Two Bennington College Faculty Members Awarded Prestigious 2026 Fellowships from the Marion and Jasper Whiting Foundation
Faculty members Mariam Rahmani and Sue Rees have been named 2026 Whiting Fellows by the Marion and Jasper Whiting Foundation.
Two Bennington College faculty members have been named 2026 Whiting Fellows by the Marion and Jasper Whiting Foundation, which provides funding for travel that will deepen and expand their teaching and curriculum development. These competitive awards support educators at New England colleges and universities in pursuing research that broadens the mind and enriches instruction.
This year’s recipients from Bennington College are faculty member in Literature Mariam Rahmani and faculty member in Visual Arts Sue Rees.
Mariam Rahmani’s project, Deadly Writing: Learning from Salman Rushdie, will hone a course by the same title, which Rahmani taught at Bennington this term, and will inform a new course, Writing After Rushdie, which will debut in the 2026-2027 academic year. Rahmani will gather research throughout travels to Mumbai and to the Kashmir Valley, places central to Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses and Midnight’s Children, and examine how domestic politics—such as that which informed the Iranian fatwa—can help shape global literature, how cultural and state politics interact, the politics of a novel, and freedom of expression. Writing After Rushdie, a fiction workshop, will use Rushdie’s body of work as a springboard and teach students to learn how to write setting and take formal risks. The classes are an invitation for students to learn to speak at once freely and ethically as storytellers, whether of fiction, our own stories, or other histories.
“It's an honor to be given this opportunity by the Whiting Foundation,” said Rahmani. “I am grateful and excited to see how this can continue to develop our literary and creative writing communities at Bennington.”
Sue Rees’s project, Exploring 3D Worlds: Animation and Puppet Making, will take her to the Czech Republic to study leading traditions in stop-motion animation and puppetry at institutions and studios in Prague and Pilsen with the goal of enriching her long-running animation program at Bennington College. By visiting sites such as the Academy of Arts, Architecture, and Design in Prague (UMPRUM); the Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts (FAMU); and the University of West Bohemia, as well as professional studios, Rees will observe how contemporary practitioners integrate analog and digital techniques while drawing on a rich artistic lineage shaped by figures like Jan Švankmajer, Jiří Trnka, and Jiří Barta. She will also research historical and cultural influences—from Giuseppe Arcimboldo to Karel Zeman—to create new teaching materials, including visual documentation and expanded coursework on puppet construction, set design, and experimental animation practices grounded in one of the world’s most influential centers of the medium. She will use the experience to create new teaching materials and expanded coursework on puppet construction, set design, and experimental animation practices grounded in one of the world’s most influential centers of the medium.