Class of 2025 Graduates Hit the Ground Running
On May 30 and May 31, Bennington College will celebrate the achievements of the Class of 2025 at the 90th Commencement. Learn more about graduate outcomes across the years.
2025 Commencement Speakers
Choreographer, dancer, and visual artist Kyle Abraham will address the class of 2025 at Bennington College’s 90th Commencement on May 31. Kerry Ryer-Parke ’90 will be the faculty speaker, and Anuarite (Anu) Gikonyo ’25 will be the student speaker.
Friday's Commencement speeches and Saturday’s Conferring of Degrees ceremony will be available to watch on the College’s Commencement webpage.
We couldn’t say goodbye without sharing some of the remarkable accomplishments and valuable impact students have made on campus and beyond throughout their years at Bennington.
We Work Here
Work-integrated learning has been integral to a Bennington education since its founding. Through their four Field Work Term experiences, the class of 2025 explored passions, made professional connections, and gained work experience at institutions ranging from Women’s Project Theater, Food & Water Watch, Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, Habitable, Union of Concerned Scientists, and more.
The Frankenthaler Fellowship, also known as Museum Fellows Term, is an extension of Bennington College’s Field Work Term that gives a small group of students who are interested in the art world the opportunity to live, work, and study in New York City for 20 weeks. Members of the class of 2025—including Chuna Chugay ’25, Lorena Fernández Camba ’25, Ximena Maldonado Mayans ’25, Adam Mathewson ’25, and Grace Muller ’25—took advantage of this opportunity, working at Museum of the Moving Image, Studio Museum in Harlem, Swiss Institute, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC), and Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, respectively.
Over their summer Field Work Term, Chuna Chugay '25 worked as an editorial intern at the Museum of the Moving Image (MoMI).
Paige Colby ’25 and Halley Le ’25 worked with Bennington College’s Office of Marketing and Communications. They covered a variety of student, faculty, and alumni work, including interviews with fellow recent graduates, Will Greer ’24 and Mohammad Tavir Anjum ’25.
Emma Danylin ’25 and Charles Pfeiffer ’25 both used fruit flies in their research for the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU). Pfeiffer studied the effect of probiotics on the gut-brain axis with The Dra. Imilce Lab at the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras, while Danylin went to the University of Connecticut’s Hanlon Lab to study the effect of Wolbachia, an intracellular bacterial parasite found across insect species, on the transmission of B chromosomes.
Rodrigo Diaz ’25 participated in the Young Professional Fellowship in São Paulo, Brazil, in November 2024. During Field Work Term 2025, Diaz completed an internship at the Vermont State House shadowing the Democratic Majority Leader of the Senate, Sen. Kesha Ram-Hinsdale. Diaz attended Senate committees on Education, Economic Development, Housing, and Genera and became familiar with legislative procedures and Vermont politics.
Killion Knight '25 completed a Field Work Term experience at Advocacy Resources, Inc., a nonprofit working to connect queer individuals in need of support to mental and physical health resources.
Through the National Science Foundation’s STROBE Center for Imaging Science and Technology, Halley Le ’25 studied the nanomechanical properties of NiTaTiHf, a next-generation alloy composed of four metallic elements with exceptional heat resistance—niobium, tantalum, hafnium and titanium—at the University of California, Berkeley.
Gates Leonard ’25 had a staged reading of her play Pearls for Spurs at La Mama Experimental Theatre Club, following her Field Work Term internship.
Roberta Martey '25 completed a Field Work Term internship in Kyoto, Japan, where she worked as an intern on a Social Kitchen project with the Africa Diaspora Network Japan.
Annika Owenmark '25 completed a Field Work Term experience at Cal Shakes as the coordinator for the youth summer conservatory.
Shloka Shah '25 completed a Field Work Term experience as a Creative Development Intern at Roy Kapur Films in Mumbai, India.
Mehedi Sizar '25 returned to his birthplace of Bagmara, Rajshahi, Bangladesh, to work with BD Clean, the largest environmental group in Bangladesh as a 2024 Endeavor Foundation Environmental Action Fellow.
As a Field Work Term experience, Miracle Thornton ’25 worked for the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA, as a Summer Program Assistant, where she will return again during summer 2025.
Campus Collaborations
Bennington students make an impact in the local community, during their Field Work Term experiences and beyond.
Sinha Binte Babul ’25 and Mehedi Sizar '25 worked with Southwestern Vermont Medical Center over Field Work Term to analyze data in order to improve population health aims.
Jaren Gallo '25 and Ximena Maldonado Mayans '25 selected works by artist and illustrator J. J. Lankes to display at the Robert Frost Stone House Museum as part of the exhibition Gold Dusted: The Artistry of Arion Press Books.
Karina Gonzalez Perez ’25 re-started the co-ed football (soccer) team after a several year hiatus, with an opening game against Landmark College and an unforgettable match of students versus faculty and staff. The motivation to restart the team came while she was taking a class with Director of CAPA Susan Sgorbati about building community on campus. The team is still active and has games every semester.
Peace Kalomba '25 was a part of a team that advanced spatial and temporal research of PFOA contamination in local wells and earned recognition from the Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation.
Roberta Martey ’25 helped build upon the success of the Slow-Cooked Movement—a student-initiated food security project begun in 2021 with support from faculty member Yoko Inoue—to offer culturally inspired community dinners during Field Work Term.
Ahmed Shuwehdi ’25 made his virtual reality experience of Robert Frost's “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” available to visitors of the College-stewarded Robert Frost Stone House Museum in Shaftsbury, VT.
Awards and Honors
Members of the class of 2025 were awarded prestigious honors and fellowships to expand their experiences in their areas of study.
Chuna Chugay ’25 studied the Koryo-Saram diaspora as part of their work in Visual Arts and Public Action. Chugay received a Newman and Cox Public Action Student Grant in 2023, which they used to interview Koryo-Saram survivors of the ethnic cleansing that happened in the USSR in the 1940s. For a project resulting from this research, Chugay participated in the ten-day Trailer Blaze new artist residency in Seattle, WA, in spring 2025.
Prokriti Projukti Tusti ’25 was invited to present her biology research at the 2025 National Undergraduate Research Conference hosted by Brown University, which welcomed 200 undergraduates from 30 states. Her short films Ordinary Rebels, Gifted, and Biopic Of/By Tusti were also selected for screening at the Lift-Off Filmmaker Sessions Volume 2.
Miracle Thornton ’25 was a 2023 winner of the Rattle Chapbook Prize and received $5,000 and chapbook distribution to all 8,000 of Rattle’s subscribers.
With the support of a $10,000 Davis Projects for Peace grant, Anuarite Wairimu Gikonyo '25 will pursue her project Midundo Ya Amani (“Rhythms of Peace”): Dance for Sustainable Peace in the Grand Lac Region.
Outsized Impact
Bennington students don’t wait to begin making an impact. The work they do, even as undergraduates, changes the world right now.
Members of the class of 2025–including Sinha Binte Babul ’25 and Mohammad Tanvir Anjum ’25–helped establish the Bennington chapter of Women in Data Science.
Rodrigo Diaz ’25, Mia Jay-Pachirat ’25, and Peace Kalomba ’25 traveled to COP28 to participate in a protest for DeltasUNite in order to build capacity for youth with partners drafting a new United Nations Convention on Conserving the River Deltas (UNCCRD).
Myah Garrison ’25 secured a publishing contract for a series of Western novels, following the success of Emmet Buell: Revenge Seeker: A Western Adventure Novel, which she initially wrote for her independent study during her gap year before attending Bennington.
In and Beyond the Classroom: Projects from the Past Four Years
Students from visiting faculty member in Spanish Lena Retamoso Urbano’s Creative Writing in Spanish class–including Ashley Alonso ’25 and Jules Guzmán ’25 –represented Bennington’s Cultural Studies and Languages Program at the First International Multilingual Creative Writing Conference in New York.
Several students, including Jasmine Bete-Mitchell ’25, Julia Duva ’25, and Sofian Holden ’25, learned how to shape foundry wax and prepare sand molds for the purpose of conceiving and realizing an object in iron during Examining Space, a sculpture class with John Umphlett at Salem Art Works.
Lorena Fernández Camba ’25 co-adapted, directed, and set designed the Fall 2025 student production The House of Bernarda Alba. She was also instrumental in the development of the College’s Adaptive Framework, which was the subject of an article in the Fall 2024 issue of Bennington Magazine.
Shadan Karimi '25 took Design for the Pluriverse, a Williams College course dedicated to sustainability and community. As a part of the class, she completed the Pluriverse Pavilion project, which challenged her to translate creative designs into something that was both engineerable and buildable.
Nico Migdal ’25 crafted four mugs in faculty member Anina Major’s Kilns and Firing Techniques course that were donated to Roz’s Cafe for campus use.
Graduate Studies and Future Plans
Bennington graduates bring innovation, creativity, and drive to their work. With an average of ten progressive work experiences woven into their self-driven educational Plan, Bennington graduates are uniquely prepared for the world of work and earn rave reviews from the College’s network of employer partners. Their futures are bright!
Taha Ahmar Qadeer ’25 received offers from University of Massachusetts Amherst, Washington University St. Louis, The University of Virginia, New York University, and others. He will be attending Washington University St. Louis.
Sinha Binte Babul ’25 will be joining an energy consulting company as a full-time data analyst.
Ophelia Brousseau ’25 has secured a place in New York University's prestigious MFA program.
Primo Connolly ’25 has been accepted into the MFA program in fiction at Washington University in St. Louis.
Eve Michelle Dartley ’25 will be attending Columbia University for an MFA in Fiction.
Maxfield Francis Goldman ’25 will be attending Columbia University's MFA in Fiction.
Bella Huettner ’25 will be attending the MFA program in fiction at Columbia University's School of the Arts.
Halley Le ’25 has received offers from Purdue University and Northwestern University for PhD programs in Chemistry and Materials Science & Engineering.
Prokriti Projukti Tusti ’25 has been accepted into five globally renowned Film MFA programs, among which CalArts and Loyola Marymount University are her top two. She deferred her MFA admission and will be joining as a research assistant at Boston Children's Hospital in a lab affiliated with Harvard Medical School this summer.
Miracle Thornton ’24 has received acceptance letters from University of Iowa, University of Michigan, New York University, Syracuse University, and University of Illinois. Thornton will be attending the Helen Zell Writers' Program at the University of Michigan for an MFA in Poetry.