April 21, 2026

Jong-Fast will address the 91st graduating class during the conferring of degrees at 10:00 am on Saturday, May 30. In addition to Jong-Fast’s address, the faculty speaker will be faculty member in Japanese Language and Culture Ikuko Yoshida, and the senior student speaker will be Andy Farrell ’26. The student speaker will deliver remarks at the senior dinner on Friday, May 29. The faculty speaker will address attendees at both events. Both the Friday evening speeches and the Saturday Commencement ceremony will be livestreamed from Bennington College’s website.

Molly Jong-Fast is a contributing writer for the opinion page at The New York Times, an MSNOW political contributor, and host of the Fast Politics podcast. Molly is the author of four books, including her latest memoir, the New York Times best-selling title: How to Lose Your Mother. Her writing has appeared across the media spectrum including in Vanity Fair, The New York Review of Books, The Wall Street Journal, and The Atlantic.

“We are thrilled that Molly Jong-Fast will come to Bennington to deliver this year’s Commencement address,” said Bennington College’s Interim President Elissa Tenny. “Molly is a distinguished alum of the Bennington Writing Seminars and has experienced great acclaim for her honesty and forthrightness in both her writing and her political commentary. I look forward to hearing her message for our graduates.”

Faculty speaker Ikuko Yoshida has been a faculty member at Bennington College since 1998, where she teaches Japanese language and culture, Japanese aesthetics and Ikebana, and foreign language education. Her research interests include second language acquisition, pedagogy, critical thinking, technology in language learning, and Japanese aesthetics. Her courses are designed to foster not only linguistic proficiency, but also the development of cognitive skills—particularly critical thinking—through engagement with Japanese literature, art, history, and religion. 

The 2026 Senior Speaker, Andy Farrell ’26, is a Philosophy and Computer Science student focused on exploring the theoretical possibilities of machine consciousness. For the past year, they have served as the first student representative on the advisory board for the new Bennington Center for Artificial Intelligence. Andy has worked as a First Year Forum co-leader, run Drag Club, and co-created the now-annual Jennings haunted house. In their free time, they work as a mentor for high school students and as a tutor for K-12 students.