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.
Psychology is more than the study of the mind and its effect on behavior; it also requires a nuanced understanding of the scope and limits of theories and other generalizations of human behavior. At Bennington, some psychology courses focus on understanding the generalizations made by others, while other courses focus on the process of research, where students make their own generalizations about human behavior. In both cases, students learn to read, understand, and critically evaluate published work in psychology. They develop the skills to write a convincing, non-prejudicial argument. And they learn how to apply ethical standards to research and theory in psychology.
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.
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.
The Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Public Action is a highly selective graduate degree program, designed to give accomplished artists working as agents of social change the time, space, and focus to conduct research and develop new work.
MFA fellows are expected to have substantial professional experience in socially or civically engaged public art or related areas, well beyond undergraduate studies. We recognize the achievements of artists who have had significant careers and encourage them to apply in order to continue their creative research.
Set/production design is based in the drama program and gives students the opportunity to learn the basics of designing for a performance, as well as opportunities to design student- and faculty-directed productions. Additionally, students have created puppet shows range from small, one-person events to much larger affairs.
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.
We practice video at Bennington in the framework of visual art, building a varied program that includes analog and digital, experimental and documentary, critical and poetic approaches to the medium. Students make films, videos, and installations in a dynamic studio environment that includes production facilities, editing and screening rooms, and the breathtaking landscape of the campus itself. We emphasize formal innovation, conceptual rigor, historical consciousness and the capacity to collaborate as hallmark of a vibrant moving image practice. Students analyze works from film history alongside contemporary art in order to build a vocabulary to explain their own perspectives and critique one another’s work. Students learn the basics of form (composition, mise-en-scène, lighting, editing, sound) in together with thematic inquiry (politics, race, gender, social justice, the environment) before pursuing advanced independent work.
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.
Sociolinguistics is about how language is used in society and how social factors affect the way we speak. At Bennington, students studying sociolinguistics explore how language shapes our identities and how social status and power influence those identities. They examine how people adapt their language during conversations and how it reflects things like gender, sexuality, group membership, and social status. They ask questions about not only what is said, but also how it is said, who says it, and why. Students also learn about the cognitive and structural aspects of language as a system and how it’s influenced by different contexts. They use both qualitative and quantitative methods to analyze language, and they evaluate different approaches to this important human topic.
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.
Our approach to teaching Spanish at Bennington is unlike those of most programs across the United States. We teach language by engaging with a student’s intellectual identity. The faculty design courses knowing that students have more fulfilling experiences with texts, materials, and spoken language when they have a personal reason for doing so, and when they are actively engaged in the process. Each Spanish class at Bennington College is organized around a single culturally relevant concept, literary figure or movement, political period, artistic medium, or genre.
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.
Contemporary sculpture in practice and research, now more than ever before, embraces a full range of exploration from the historic traditions of figuration to innovative content in the areas of functional and non-functional object-making, installation, performance, site-specific work, and digital forms. As they progress to advanced classes, students are challenged to use their skills to make work that is more self-directed and research-driven to contribute to the ever-extending visual dialogue that interprets our personal and public lives.
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.
