Class of 2026 Graduates Hit the Ground Running
On May 29 and May 30, Bennington College will celebrate the achievements of the Class of 2026 at the 91st Commencement. Learn more about graduate outcomes across the years.
2026 Commencement Speakers
Author and political analyst Molly Jong-Fast MFA ’04 will address the class of 2026 at Bennington College’s 91st Commencement on May 31. Ikuko Yoshida will be the faculty speaker, and Andy Farrell ’26 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 2026 explored passions, made professional connections, and gained work experience at institutions ranging from Food and Water Watch, Environmental Advocates NY, Cafeteria Culture, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Billie Holiday Theater, Women’s Project Theater, Green Writers Press, Berkshire Art Center, Sierra Club Rio Grande Chapter, 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 2026—including Zinariya Ali '26, Julia Chow '26, Aviva Feinberg '26, Mac Goulis '26, Lorelei Kurowski '26, Carissa Lombardi '26, June Meuser '26, Joy Stacy '26, and Holland Williams '26—took advantage of this opportunity, working at The Kitchen, Queens Museum, Dia Art Foundation, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC), Studio Museum in Harlem, Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, Swiss Institute, Museum of the Moving Image, and Cooper Hewitt, respectively.
Over the summer 2025 Field Work Term, Lyra Holahan '26 worked with architect Rafe Churchill ’91 and a team of Bennington students as part of Place in Mind, a hotelier dedicated to resurrecting historically unique properties. The team rebuilt the former bell tower at a historic seminary in Old Bennington, VT, and gained hands-on experience across multiple phases of construction, including demolition, framing, insulation, drywall, and tile work.
During summer 2025, Andrea Lara ’26 was one of 60 students chosen from 50,000 applicants to study at Brown University. She was one of nine in the Ecology, Evolution, and Organismal Biology cohort, and she was tasked with studying cleaner shrimp in the Caves Lab at Brown, assisting with important postdoctoral research. She also reconnected with members of the lab to invite them as guest speakers for Bennington’s Science Workshop series in Spring 2026.
Following her Education and Writing internship at Uptown Stories during the Winter 2023 Field Work Term period, Lara was offered a part-time position as a Development Assistant for the nonprofit arts organization. She will continue to work with them post-graduation.
Jason de la Peña '26 and Edison Hicks ’26 shared their experiences interning at Green Writers Press.
Jay Clark '26 studied Literature and Environmental Studies at Bennington. For his summer 2025 Field Work Term, Clark worked as an archival intern for the OUTWORDS Archive, which captures, preserves, and shares the stories of LGBTQIA2S+ elders to build community and catalyze social change. For his 2025 winter FWT, he spent six weeks in the archives at the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University indexing documents from 1970-2016 detailing expeditions to northeastern China. Clark said, “It was incredible to work with field experts, flex my skills in archival practices/thought, and it pushed me to commit to applying to graduate school!”
Aliza Khan '26 studied Visual Arts, including Architecture and Sculpture, at Bennington. For their summer 2025 Field Work Term, Khan worked as an intern for Yasue Maetake, a New York City-based Japanese sculptor.
Georgia Hauser '26 studied Visual Arts at Bennington. Last summer, Hauser completed a Field Work Term experience as a volunteer for Project 412, which helped bring artist Thomas Dambo's Alexa's Elixir to Detroit Lakes, Minnesota.
Erin Racklin '26 studied Psychology and Anthropology at Bennington. Racklin completed a Field Work Term experience at Resilience, Inc, which provides Social Emotional Learning (SEL) tools to K-12 schools.
Alex Bregy '26 studied English Literature and Video Production at Bennington. Bregy completed a Field Work Term experience split between two sites: the Young Writers Project and the DREAM Program. Bregy continued working with the DREAM Program during all four years at Bennington, including serving as a site manager in summer 2025, where he managed a team of 10 Bennington students (as counselors) and 30 youth (ages 6-14) at a summer day camp that is offered for free to Bennington residents who are living in low-income housing communities.
Coco Rohde '26 reflected on her Field Work Term experience at Brooklyn Children’s Theatre. Wrote Rohde of the experience, “I helped with pretty much everything, including devising a script the kids had written, prop making, website rebuilding, newsletter, set work, scratch tracks and music, kid wrangling, fundraising, and administrative support. Despite this being such a short time, I never felt bogged down by any of it!”
Julius Boxer-Cooper '26 studied Music, Linguistics, and Chinese at Bennington and also studied abroad in Taiwan. During summer 2024, Boxer-Cooper completed a Field Work Term experience at Ashé Records.
Will Parker '25 studied Acting in Theater at Bennington. During the 2024 Field Work Term, Parker worked at Roundabout Theatre Company in New York City.
At Bennington, José Rubén Ruiz Garrido '26 studied Drama with a focus on Acting and Stage Design. During his Field Work Term experience as a Lucille Lortel Fellow at Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), he gained a new approach to theater and a different perspective on the arts.
Tisa Shrestha '26 studied Architecture at Bennington and supplemented her Plan with coursework in Mathematics and Environmental Studies. During the 2024 Field Work Term, Shrestha worked at Local Initiatives for Biodiversity (LI-BIRD), a Nepal-based NGO that supports the sustainable management of natural resources in support of smallholder farmers.
Ananda Zamarron Carbajal '26 studied Drama at Bennington, with a particular focus on acting and design. She spent her 2024 Field Work Term interning at XTR Studios, a film production company founded by Bryn Mooser ’01. She worked with Mooser again in 2025 at XTR, a company focused on non-fiction film and television studio based in Echo Park, Los Angeles.
Campus Collaborations
Bennington students make an impact in the local community, during their Field Work Term experiences and beyond.
Along with several other individuals, August Schnell ’26 brought forward the idea of securing a $1,000 Stewarts Shops grant on behalf of the Bennington Free Library. The grant will be used to support dementia-related care resources for patrons of the library.
Mattias Van Cleef '26 presented "My Fleeting Moments," a solo exhibition, from May 1–7, 2026, at JAYS – Bennington Artisan Market (B.A.M.) in downtown Bennington.
Eliana Carr ’26 participated in an International Food Day event, gathering Bennington College students and faculty and members of the local Japanese community to cook, connect, and celebrate.
Shashvat Shah ’26 applied Data Science to drive healthcare decisions at Southwestern Vermont Medical Center.
August Schnell ’26, Alejandra Vouga Aguilera ’26, and Kasha Butterfield ’26 were part of a team that received certificates of appreciation from the State of Vermont for their work analyzing well-testing data in a PFAS contamination zone around former ChemFab Corp. factories in the town of Bennington.
August Schnell ’26 and Miriam Bloom ’26 published a front-page opinion essay in the Bennington Banner that laid out the case against parking the LPG trains in local neighborhoods.
Awards and Honors
Members of the class of 2026 were awarded prestigious honors and fellowships to expand their experiences in their areas of study.
New for 2026, the Commencement Fellowship pilot will support three outstanding graduating visual arts seniors at a critical juncture—the beginning of their lives after Bennington. This unprecedented opportunity provides $18,500 in support to assist fellows in launching lives in the visual arts. The inaugural Commencement Fellows are Zuza Gaboush ’26, Natalie Bayeslan ’26, and Aviva Feinberg ’26. This pilot fellowship program is generously supported by the Ponsold Motherwell Charitable Trust.
Meri Mkrdumyan ’26 received a scholarship/fellowship for research conducting interviews and working with displaced Armenians to process grief and loss through embodied practice.
“Catastrophe Theory," a poem by Blu Mehari '26, was selected by poet Matthew Shenoda for the 2025 Green Prize for Poetry by the Academy of American Poets and was featured on their website.
How to Kill a Deer, a play by Timmy Torinus ’26, was selected for the 2025 New South Young Playwrights Festival at Horizon Theatre Company in Atlanta. Constance and Grace, a play by Miriam Campbell '26, was selected for the 2024 festival.
Outsized Impact
Bennington students don’t wait to begin making an impact. The work they do, even as undergraduates, changes the world right now.
On March 14, 2026, Beatrix Sherry ’26 and Carissa K. Lombardi '26 co-facilitated a restorative justice circle combined with succulent planting. The event, part of the Restorative Justice Collective’s Pi Day celebration, centered on building community. Sherry and Lombardi also facilitated a series of Senior FLoW (First-Generation, Low-Income, and Working-Class) circles on campus to build community among FLoW seniors, reflect on this time of transition, and share resources with one another.
Shashvat Shah ’26 and Atlas Seres ’26 are published contributors to a peer-reviewed genomics paper in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution from December 2025, titled “Recombination Suppression Drives Expansion of the Drosophila Dot Chromosome.” Through manual gene curation and comparative genomic analysis, students helped identify chromosome-specific size expansion across species of fruit fly.
Zee Camp '26 hosted a disability-centered ceramic lesson, Creature Creation, at Context Collective in Troy, NY.
Andrea Lara ’26 was one of four students to represent Bennington’s Cultural Studies and Languages Program at the First International Multilingual Creative Writing Conference in New York.
In and Beyond the Classroom: Projects from the Past Four Years
Julius Boxer-Cooper ’26 prepared two senior works: his music concert and his thesis in linguistics. The concert featured several ensembles playing Boxer-Cooper’s original compositions in a wide range of styles, including jazz, rock, fusion, disco, doo-wop, rhumba, and third stream, as well as one piece of standard classical solo repertoire. In his thesis, Boxer-Cooper sought to clarify historical ambiguity relating to dialect shift and Koineization in the Abenaki language as a result of war and forced migration. His hopes are that phonological comparison of terms from dictionaries of different eras and dialects can yield some clues as to how dialect leveling and simplification might have played out.
For her senior project, Anne Pötzsch wrote a critical thesis in literature on the figure of the flâneur in contemporary transnational literature, called “The Immigrant Flâneur: Urban Wandering in Yoko Tawada’s Das nackte Auge and Teju Cole’s Open City.”
For her senior work, Coco Rohde ’26 put on “Garden of Horrors,” a production set in the light lab that utilized crochet and found fabric. Rohde wishes to thank the project’s producer Lily Ercoline ’26 and the cast—Landon, Ace, and Lorelai—as well as faculty members Tilly Grimes, Michael Giannitti, Seancolin Hankins, and Davison Scandrett for their help.
At the 2026 Northeast Natural History Conference in Burlington, VT, Alejandra Vouga Aguilera '26 presented a talk on her herbarium-based research over the past three years in the Ecology and Field Biology Lab. Kai Bjork '26, Willa Donovan '26, and Nora Beer '26 presented posters on their herbarium-based research.
Sixteen seniors presented their Advanced Work in Society, Culture, and Thought.
Mirka Porcayo ’26 served as assistant director, stage manager, and overall technical lead for the production of A Boy Named Salmon by Rachel McCauley ’25.
Natalie Bayeslan ’26, Linnea Burroughs ’26, and Violet Glock ’26 showcased their animation work from faculty member Sue Rees’s Animations Projects class as part of an exhibition in the Barn Annex.
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!
Jay Clark ’26 will be pursuing a Masters of Library and Information Science at the University of Toronto.
Blu Mehari ’26 and Hannah Bardhi ’26 will both be pursuing their MFAs in poetry at the University of Iowa Writers Workshop.
Edison Hicks ’26 will be pursuing their MFA in poetry at Syracuse University.
Beginning in the fall, Julius Boxer-Cooper ’26 will be pursuing a Masters in Contemporary Musical Arts at the New England Conservatory of Music.
During his time at Bennington, Alex Bregy ’26 wrote two full-length novels, for which he plans to pursue publication following graduation.
Dallas Fangmann ’26 will be pursuing an MA in History and Philosophy of Religion at the University of Chicago.
Anne Pötzch ’26 will be pursuing a PhD in Comparative Literary Studies at Northwestern University. She writes, “Comparative literature focuses on the study of literature and culture across linguistic, national or disciplinary boundaries. As I am part of the German department, my main research will be in German and English, and I hope to continue working on improving my French and Mandarin Chinese while I am there. Another thing that really excites me about going to NU is the program’s focus on Critical Theory, which will be integral to my research as I continue to explore the transnational flâneur and further themes of my advanced work in grad school.”