Spring 2026 Course Search

Dance, Musicals, Opera - a costume studio practice

The class will consist of three elements-

1) Designing a produced piece in drama or dance

2) A paper project designing costumes for a music based narrative piece (ie:opera, musical theatre, dance)

This advanced level intensive course is designed for students who have prior experience of making a work around a body, especially (yet not limited) in dance, theater and visual arts contexts. Inspired by butoh-based movement practice, Buddhism and French post-structuralism philosophies, students will seek a way of liberating a body from a socially pre-conditioned self.

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.

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.

Multivariable calculus is one of the core parts of an undergraduate mathematics curriculum. Introductory calculus mostly concentrates on situations where there is one input and one output variable; multivariable extends differentiation, integration, and differential equations to cases where there are multiple input and output variables. In this way, multivariable calculus combines calculus and linear algebra; the subject can also be called vector and matrix calculus.

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.  

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.

The dramaturg serves as a powerful medium in the theatre. They bridge the past and the present, the creative team and the audience, while providing critical generosity and historical and literary insight. In this course, we will learn about the history and practice of dramaturgy, while learning how the critical and research skills of the dramaturg can apply to a wide array of theatrical and artistic disciplines. Through a varied blend of weekly readings, discussion, small-group activities, and independent projects, students will engage with various tools and methods of dramaturgy.

“If you are really doing it, you don’t have time to watch yourself doing it.” Sanford Meisner was an actor and founding member of the Group Theater. He went on to become a master teacher of acting who sought to give students an organized approach to the creation of truthful behavior on stage within the imaginary circumstances of a play. This class focuses on developing an actor’s ability to listen, follow their impulses, trust their instincts, and work from moment to moment off of an acting partner.

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

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

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 will look into the use of the kiln as an integral tool and part of the creative process in ceramic art. We will explore various different kilns and firing techniques, learning the roles of fire and atmosphere in transforming glaze components into desired surfaces. We will also discuss the history of kiln technology and how it has influenced the development of wares, kiln building, and the theoretical basis for kiln design and firing. Students will be expected to develop and produce work independently outside of class time for use in the firings.

In this course, students will develop skills in aural perception, learning to visualize, sing, and notate music through melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic exercises. Students will learn to identify key signatures, intervals, 7th chords, triads, key relationships, common cadences and phrase structures, larger forms, tempo markings, and more.

Beyond Columbus’ errant journey into the abyss and the ensuing quest for El Dorado, or Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle, Latin America’s interior has often enticed its own learned population. Their travels, in space, time and thought, do not merely present a physical confrontation with alterity, with the continent’s supposed heart of darkness, but an intellectual clearing, an origin, from which a more equitable politics may begin.

Why does chronic hunger endure even in times of prosperity? How can famine devastate entire regions in extreme cases, while food deserts quietly persist in wealthy countries like the United States? And what does it mean to treat nourishment not as charity or commodity, but as a right of citizenship?

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.

The CAPA Workshop is for Seniors who are engaged in their advanced work and want to complete a project as part of it in Public Action.Students are able to connect this work to any area of study at Bennington College. Each student will be required to assemble a digital portfolio that will include their research or thesis, along with a description and implementation of their project during the term. A proposal form will be required once admitted to the class. Projects, can be local, national or international. 

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

The Holocaust is one of the most ethically challenging, traumatic, and consequential occurrences in modern history. This seminar aims to give students a granular understanding of the mass oppression, enslavement, and genocide that occurred in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s, in order to then consider how it has been represented in poetry, drama, fiction, and nonfiction both by survivors of the this historical humanitarian crisis and those who've followed.

Journalism & Democracy is the result of a grant and partnership with the Center for Community News at the University of Vermont, a national network of student journalism programs around the United States. The course recognizes the essential role that the arts and culture play in a healthy democracy. Arts and culture invite us to experience perspectives and ways of life different from our own; they shape conversations about freedom, equal rights and other values that are at the core of American society; and they help us engage with the world in new and important ways.

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.

In this course, we will examine French culture’s engagement with questions of sexuality and gender, with a focus on authors, artists, theorists, and others who have questioned ideas of normative sexuality from the Middle Ages through the 21st century. Authors and texts to be studied may include Marie de France, Gabrielle d’Estrées et l'une de ses soeurs, Montaigne, l’Abbé de Choisy, Charles Perrault (La Belle au bois dormant), le Chevalier d’Eon, Virginie Despentes, Paul Preciado, Wendy Delorme, Abdellah Taïa, Edouard Louis, Bambi (Sebastian Lifshitz), and Parole de King (Chriss Lag).

In this sixth-term Japanese course, students will examine how Buddhism influenced Japanese thought on the afterlife and analyze how Japanese views on the relationship between life and death are depicted in Japanese films.  In the first seven weeks of the course, students will examine and discuss the history, beliefs, and deities of Buddhism, as well as their influences on society.  In the second half of the term, students will analyze how death and the common theme of reincarnation are depicted in different genres of Japanese films, such as love stories and

In this course we will explore spiraling in and out of the floor.