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Two Bard College Graduates Win 2024 Fulbright Awards

Two Bard College graduates have won 2024–25 Fulbright Awards for individually designed research projects and English teaching assistantships. During their grants, Fulbrighters meet, work, live with, and learn from the people of the host country, sharing daily experiences. The Fulbright program facilitates cultural exchange through direct interaction on an individual basis in the classroom, field, home, and in routine tasks, allowing the grantee to gain an appreciation of others’ viewpoints and beliefs, the way they do things, and the way they think. Bard College is a Fulbright top producing institution.

Sara Varde de Nieves ’22, who was a joint major in film and electronic arts and in human rights at Bard, has been selected for a Fulbright Study/Research Award to Chile for the 2024–25 academic year. Their project, “Regresando al Hogar/Returning Home,” aims to preserve the legacy of Villa San Luis, a large-scale public housing complex built in Las Condes, Santiago, Chile from 1971 to 1972. Through a multi-format documentary comprising interviews with former residents and project planners, archival documents, and footage of the current buildings, Varde de Nieves seeks to capture the collective memory of Villa San Luis’s original residents and planners. In executing this project, Varde de Nieves aims to expand the label of “heritage conservation” to include buildings and infrastructure that are not considered culturally significant as classic historical monuments and to make connections among narrative, memory, ephemera, and the historical archive. “I’m very excited to conduct in-person research on Villa San Luis, an innovative project that strove for class integration and high-quality construction. During my time abroad, I hope to foster long-lasting relationships and get acquainted with Chile's fascinating topography,” says Varde de Nieves.

While at Bard, Varde de Nieves worked as an English language tutor in Red Hook as well as at La Voz, the Hudson Valley Spanish language magazine. Their Senior Project, “Re-igniting the Clit Club,” a documentary about a queer party in the Meatpacking district during the 1990s, won multiple awards at Bard.

Jonathan Asiedu ’24, a written arts major, has been selected for an English Teaching Assistantship (ETA) Fulbright to Spain. His teaching placement will be in the Canary Islands. While in Spain, Asiedu plans to hold weekly poetry workshops in local cultural centers, communities, and schools. He hopes to invite the community to bring in their work or poems that speak to them, to share poets and writers and the ways they speak to us. “Studying poetry, learning pedagogical practices to inform my future as an educator, and mentorship opportunities throughout my college career have shaped both my perception of education and the work that needs to be done to improve students’ experiences within the educational system,” he says.

At Bard, Asiedu serves as a lead peer counselor through Residence Life, an Equity and Inclusion Mentor with the Office of Equity and Inclusion, admission tour guide, and works as a campus photographer. Moreover, this past year, he gained TESOL certification and has served as an English language tutor, as well as a writing tutor at the Eastern Correctional Facility through the Bard Prison Initiative. Asiedu, who is from the South Bronx, decided early on that he wanted to speak Spanish and has taken the Spanish Language Intensive at Bard, which includes four weeks of study in Oaxaca, Mexico. After the completion of his Fulbright ETA, he plans to pursue a master degree in education with a specialization in literature from Bard’s Master of Arts in Teaching program.

Three Bard students have also been named alternates for Fulbright Awards. Bard Conservatory student Nita Vemuri ’24, who is majoring in piano performance and economics, is an alternate for a Fulbright Study/Research Award to Hungary. Film and electronic arts graduate Elizabeth Sullivan ’23 is an alternate for a Fulbright Study/Research Award to Germany. Mathematics major Skye Rothstein ’24 is an alternate for a Fulbright Study/Research Award to Germany.

Fulbright is a program of the US Department of State, with funding provided by the US Government. Participating governments and host institutions, corporations, and foundations around the world also provide direct and indirect support to the program.

Fulbright alumni work to make a positive impact on their communities, sectors, and the world and have included 41 heads of state or government, 62 Nobel Laureates, 89 Pulitzer Prize winners, 80 MacArthur Fellows, and countless leaders and changemakers who build mutual understanding between the people of the United State and the people of other countries.

Post Date: 05-07-2024

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Bard College Student Melonie Bisset ’24 Wins Critical Language Scholarship for Foreign Language Study Abroad

Bard College senior Melonie Bisset ’24, a film and electronic arts major, has won a highly selective Critical Language Scholarship (CLS) for the 2024 summer session. CLS, a program of the US Department of State, provides recipients with overseas placements that include intensive language instruction and structured cultural enrichment experiences designed to promote rapid language gains. Each summer, American undergraduate and graduate students enrolled at US colleges and universities across the country, spend 8 to 10 weeks learning one of 13 languages at an intensive study abroad institute. The CLS Program is designed to promote rapid language gains and essential intercultural fluency in regions that are critical to US national security and economic prosperity. The languages include Arabic, Azerbaijani, Chinese, Hindi, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Persian, Portuguese, Russian, Swahili, Turkish, and Urdu.

Bisset will study Portuguese at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The CLS Program in Rio de Janeiro provides a language learning environment designed to cover the equivalent of one academic year of university-level Portuguese study during an eight-week period. While in Brazil, Bisset will live with a local host family, eating breakfast with them each morning and spending free weekends with them. Host families help students integrate into daily life in Rio de Janeiro, introduce them to their extended networks, and create opportunities for them to practice their Portuguese in a more relaxed setting. Students also meet with a language partner several hours per week to practice conversational language skills and explore the city, planning their own activities with their language partners based on their interests.

Bisset writes that her interests have always been at the intersection of multiple cultures. That is where she feels most like herself—where she belongs. Accordingly, that is why Brazilian culture has always captivated her: its intense mix of diverse cultures. Aside from music and dance, she is also attracted to Brazilian filmmakers engaged in debates surrounding ecocinema, poverty, and multiculturalism. Her ultimate goal is to create a US-based nonprofit that facilitates cross cultural exchange and understanding through language and art.

“I am extremely grateful to receive the Critical Language Scholarship, and even more excited for the opportunity to study Portuguese in Rio de Janeiro this summer,” says Bisset. “As a multicultural-multiracial English, Mandarin, and Spanish speaker, a certified TESOL instructor, a filmmaker, an Argentine Tango dancer, a translator, and most importantly a story teller, my aspiration has always been to facilitate greater intercultural understanding through engagement with the arts and languages. I hope to establish my own organization dedicated to these dreams one day. This immersive language and cultural experience will undoubtedly have a lasting impact on my personal life and career development.”

The CLS Program is part of a US government effort to expand the number of Americans studying and mastering critical foreign languages. CLS scholars gain critical language and cultural skills that enable them to contribute to US economic competitiveness and national security. Approximately 500 competitively selected American students at US colleges and universities participate in the CLS Program each year.

“Critical” languages are those that are less commonly taught in US schools, but are essential for America’s engagement with the world. CLS plays an important role in preparing US students for the 21st century’s globalized workforce, increasing American competitiveness, and contributing to national security. CLS scholars serve as citizen ambassadors, representing the diversity of the United States abroad and building lasting relationships with people in their host countries.

For further information about the Critical Language Scholarship or other exchange programs offered by the US Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, please visit  http://www.clscholarship.org/ and https://studyabroad.state.gov/.

Post Date: 04-01-2024

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Art Newspaper Spoke with James Fuentes ’98 About His Gallery’s Move to Tribeca

“James Fuentes Gallery, long a forward-looking presence in the contemporary art scene on New York’s Lower East Side, is the latest space to decamp to Tribeca,” writes Jillian Billard for the Art Newspaper. The eponymous gallery of alumnus James Fuentes ’98, who will be awarded the Charles Flint Kellogg Award in Arts and Letters at this year’s Bard College Awards, has long championed “artists with practices outside the commercial conventions of the contemporary art market.” This curatorial focus, Fuentes says, was first furnished at Bard. “I kind of picked up this idea of curating as a profession through osmosis, studying adjacent to the Bard Center for Curatorial Studies and spending time in the library founded by Marieluise Hessel,” Fuentes says. “The program planted a seed.”

Post Date: 03-26-2024

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Bard Film Professor A. Sayeeda Moreno Awarded Residency by Provincetown Film Institute

A. Sayeeda Moreno, assistant professor of Film and Electronic Arts at Bard, was honored with a one-week residency to develop her upcoming feature film, Out in the Dunes, a coming-of-age romance set in 1990s Provincetown on Cape Cod. Immersing herself in the locale, she explored Provincetown to seek enrichment for her screenplay. Sayeeda also showcased three of her short films, Sin Salida, Bina, and White, at the Provincetown International Film Festival followed by a Q&A session, sharing the intricacies of her creative process as a writer and director with an engaged audience. The Provincetown Film Institute Women’s Residency Program offers established women-identifying filmmakers from around the world the opportunity to work in Provincetown during the off-season alongside other artists and writers who use the solitude of the outer Cape Cod area as inspiration for their work. Residents are selected by a panel of film industry professionals and given a small travel stipend, lodging, and roundtrip travel from Boston. 
 A. Sayeeda Moreno is a director and screenwriter whose award-winning short films and screenplays are nourished by the mythology of the New York City metropolis where she was born, and the exhilarating cast of characters that filtered through her bohemian home. She documents and filters this World through her own body and a body of work that is character-driven, utilizing genre to illuminate our human experiences: how we survive, what is in opposition to us, what our mind grapples with, and how we love. Sayeeda is a Film Independent, Sundance Women in Finance, and Tribeca All Access Fellow and earned her MFA in Film from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts as a dean’s fellow. She is developing her feature film Out in the Dunes and has been an assistant professor in Film and Electronic Arts at Bard College since 2018.

Post Date: 02-15-2024

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Bard Film Professor Ephraim Asili Wins $50,000 Creative Capital Award

Ephraim Asili MFA ’11, associate professor of film and electronic arts and director of the Film and Electronic Arts Program, has won a 2024 Creative Capital Award for $50,000 to support his documentary film Eternal Rhythm. Creative Capital Awards provide artists with unrestricted project funding up to $50,000, bespoke professional development services, and community-building opportunities.

Eternal Rhythm explores the personal and artistic relationship between Don and Moki Cherry after the couple moved from New York to Moki’s native Sweden in 1970. There they began a decade-long collaboration that merged multicultural expressions of art, music, and radical living into a synergetic model for communal creativity. 

Creative Capital’s “Wild Futures: Art, Culture, Impact” Awards in Visual Arts and Film/Moving Image total $2.5 million in grants to artists for the creation of 50 groundbreaking new works. Chosen from 5,600 applications, this year’s awards will fund 28 innovative visual arts projects and 22 film/moving image projects, representing 54 artists in total.

Post Date: 02-05-2024

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Bard Faculty Members and Alumni/ae Awarded 2023 MacDowell Fellowships

Two Bard faculty members and two alumni/ae are recipients of MacDowell Fellowships. Carl Elsaesser, visiting artist in residence at Bard College in Film and Electronic Arts, has been awarded a MacDowell Fellowship to MacDowell's Residency Program in the Film/Video Artists category for fall/winter 2023. Elsaesser’s residency will support the completion of his project, Coastlines, a feature-length film that intertwines the ethnographic intricacies of Maine’s coastline with the intimate video diaries of a Portland family, inviting a reevaluation of evolving identities and artistic representation within the private and public spheres. Drawing from queer phenomenology and traditional historical narratives, the film challenges perceptions and redefines the boundaries of storytelling, revealing Maine’s dual role as a backdrop and active participant in shaping inhabitants’ sense of self.

Daaimah Mubashshir, playwright in residence at Bard, received a MacDowell Fellowship in MacDowell’s Artist Residency Program for fall 2023 in Peterborough, New Hampshire, in support of their work on a new play about their great grandmother, Begonia Williams Tate, who defied all odds in Mobile, Alabama, in the late 19th century. Chaya Czernowin, a composer and Bard MFA ’88 in Music, and Bard alumna Hannah Beerman ’15, are also 2023 MacDowell Fellowship recipients. The MacDowell Fellowships are distributed by seven discipline-specific admissions panels who make their selections based on applicants’ vision and talent as reflected by work samples and a project description. Once at MacDowell, selected Fellows are provided a private studio, three meals a day, and accommodations for a period of up to six weeks. 

Post Date: 01-19-2024