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. 

Mahjong 麻将／麻雀  is a very fun game that originated in China and it is common to see groups of Chinese people playing Mahjong in parks, tea shops, bars or just by the side of the street. Mahjong utilizes white tiles with Chinese characters and symbols. It is similar to the western card game of Rummy and is a game of strategy, calculation and chance. It is a game of patience but easy to learn. This class is designed to be a fun way to learn about Taiwanese culture and acquire some Chinese/Mandarin language.

This course explores how photographers translate artistic concepts into the materiality of bookmaking, giving students insight into the basic steps of creating a photobook. The course will experiment with different book designs, paper qualities, digital printing, binding techniques, sequencing exercises, intervened photography, photo-collage, and layering.

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 is an in-depth exploration of improvised comedy scene work, with a central focus on finding and playing “Game.” Game is loosely defined as a pattern of unusual behavior that breaks from the pattern of your everyday life. In other words, Game is what's funny about your scene.

To play Game in a long-form scene, you’ll learn to answer three key questions:

• What is the situation?

• What is the first unusual thing?

• If this is true, then what else is true?

Students in this advanced level course will engage in research through both texts and images. Reflective writing and constructive peer critiques will expand their critical thinking and expand their photographic practice. Individual feedback by the instructor will be geared towards the progressive development of the student’s semester long project. By the end of the semester, students will produce visual and written work that is representative of their creative exploration over the course of the term.

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 examines the visual representation and performance of race, gender, and fashionable dress from roughly 1504 to 1954. For elite early modern sitters, portraits were a valued means of constructing a public image, securing a spouse, memorializing the dead, and emphasizing political and dynastic relationships.

This advanced seminar offers students the opportunity to pursue a term-long project in history.  Asking the historian’s three basic questions – why this? why here? and why now? – each student will be able to do a deep dive into their chosen piece of the past.  For some, this will be the venue for writing their SCT senior theses.  For others, this will be the place where they can produce a historical project appropriate to their Plan. Writing will take place throughout term, and all students in this seminar will receive weekly feedback.

These technical applications, can lead you to a concept due to the design/practicality of said application.

Aristocles (known to us as "Plato") lived and wrote in Athens in the 5th c. BCE. More than 2400 years later, Alfred North Whitehead’s famous remark still resonates: “The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato…the wealth of general ideas scattered through them…have made [Plato’s] writings an inexhaustible mine of suggestion” (Process and Reality, 1929).

This course introduces students to the basic language of 3D animation and modeling.  Students will be expected to become familiar with the basic principles of the MAYA program. A series of modeled objects placed in locations will be created. The emphasis will be on becoming proficient with modelling forms, texturing using Arnold Renderer, basic animation and utilizing lights and cameras.