Spring 2026 Course Search

This course aims to experiment with generative and alternative forms of reading that can be thought of as not only a methodology, but as a practice that supports us as we engage in research with, alongside and through study in dance and performance. We will ask ourselves what it means to read and “make sense” of texts and events today…together. 
*For BFA students this course satisfies Critical Studies credit.
 

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.

Fundamentals of 2-D animation principles will be explored through drawing, from basic motion cycles to straight-ahead animation. Students will primarily work with wet/dry mediums on paper, with additional instruction in After Effects compositing workflow, and digital drawing. Weekly exercises will explore a variety of animation techniques to create short projects. While Screenings, critiques and demonstrations parallel regular viewings of student work.

“When I combine imagery and text, I'm really just trying to surprise myself,” writes poet Diane Khoi Nguyen. In fact, there are many pathways to surprise when we start to experiment with multimedia. Certainly the result must have been surprising when the late John Giorno, in 1968, developed the phone-based, poetry performance project, Dial-a-Poem.

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.

Balkan music is fierce brass, complex harmonies, and mind-bending asymmetrical dances. It is spirited Macedonian wedding music, dissonant village songs, devastating Bosnian love ballads, Greek polyphonic songs, and heart-pounding Turkish rhythms. In the Bennington Balkan Ensemble, we will learn to perform a variety of traditional, urban, village, and popular music from Southeast Europe. Singing and playing indigenous, orchestral, and electronic instruments, we’ll explore repertoire from Albania, Greece, Bosnia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Croatia, Kosova, Turkey, Macedonia, Romania, and Serbia.

The U.N. estimates that there are 281 international migrants in the world, a number that has grown precipitously over the past half century and shows little sign of dissipating. Over the same time period, anti-immigrant parties and leaders have sprung up across much of the world, with visions of national revitalization contingent upon militarized borders and mass deportations. How might we understand the complex and contradictory forces that give rise to such a reality?

Individual private lessons for advanced students, with focus on the classical repertoire. Students will meet with the instructor weekly on scheduled class days, at times to be arranged with the instructor. Two excused absences permitted, with every effort made for make-up lessons. Daily practice is expected, and participation in Tuesday evening music workshop and performance at the end-of-term recital are required.

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.

Catastrophic events—droughts, earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, and landslides—are growing in frequency and intensity around the world. As more of the global population concentrates in urban areas, the nature and consequences of these natural hazards are taking on a distinct and often violent shape in today’s metropolises and megacities. This course investigates how urban life reshapes both the impact of disasters and our capacity to respond to them.

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.

Students with burgeoning linguistic skills will learn the language through an immersion in Latin American and Spanish film in the second half of this full-year introduction to the Spanish-speaking world. While there will be some discussion of more common tactics such as stylistic nuances, script-writing, acting, dubbing, and directors’ biographies, it is expected that we will continue to develop sufficient linguistic ability to focus on cinematographic and social movements, thus treating the films as ideologemes, representations of political import.

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.

This course will support the rehearsal and performance process of the student-directed productions. Students who are cast in the productions through the Drama Auditions will enroll in this 2-credit section.

This course will support student directors in the rehearsal and production process of their faculty-approved projects. It will provide a structured framework for students to conceive, rehearse, and present their theatrical productions under the guidance of faculty. Students will develop a collaborative process as they direct and manage productions from inception through performance.

Economic inequality is often described in terms of uneven distribution of income and wealth. Yet, more importantly, it reflects uneven access to opportunities, advantages, and life chances. Why do some people enjoy a higher standard of living and better quality of life than others? Are such inequalities fair and just? What role do history, policy, and institutions play in sustaining or reducing inequality?

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?

This class will introduce students to the fundamentals of scenic art, including terminology, and commonly used tools and techniques. Students will learn to create processes that will guide them from a rendering or scenic finish to a completed project. Skills we will develop include color mixing, surface preparation for soft goods and hard scenery, translating small renderings to fully realized pieces, analyzing and reproducing organic textures and architectural details.

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.

Drawing from news articles, interviews, archival materials, and more, writers throughout the 20th and 21st Centuries have sought to document the world through poetry.

What is the lyric? How did lyric poetry emerge as a genre, and how have reading practices evolved alongside it? This is a 2-credit survey class exploring theoretical engagements with the modern idea of the lyric, including readings in genre theory, new criticism, structuralism,  post-structuralism, and beyond.

This class will introduce students to basic concepts of improvised dancing with particular focus on effort.  Class will begin with an embodied check-in and a gentle warm-up. Weekly exercises will move students through various investigations regarding effort, from organ systems to Buddhist teachings to personal preferences to the laws of Physics. While the course's references will be wide-ranging, the objective of the class will always be to learn by doing and to physicalize knowledge. 

Introduction to Computer Science 2 continues the design-recipe approach started in Introduction to Computer Science 1. We extend our toolkit from structural recursion into generative recursion, abstraction, and algorithmic problem-solving. Students move beyond simple data definitions to work with more sophisticated structures (trees, graphs, sets, maps) while beginning to reason about program efficiency and resource use.

Digital Realities: Rhino 8 and the Art of Making is an introductory course in Digital Fabrication using Computer-Aided Design (CAD) and Computer Numerically Controlled (CNC) equipment. This course will explore the use of 3D Printers, CNC Laser Cutters, and CNC Routers to create custom objects modeled in Rhino 8. The course will cover the necessary workflows and parameters used for each machine, as well as general maintenance, material management, and best practices. This course aims to build technical skills and consider aesthetics, functionality, and design concepts.

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.

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 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.

This course explores the art and science of mixing and producing audio for both emergent immersive formats and traditional legacy platforms. Students will gain hands-on experience with spatial audio technologies such as Dolby Atmos, Ambisonics, and binaural mixing, while also mastering industry-standard techniques for stereo and 5.1 surround sound production.

This ensemble-based course explores the intersection of live performance, experimental soundscapes, and dub aesthetics. Rooted in the traditions of dub music—including remix culture, delay and reverb manipulation, and bass-driven textures—students will create immersive sonic environments using a mix of acoustic instruments, electronic tools, field recordings, and live effects processing.

This seminar course investigates the cultural, philosophical, and aesthetic dimensions of sound through critical readings, listening exercises, and discussions. Drawing from fields such as sound studies, media theory, musicology, literature, and art, Readings in Sound challenges students to consider how sound shapes experience, knowledge, identity, and space.

An advanced course in sonic contraptions, for students who have already completed significant work in sound, visual design, or project management.  Starting with Collins’ Hardware Hacking, we’ll review soldering, circuit bending (i.e. “tickling the clock”), and associated topics, such as no-input mixing and basic circuit tinkering. We will look at alternative methods of physical sound creation through programming languages and mechanical paradigms such as solenoids and sensors.

This course is for experienced student artists with a firm commitment to serious work in the studio. Students will work primarily on self-directed projects in an effort to refine individual concerns and subject matter. Students will present work regularly for critique in class as well as for individual studio meetings with the instructor. Development of a strong work ethic will be crucial.

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.

Self-taught guitar playing often begins with the recognition of simple patterns, evolving into complexity. These patterns, while helping us gain familiarity, can eventually become a constrictive box, requiring new material to refresh the old.  How do we make a song more effective through focusing on guitar, how can we make a song find its destination? This course develops each student’s guitar practice in tandem with songwriting, while challenging players to hear all notes, chords, rhythms, and breaks as viable.

The Tuning in the Trees is an advanced seminar in microtonality that treats tuning systems as both technical structures and living landscapes. Students will explore how musical intervals emerge from natural patterns—such as tree bifurcations, harmonic ratios, and number sequences—while engaging deeply with Just intonation, Meantone, Bohlen–Pierce, and other non-Western tunings.

Actions in Practice employs Sidra Bell's CONTEMPORARY SYSTEMS, an interior and material approach to movement that encourages provocative thought and an immersive approach to the subject matter of the body. The work demands a high degree of physicality and input from the dancers, encouraging them to execute movement with intention, curiosity, and empathy.

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.

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?  

In this course we will be taking a hands on approach to understanding the lever harp both historically and compositionally. We will be building and stringing small 19 string harps which will be used as the basis for our compositional work where students will be creating new works of varying length for the lever harp to be presented at the end of the semester. We’ll look at what techniques are and are not achievable, what makes this instrument unique to other harps, and how to include it in larger compositional contexts.

This course will focus on the learning of traditional Scottish and Irish melodies on the harp as well as developing foundational technique. This will include looking at body posture, the importance of relaxation and its relationship to developing good tone, and finger placement. In group lessons, students will learn melodies and exercises the traditional aural way, by ear, and simple notation and recordings will be provided at the end of each class to use as a reference for practice during the week.

This course enables students to undertake the research essential for composing their thesis or completing a project within their field of study or area of interest. Enrollment requires the submission of a comprehensive project proposal to Ikuko Yoshida, which must include a project title, a brief description, a list of relevant preparatory courses, and clearly articulated objectives and goals. 

This fourth-term Japanese course is purposefully designed to enable students to create digital books that promote cultural understanding among Japanese children. The curriculum begins with students engaging with short stories and Japanese animations to analyze expected behaviors and communication styles among Japanese children. Additionally, students examine social and cultural values in Japan—focusing on how these values are conveyed and how gender roles are represented in children’s literature and media.

How are language and thought connected, and does speaking multiple languages affect these connections?  Most people have had the experience of struggling to come up with a particular word or phrase, sometimes recalling it after a substantial delay.  This course will unpack the mental processes involved in that experience and explore the ways that cognitive psychology -- the study of thought -- has been broadened by investigations of monolingual and multilingual language use.

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

Borrowed from the subtitle of Lois Ellfeldt & Edwin Carne's seminal 1971 Dance Production Handbook, "Later is Too Late" became a mantra for the course instructor after finding a well-worn copy of the paperback in his roadbox for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company.  In this course we will examine the specific technical challenges and design opportunities presented in the production of dance performance, including the role that planning and management can play in overcoming the structural inequities and lack of resources endemic to the form.  Through readings,

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 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.