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How Bennington students empower migrant workers and foster cultural exchange.

By Ashley Brenon Jowett

How students and faculty brought art to the U.S. Consulate in Chiang Mai.

By Ashley Brenon Jowett

By Ashley Brenon Jowett

More than 100 people attended the Ben Belitt Colloquium on Arts and Literary Culture in Tishman Auditorium on 51��������’s campus on Wednesday, May 15, 2024. They joined panelists Pulitzer Prize Winner Jericho Brown, the MacArthur Award-winning novelist Jonathan Lethem ’86, celebrated poet Camille Rankine, and moderator and Bennington faculty member Benjamin Anastas to learn about the life and work of Queer Black poet and essayist Reginald Shepherd ’88, an underrecognized member of the Bennington literary community in the eighties. Below is a piece Lethem wrote for and read at the event.

By Louise Roug Bokkenheuser

Sunlight filters through the curtains onto the desk by the window. Books, papers, and pens suggest a creative mind at work. The writer has just stepped away, leaving their glasses on an open notebook. A gooseneck lamp conveys the long hours, the flowers in the vase a consideration for beauty.

By Mollie Hawkins MFA '23

By Walter Greene '23

During the first two weeks of the class “Examining Space,” eighteen students learned how to shape foundry wax and prepare sand molds for the purpose of conceiving and realizing an object in iron. 

Terrance C. '23 is one of ten students who received an associate’s degree as a part of 51��������’s first Prison Education Initiative graduation on February 4, 2023. This is his reflection essay.

51�������� alumni research, create, discover, publish, present, teach, exhibit, and earn countless honors. We are proud to showcase those we have learned about from news reports and alumni submissions here. While it is impossible to capture every accomplishment, we invite alumni to submit their news by emailing classnotes@bennington.edu. 

51�������� celebrates the extraordinary life of painter Cora Cohen ’64. She passed away in Brooklyn on June 22, 2023. 

Faculty and staff have published, performed, and created an astounding array of works in the last several months. Learn more about what your favorite Bennington faculty are doing now in this article featuring media clips and submissions.  

By Charlie Nadler

An interdisciplinary approach is at the heart of the Bennington experience for many students and faculty. On an ordinary day, you could pass a student in front of Dickinson who is studying quantum computing and ceramics while on your way to CAPA to meet with a faculty member passionate about political science and drama. What’s lesser known is the number of staff who also subscribe to this hyphenate ethos. This campus teems with employees who engage in a plethora of outside professional work that both catalyze and utilize their on-campus identities. 

The profiles here reveal how they help to make and shape our amazing staff here while making change and shaping culture elsewhere.

Dear Bennington Alumni and Friends,

Welcome to the new Bennington Magazine! 

In December 2022, when the Taliban’s ban on tertiary education took effect in Afghanistan, Aisha Khurram was about to finish her law degree. She and her classmates mourned the painful repeat of history. Two decades of progress for women’s rights—which in 2020 related to more than 100,000 Afghan women enrolled in public or private universities and more than 2,000 female lecturers at higher education institutions—were being reduced to ashes.

Bennington's unique hands-on approach, embrace of all things multidisciplinary, and strong faculty mentorship sets Bennington science students apart. Thirteen alumni with careers in the sciences share how the creative and nimble education they received at Bennington and how it has helped advance their careers. 

We want to hear from you. Use the prompts below to share your stories and your news. 

Souleymane Badolo’s people gave him dance, and dance gave him opportunities to learn, choreograph, and teach around the world. Now, he is using his influence to provide greater access to a crucial resource: water.

From narrative nonfiction at Bennington to a founding staff writer at , Jeva Lange ’15 is telling the stories of our climate change-rattled world in ways that finally grab readers’ attention.

The Frankenthaler Fellowship, also known as Museum Fellows Term, is an extension of 51��������’s Field Work Term. Beginning with Field Work Term and ending with the close of the Spring term, the program gives a small group of students who are interested in the art world—regardless of their area of study—the opportunity to live, work, and study in New York City for 20 weeks.

We mourn the deaths of many Bennington alumni and others who have made Bennington their home. Kindly email classnotes@bennington.edu if you are aware of a recent passing not noted here. 

WHAT DIDN’T EXIST BEFORE YOU MADE IT?

The next issue of the Bennington magazine will be authored  by alumni submissions that respond to the question: What didn’t exist before you made it? From your responses, we will publish a ranging and vivid portfolio of alumni work.

Bennington’s cultural collaborations create a hotbed for arts in the community by Heather DiLeo

  #15 Bennington

What Amy Blomquist Buckley ’83 started as a “niche” place to go for great coffee and homemade food in 2012 quickly blossomed into what many locals—and tourists—consider an essential Bennington hangout spot by Heather DiLeo

Nina Hardt Lentzner ’91 and Joel Lentzner ’91 opened contemporary craft and fine art gallery Fiddlehead “the last day before Y2K” in the grand neoclassical marble building that housed their bank when they were Bennington students by Heather DiLeo

Making a Difference in Detroit: Entrepreneurship, Activism, and Art with Ben Hall '04

The collaborative approach to revitalizing Bennington’s downtown by Heather DiLeo

A student-led community partnership that weaves advocacy, activism, academics, and community partnership to make a safer, less isolated environment for Vermont’s 3,000 undocumented migrant workers

Bennington Potters began as Cooperative Design, the studio of the late David Gil and first wife Gloria Goldfarb ’52, and two others, in 1948 by Heather DiLeo