ON AND OFF CAMPUS: NEW FACULTY

Left to right: Renata Salecl, Thomas Chatterton Williams, Allison Stanger, and Mike Cosper at the Hannah Arendt Center 2022 conference, “Rage and Reason.” Photo by Karl Rabe

Writer and cultural critic Thomas Chatterton Williams will begin teaching at the College in Spring 2023 as Hannah Arendt Center senior fellow and visiting professor of humanities. Williams is the author of Losing My Cool and Self-Portrait in Black and White, and a contributing writer at the Atlantic. His work has also appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Harper’s Magazine, and New Yorker, and has been collected in The Best American Essays and The Best American Travel Writing. His forthcoming book, Nothing Was the Same: The Pandemic Summer of George Floyd and the Shift in Western Consciousness, will be published by Knopf. In 2022, he was named a Guggenheim Fellow for his work in general nonfiction.

Jessie Montgomery, photo by Jiyang Chen

The Bard College Conservatory of Music has appointed Jessie Montgomery and Missy Mazzoli to the faculty as composers in residence. Violinist, composer, and educator Montgomery, Musical America’s 2023 Composer of the Year, has received numerous accolades for her work, which interweaves classical music with elements of vernacular music, improvisation, poetry, and social consciousness. She has been commissioned by organizations around the world, including Bard’s own SummerScape Festival, which premiered her collaborative piece I was waiting for the echo of a better day in 2021. Mazzoli, whom the New York Times called “one of the more consistently inventive, surprising composers now working in New York,” was one of the first two women to receive a main stage commission from the Metropolitan Opera, in 2018, and was nominated for a Grammy award in the Best Classical Composition category that same year. In January 2023, the American Academy of Arts and Letters named Mazzoli a winner of the Marc Blitzstein Memorial Award.

Missy Mazzoli, photo by Marylene Mey

Lucas Blalock ’02 joins Bard as assistant professor of photography. Originally from Asheville, North Carolina, Blalock holds a BA from Bard and an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles. His work, which explores the potentials of mannerism in photography, has been exhibited at major museums, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, Museum of Modern Art, Walker Art Center, and Metropolitan Museum of Art. He has also staged solo exhibitions throughout the US and Europe, including at Galerie Eva Presenhuber, which represents him in New York City and Zurich, and Galerie Rodolphe Janssen, which represents him in Brussels.

Lucas Blalock ’02, photo by Gertraud Presenhuber. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich/New York