The Culinary Arts program offers a hands-on environment for aspiring chefs. Students gain experience through operating an onsite restaurant and learn skills in cooking, baking, food safety, and menu planning.
This program includes or prepares for the following credential(s): ServSafe Food Manager, Vermont First Class Server Training, ACT National Career Readiness Certificate. This program also offers free college credits from the White Mountains Community College.
The Forestry & Heavy Equipment program introduces students to forest science and heavy equipment operation. First-year students focus on safe equipment use and forest management, while second-year students engage in community projects and advanced topics like timber harvesting and arboriculture.
This program includes or prepares for the following credential(s): Game of Logging Chainsaw Safety Training Levels 1, 2, 3 and 4; Commercial Driver’s License (CDL) Class B; ACT National Career Readiness Certificate.
The Graphic Arts program teaches visual communication through project-based learning. Students gain experience in design fundamentals, Adobe software, and client relations, preparing for careers in graphic and digital design.
This program includes or prepares for the following credential(s): Adobe Certified Professional: Illustrator, Photoshop, and InDesign; ACT National Career Readiness Certificate. This program also offers free college credits from the Community College of Vermont.
Students who choose to study Black Studies explore and participate in the history of the African and Afro-diasporic community of thinkers and makers. Bennington’s interdisciplinary and student-designed approach to learning helps students draw on various resources to gain new insights and develop their own perspectives on the representations of Blackness and the Black body.
Black Studies interrogates the assumptions, objects of study, practices and limits of other established disciplines. Students who focus on Black Studies complete culminating projects that include research on specific issues, development of informed and innovative thinking, and/or creation of new ways to express and communicate understanding of Black Studies. Black Studies graduates work in scientific research, policy development, law, education, social studies and advocacy/activism, dance, theater and performance, literature and creative writing, and curatorial contexts and 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.
Bennington’s 60-credit, low-residency program is designed to prepare learners for licensure in as little as 2.5 years. Each semester begins with a 10-day on-campus residency, fostering intensive learning and meaningful connections with faculty and peers. Between residencies, you’ll continue your studies remotely through dynamic online coursework, live discussions, and individualized faculty advising, blending hands-on support with flexible, independent learning.
The Master of Arts in Clinical Mental Health Counseling offers a general clinical mental health counseling track or three specialized concentrations to tailor your expertise: Expressive Arts Therapy, Narrative Therapy, or Sexual Orientation and Gender Expression.
From their first year in the Lab, students are encouraged to make their own choices about study possibilities through discussions with and mentoring by their advisors and faculty members. In taking responsibility for their own educational pathways, emerging artists discover how they want to situate their voice in relation to the world. This sort of choice-making is crucial for advanced dance artistry and professional work in associated fields, and the curriculum expects engaged, direct participation in the learning process. Within the BFA Dance Lab curriculum, students are encouraged to discover their interests, articulate their perspectives, and situate themselves as participants capable of developing new relationships to dance and to the world.
The 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.
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.
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.