Spring 2026 Course Search

In her essay, Violence, director Anne Bogart writes, "Richard Foreman, perhaps the most intellectual of American directors, said that, for him, creation is one hundred percent intuitive. I have learned that he is right. This is not to say that one must not think analytically, theoretically, practically and critically. There is a time and a place for this kind of left-brain activity, but not in the heat of discovery in rehearsal and not in front of an audience. As soon as the door closes in rehearsal or as soon as the curtain goes up in performance, there is no time to think or reflect.

An herbarium is a museum of pressed plants, a record of flora following a system that dates back to the 16th century. Large herbaria at institutions like D.C.’s Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, Chicago’s Field Museum, Cambridge’s Harvard University, and London’s Kew Gardens contain millions of specimens, collected from around the world. But, most herbaria are small herbaria, with less than 10,000 specimens.

How can we create machines that think, learn, and solve problems? This course explores the fascinating field of artificial intelligence (AI), introducing the fundamental concepts, techniques, and ethical considerations that drive this rapidly evolving discipline.

Building upon your programming knowledge, you will explore key AI paradigms including search algorithms, evolutionary algorithms, swarm intelligence, and machine learning.  You will implement AI solutions to real-world problems, and gain an understanding of how to think about contemporary AI development.

This course is for students who are doing advanced work in Sustainable Agriculture or community engagement work. Students will create an individual project developing project management skills that include planning, research, development, and implementation. The students will have the opportunity to collaborate with a community partner and will present their completed project at the end of term. A small project budget will be provided supported by The Bennington Fair Food Initiative grant.

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.

Born to a multilingual family and culture, with connections to both India and Pakistan, and educated at Cambridge in the UK, Rushdie was already a celebrated writer when an Iranian clerical fatwa against him in 1989 launched him to another level of fame (or infamy). Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini charged Rushdie with blasphemy in his novel, Satanic Verses, published the prior fall (1988), offering a bounty for his life. The fatwa was never repealed.

This course covers the breadth of university calculus: differentiation, integration, infinite series, and ordinary differential equations. It focuses on concepts and interconnections. In order to cover this much material, computational techniques are de-emphasized. The approach is historically based and classical, following original texts where possible.

The course will be for sustained work on an animation or design project, and should be a space for both experimentation, ambition and a consistent endeavor.  Students will be expected to create a complete animation, a series of experiments, projection or interactive project.  The expectation is that students will be fully engaged in all aspects of the class from critiques, to experimenting with ideas, undertaking research and being present.

When you first learn how to paint, the focus is typically on gaining facility with the application and manipulation of paint to articulate the subject. In this intermediate course, we shift our attention to the often overlooked step that precedes painting: preparing the surface. 

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?

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?

Accessibility describes the practice of freeing a space or an event so it might be visited by more people in more ways than one could ever presume at the outset. In this course, we will explore the litany of practices that allow more people (and in particular, disabled, mad, and chronically ill people) into all spheres of public life with a particular focus on performance events.

The captivity narrative is a uniquely American literary form, a distinct, adventure-driven offshoot of the Puritan spiritual autobiography--with affinities to the slave narrative--that has more in common with today's reality-based media programming that you might think. We'll spend the term looking closely at the captivity narratives that form the canon, beginning with the Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson (1682), and charting developments in the genre as it exploded with the so-called Indian wars between the U.S.

Historical Dress: The Park-McCullough Project Spring '26

Working in collaboration with the local Park-McCullough Historic Governor’s Mansion, students will create a new archive of the historic dress collection.

What does intimacy reveal about our social worlds? This seminar explores a range of recent methods in the study of intimacy, as well as what it means to make intimate knowledge claims. Through neighboring concepts in Anthropology, such as kinship, friendship and relatedness, as well as through intimacy’s imbrication with economy, sexuality, violence, and more-than-human worlds, this course considers the varied shapes that intimacy takes across distinct social worlds.

Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) was a political theorist whose work has become increasingly influential in recent years. A student of Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers, her extensive writings cover such topics as the nature of power, the meaning of the political, and the problem of revolution. This course is a detailed exploration of some of her major works, including The Human Condition, On Revolution, and Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, as well as an engagement with some of the critical literature on her work.

This course examines the history of immigration to the United States. How did this country become a “nation of immigrants”? How did immigration become so central to American national identity? What are this country’s purported ideals on the subject and has it ever lived up to them?  

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 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.