Taught by successful, current professionals in their fields, Bennington’s visual arts program provides students with a strong background in the creative process. As students move through their courses, they develop their own techniques, methods of investigation, conceptual thinking, and understanding of what it means to be a creative practitioner. They are encouraged to explore opportunities across a broad range of media, while examining contemporary creative practice and its connections to the history of art.
At Bennington, you design your own course of study and work, taking full advantage of the College’s resources both inside and outside the classroom. This process goes beyond the bounds of a traditional major. You identify one or more areas of interest that spark your intellectual curiosity and provide a foundation for your academic work and fieldwork, and you pursue that work with ongoing guidance from your faculty. This is your Plan.
One of the top low-residency programs in the country, the Bennington Writing Seminars is a two-year, rigorous exploration of craft. You commit as much to reading as to writing and critical literary analysis. You create bold new works of fiction, nonfiction, or poetry, and may work in a dual-genre. You finish with a polished thesis and a critical paper. All this with the expert 1:1 guidance of acclaimed authors who develop a stake in your work. Our alumni, faculty, students, and staff publish work at the highest levels.
Music at Bennington helps students grow in their ability to do creative work in performance and composition. Our faculty of active professional musicians and composers represent a rare diversity of musical traditions who share a belief in hands-on learning and the development of versatile, thinking musicians who are able to understand multiple musical perspectives. Courses range from ensemble classes in Filipino kulintang, North American traditional music, and percussion music from the African diaspora, to classes in counterpoint, voice, jazz improvisation, electroacoustic music, studio recording, music history, and individual instrumental study.
At Bennington, you design your own course of study and work, taking full advantage of the College’s resources both inside and outside the classroom. This process goes beyond the bounds of a traditional major. You identify one or more areas of interest that spark your intellectual curiosity and provide a foundation for your academic work and fieldwork, and you pursue that work with ongoing guidance from your faculty. This is your Plan.
Bennington’s Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Music program invites students of music to develop their artistic vision by pursuing work at an advanced level in either composition or voice. (In exceptional cases, students wishing to pursue postgraduate work in other performance areas may be considered.) In a supportive and demanding environment, MFA candidates, in dialogue with the faculty, design an individual program that puts them in contact with a range of accomplished faculty members over the course of their time here, as well as with disciplines outside of music, with the primary goal of refining and deepening the quality of their work as performers or composers.
The Bennington music faculty accepts one or two graduate students at a time to pursue postgraduate work.
From ethics and political philosophy to aesthetics and ancient Greek philosophy to Marx, Kant, Wittgenstein, and topics in continental philosophy—Bennington’s philosophy curriculum provides students with a solid sense of the nature of philosophical inquiry and invites them to consider how philosophical concerns and methods can be incorporated into their studies across the curriculum.
At Bennington, you design your own course of study and work, taking full advantage of the College’s resources both inside and outside the classroom. This process goes beyond the bounds of a traditional major. You identify one or more areas of interest that spark your intellectual curiosity and provide a foundation for your academic work and fieldwork, and you pursue that work with ongoing guidance from your faculty. This is your Plan.
Photography at Bennington offers students an introduction to both analog and digital camera work. Courses cover a broad range of topics, exploring photography’s history from the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries, and investigating all genres of the medium, as well as how it combines with other artistic practices. Studio photography classes are designed to mix creative production with relevant readings, historical research, and technical hands-on instruction.
At Bennington, you design your own course of study and work, taking full advantage of the College’s resources both inside and outside the classroom. This process goes beyond the bounds of a traditional major. You identify one or more areas of interest that spark your intellectual curiosity and provide a foundation for your academic work and fieldwork, and you pursue that work with ongoing guidance from your faculty. This is your Plan.
The wide variety of students who study physics at Bennington (along with the very nature of self-directed education) means that there is no “one size fits all” list of courses or sub-areas to focus in. However, we work to establish a firm grounding in both classical and modern physics though teaching classes in quantum mechanics, special relativity, thermal physics, and engineering physics, in addition to many astronomy and geophysics classes.
At Bennington, you design your own course of study and work, taking full advantage of the College’s resources both inside and outside the classroom. This process goes beyond the bounds of a traditional major. You identify one or more areas of interest that spark your intellectual curiosity and provide a foundation for your academic work and fieldwork, and you pursue that work with ongoing guidance from your faculty. This is your Plan.
Through coursework and fieldwork, students develop a deep understanding of political institutions, processes, behavior, outcomes, and developments at national and international levels. They learn to recognize and ask questions on fundamental political issues; critically and analytically engage these questions using ideas, insights, and tools from the pertinent scholarly literature; effectively communicate their work both in writing and verbally; and intelligently connect their work to broader contexts, including real practical world developments.
At Bennington, you design your own course of study and work, taking full advantage of the College’s resources both inside and outside the classroom. This process goes beyond the bounds of a traditional major. You identify one or more areas of interest that spark your intellectual curiosity and provide a foundation for your academic work and fieldwork, and you pursue that work with ongoing guidance from your faculty. This is your Plan.
Bennington College has two beautiful, multi-use print studios. The studio in our Visual and Performing Arts center permits all levels of work in stone, plate and photo lithography, intaglio, photopolymer gravure, wood block printing, monotype, and screen printing. In addition, our new letterpress studio, the Word and Image Lab, is well-equipped with metal type, a new photopolymer relief platemaker (A3), and two Vandercook presses (#3 and #4).
At Bennington, you design your own course of study and work, taking full advantage of the College’s resources both inside and outside the classroom. This process goes beyond the bounds of a traditional major. You identify one or more areas of interest that spark your intellectual curiosity and provide a foundation for your academic work and fieldwork, and you pursue that work with ongoing guidance from your faculty. This is your Plan.
Projection design reaches across the visual arts, drama, music, and dance. Designs and projections are developed to alter a space, bring in more information to a theatre production or act as a texture for surfaces. Students use live manipulated footage, previously created footage, and project on a variety of surfaces and spaces. The software Isadora, QLab, and various editing software are used.
At Bennington, you design your own course of study and work, taking full advantage of the College’s resources both inside and outside the classroom. This process goes beyond the bounds of a traditional major. You identify one or more areas of interest that spark your intellectual curiosity and provide a foundation for your academic work and fieldwork, and you pursue that work with ongoing guidance from your faculty. This is your Plan.
