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.
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.
Beginning during the summer term in Montpellier, France, the low-residency program is designed for mid-career artists, teachers, and dance professionals with a strong interest in expanding their knowledge and experience in an uninterrupted way.
The program is focused on rethinking inherited practices of dance education and considers the very idea of study differently. It extends spaces for learning and engagement from studios and classrooms to international festival environments, community centers, museums, and online learning platforms. The format allows flexibility and provides opportunities for working professional artists to broaden and expand their career trajectories and to sustain their lives in the arts. The program is anchored by prominent scholars, artists, and creative thinkers who foster critical conversations about the meanings, purposes, pedagogies, and potentialities of dance and performance.
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.
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.