”—as we work to create new habits and productive strategies for analytical writing.

This course will discuss practices and ethics around digital photography, and experiment with foundational tools and techniques, aiming to create space for students to develop their own interests within the possibilities of the medium. Classes will combine practical exercises, readings on the development of digital photography and its impact on society, discussions mostly on the work of contemporary photographers, and analysis of portraiture, landscape, and still photography techniques.

This course focuses on the additive construction methods essential to contemporary sculpture. Students will embark on independent projects that hone their skills in constructing armatures and exploring innovative skinning techniques. Throughout the term, participants will learn to build and manipulate forms using primarily additive processes, developing their own sculptural vocabulary in a studio environment. There will be two personal independent projects in this class that will ultimately converge into a dynamic, large-scale collaborative sculpture.

This course introduces students to econometric approaches to asking and answering questions about the economy relating to employment, health, and well-being. The primary aim of the course is to understand how economists analyze data to determine causal effect. We will analyze data sets to ask and answer socioeconomic questions such as: What factors affect a person’s income, and how do we know? How might we investigate the main causes of unemployment?

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:

Genesis is the first book in a compilation known collectively as the Bible. It is a text of enormous literary value, and one of our earliest historical chronicles, providing foundational material for Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Yet how many of us know what it actually says?  How did it come together, what is the narrative, and how does it relate to ideas, cultures, and events in the ancient world? We will not be considering Genesis in terms of its status as scripture.

The cells in our bodies need to grow and divide in order to make new tissue, and to repair or replace damaged tissue.  The processes that govern cell growth and division are tightly regulated. When the cells that comprise the tissues of our bodies lose the ability to properly regulate their growth and proliferation, cancer is the result.  This introductory level course will provide an overview of the basic mechanisms and genetics underlying human cancers, as well as explore current diagnostic and therapeutic strategies.

Celtic history and music from Ireland, Scotland, Bretagne, Galatia, and Cape Breton will be experienced, studied, and performed using instruments and voices. We’ll find and cross the musical bridges between regions–from the ballads of Ireland, Scotland and Wales to the Alalas of Spain, through the Scottish Gaelic speaking Highland and Islands to the dance tunes of Brittany. An end-of-term presentation will be prepared drawing on inspiration from traditional forms.

We will spend the term immersed in in-depth reading and analysis of the plot, structure, and language, and cultural context of six Shakespeare tragedies: Titus Andronicus, Julius Caesar, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, King Lear, and Othello. We will focus on the themes of power, corruption, betrayal, revenge, despair, and madness, among others. We will also spend considerable time discussing representations of gender, race, and old age in Shakespeare.

Delights of Ephemera explores the significance of mass-produced materials in the context of art movements and exhibitions. Contrary to its definition, ephemera can have power and permanence, giving agency to marginal and marginalized groups and providing a record of actions outside institutional structures. A poster for an exhibition can be as important—or, in terms of its historical presence, more important—as the exhibition itself.

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.

A performance-based course for folks interested in this medium. It is not necessary to have elaborate skill in sound design and editing, though students with this interest are welcome to enroll. All students will perform as actors in each other’s projects. Each week the class will listen to examples of current Radio Play and Theatre Podcast content, and discussion of weekly listenings.

This course offers a continuing introduction to the history and development of world theater and drama. We will experience the vibrant pageant of theater history through an exploration of its conventions and aesthetics, as well as its social and cultural functions. Starting in the nineteenth century, we will read representative plays ranging from the advent of stage Realism and Naturalism with Ibsen and Strindberg, through modern and contemporary drama (from the United States, Europe, Asia, South America, and Africa).

How do we recognize and make fluid forms in dance? How do we find the structural current?  How do we experience time? How do we compose with care and thought using something that keeps moving?  How on earth do we do this?

In this course, we will focus on developing the statistical skills needed to answer questions by collecting data, designing experimental studies, and analyzing large publicly available datasets. The skills learned will also help students to be critical consumers of statistical results. We will use a variety of datasets to develop skills in data management, analysis, and effective presentation of results.

An actor honors and bears witness to humanity by embodying and giving voice to the human element in the landscape of theatrical collaboration. Investigating the impulses and intuitions that make us unique as individuals can also identify what constitutes our shared humanity. Through exploration of the fundamentals of performance, students address the actor’s body, voice, and imagination as instruments for creating drama, conflict, action, and story.

This is a multi-modal course that examines how the body serves as a repository for knowledge. It is open to any student who wishes to explore the complex ways in which histories form around discourses of the body, culture, aesthetic philosophy, and power. Specifically, we will examine the theoretical proposals embedded in the history of modern and postmodern dance, and place this work within a larger social, cultural and political context. We will activate our understanding of these histories through embodied movement practices.

Isn’t the meaning of a work always discovered, to some extent, by its creator during the process of making it?” (Roslyn Sulcas). 

Each term, Bennington Visual Arts offers a program of 4-5 lectures by visiting arts professionals: artists, curators, historians and critics, selected to showcase the diversity of contemporary art practices. Designed to enhance a broader and deeper knowledge of various disciplines and issues in the Visual Arts and to stimulate campus dialogue around topical issues in contemporary art and culture, these thematically curated presentations offer students the opportunity to engage with art by emerging and internationally-known artists from underrepresented backgrounds.

Feminism imagines a world free of gender-based oppression and injustice. But what exactly does such freedom involve? In this course, we’ll investigate the interplay between gender, feminist theory, and philosophical views about freedom. Some prompting questions include: Is individual freedom enough? What does ubiquitous pornography mean for sexual freedom? How does politics shape desire? (How) should we rethink the family and work? Does feminist freedom require freedom from gender?

This Scriptorium, a “place for writing,” functions as a class for writers interested in improving their critical essay-writing skills. We will read to write and write to read. Much of our time will be occupied with discussion, writing, and revising—essai means “trial” or “attempt”—as we create new habits and strategies for our analytical writing. We will write in various essay structures with the aim of developing a well-supported thesis; in addition, we will revise collaboratively, improve our research and citation skills, and study grammar and style.

Throughout history, people have played games — games of chance and games of skill. Many of us grew up playing all kinds of different games, and most of those are infused with the core tenets of statistical reasoning and understanding: probability, risk assessment, expected value, and game theory. This course will look at statistics and probability through this lens. We will consider dice, cards, and several ‘classic’ board games. We will consider situations with both complete and hidden information and how to analyze those.

Why would a forest ecology course include an assignment to knit a wool hat? In this class we will explore the lasting impact of sheep on the Vermont landscape, from the earliest settler-colonizers through today’s small batch fiber mills and second growth forests studded with stone walls. Sheep, and especially a 19th century boom in merino sheep, radically altered Vermont’s forests and inspired early writing on conservation and sustainable land management.

This course is designed for students with no prior string instrument experience. Admission is on a first come, first served basis. Classes will be one on one, individual lessons.

Daily practice  of 10 to 15 minutes is expected, in order for students to become familiar and comfortable with the basic mechanics of playing viola.

Experience with reading music, playing piano, singing or any instrument prior to taking this course is helpful.

Clay responds directly to touch, retains memory and is forced through the dynamic process of firing to fix a point in time. This class will introduce students to a variety of hand-building techniques to construct sculptural and/or utilitarian forms. Students will develop their skills by practicing techniques demonstrated in class. Through making, students’ skills will increase, granting more confidence, and allowing more control over the objects they wish to realize.

In this course we focus our attention on a few of the most exciting composers of the late twentieth-century, and discuss how their music has influenced the music of the current period.

How do we read photographs? What are the stories contained within their borders? How does two, three, or a sequence of images convey a narrative? In this intermediate course, students are guided through a series of assignments that explore the photograph as a narrative pictorial space using analog and digital processes. Structurally the assignments may take a traditional documentary format or a creative thematic narrative format. Image editing and sequencing to strengthen narrative structure will be a key goal of the course.

In an interview with the Paris Review in 1984, James Baldwin spoke of creative writing as a means of "finding out": "When you’re writing, you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don’t want to know, what you don’t want to find out. But something forces you to anyway." This is writing as a form of inquiry, so deep-seated that it's involuntary: the only real, consistently available means we have of gaining better purchase on the world around us, and on ourselves.

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.

Composers throughout the ages have cut their teeth on the study of counterpoint – the intricate practice of writing melodies for several voices sounding at once. In this course, we’ll look mainly at 16th-century composers of counterpoint, and sing through pieces from Palestrina to Weelkes, while learning to compose in a variety of practices such as canons, the motet, and familiar style. We’ll gradually work our way from two-voice to four-voice counterpoint, and set texts in a variety of harmonic styles.

All but a handful of the objects you see in the night sky are stars in our Galaxy, the Milky Way. Although we know about these stars only from studying their light, we know today that they are not just points of light, but large, gravitationally‐bound balls of plasma governed by the laws of physics. Stars, together with dust, gas, and dark matter, are found in larger structures – galaxies. In turn, galaxies, are located in even larger structures called galaxy groups and galaxy clusters.

In this course, students will gain experience with using simple programmable robots and how they can be utilized in STEM education. The focus of this class will be on learning and designing lessons for K-12 students utilizing these robots. This class is accessible for students at all levels of computer programming experience (including none). 

How do we transition to a low-carbon economy in a manner that doesn’t reinscribe the social and environmental injustices that have plagued our fossil-fueled economy? On one hand, the continued burning of fossil fuels is producing environmental crises that threaten to destabilize the very foundations of collective life, with poor and historically marginalized communities bearing the brunt of the suffering. On the other hand, renewable energy technologies are far from environmentally and socially benign.

Commodities such as cars, smartphones, laptops, and refrigerators were initially considered luxuries but are now widely viewed as everyday necessities. This shift suggests that our understanding of need is shaped by social, historical, and cultural context. In this class we will explore questions such as: how do we distinguish what we want from what we need to live a dignified life? Moreover, how might societies determine which types of needs should be satisfied through market exchange and which should not?

This course explores how ideas about the economy – from money, to labor, to distribution – have changed over time. We will focus on different schools of thought in economics, including mercantilism, physiocracy, classical political economy, the Austrian school, Post-Keynesianism, and neoclassical economics, placing these ideas in their global context. A central focus will be on how different thinkers conceptualize capitalism: both its benefits and pitfalls.

This is an environmental policy course with a focus on public action. The class will explore the dimensions of the production, use and disposal of plastics, including climate change impacts, alternatives to single-use plastic packaging, and the need for innovation. There will also be a focus on environmental justice.

To be LGBTQIA and AAPI is to occupy two disparate, marginalized identities that seem to be be in constant flux. What might the literature of this intersection teach us about larger questions of community, belonging, and resistance? This 2000-level class attempts to locate a Queer Asian Pacific America through literature, from Chinese American lesbian poets of the 1980s to Fatimah Asghar's recent cross-genre coming-of-age novel; from David Henry Hwang’s reimagining of Madame Butterfly to queer Hawaiian reclamations of aloha; and beyond.

How can anthropology help us understand political dynamics around the world? This course will introduce students to a range of approaches anthropologists have developed in the study of politics and the political. The course will consider anthropological methods for studying the powerful, the state and institutions, and political movements.

Fake news, reality television, “IRL” – asserting the veracity of our perceptions is a constant preoccupation in contemporary culture. What is real? Realism is a widely used term with multiple connotations: verisimilitude, authenticity, objectivity, truth, fact.

In 1935, at Bennington College, Martha Graham created the iconic work Panorama. This piece “was Graham’s political call to action and her attempt to awaken social consciousness and is a stunning example of 1930s modernism.” The Martha Graham Dance Company returns to Bennington to celebrate its 100th year by teaching and performing this piece.

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.

What do we remember about our lives, and how do these memories contribute to our sense of self?  This course will begin with an introduction to the scientific study of human memory to better understand how autobiographical memory brings episodic, semantic, and other types of memory together.  We will then explore what autobiographical memory has revealed about the development of memory in childhood at brain and behavioral levels.  Cross-cultural research has substantially reshaped the scientific understanding of autobiographical memory, and we will focus particularly on groun

Human mobility has been an inherent human condition throughout history. From earliest human history, women and men have migrated in search of a better life, to populate other places on the planet, or to escape and survive human-made or natural dangers. Today migration is a fact of life for an increasing number of people around the world: there are more than 281 million migrants that cross borders, about 71.2 million that are internally displaced and around 40 million seeking asylum. Almost half of them are women.

This course is designed for new (or new-ish) playwrights, although more experienced playwrights who want to dig into the fundamentals are also welcome. We will focus on eight essential elements of playwriting craft: character, language, subtext, power, place, theatricality, surprise, and an elusive element called the gap. We will experiment with a variety of ways to start a play, and we will gain a greater understanding of our own individual creative methods and routines.

This class will introduce students to creating digital archive that includes digitizing photographs, documents, videotapes and basic types of metadata. We will have discussions about why digitizing personal collections is so important. Students will be expected to bring their own materials to the class.