Two Bard College Faculty Members Win Celebrated Guggenheim Fellowships

ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y.—Two Bard College faculty members, Playwright-in-Residence Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas and Visiting Artist in Theater and Performance Annie Dorsen, are among the 173 winners of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation’s 94th competition for the United States and Canada. Cortiñas and Dorsen were awarded Guggenheim Fellowships for their work in drama and performance art. Appointed on the basis of prior achievement and exceptional promise, the successful candidates were chosen from a group of almost 3000 applicants. The great variety of backgrounds, fields of study, and accomplishments of Guggenheim Fellows is one of the unique characteristics of the Fellowship program.

Cortiñas and Dorsen bring the number of Bard faculty members who have received Guggenheim Fellowships to almost 40. Previous recipients from Bard College include Nancy Shaver, Lothar Osterburg, Peggy Ahwesh, JoAnne Akalaitas, Peter Hutton, Ann Lauterbach, An-My Lê, Norman Manea, Daniel Mendelsohn, Bradford Morrow, Judy Pfaff, Luc Sante, Stephen Shore, Mona Simpson, and Joan Tower. This year, former Bard faculty member David Levine was awarded a fellowship in drama and performance art and John Heginbotham, who choreographed Fantasque in the 2015 SummerScape Festival, won a fellowship in choreography.

Playwright Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas has been a Bard College faculty member since 2011. He received a B.A. from Georgetown University, M.P.H. from University of California, Berkeley, and M.F.A. from Brown University. He has won several honors, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Helen Merrill Award, “playwright of the year” in El Nuevo Herald’s 1999 year-end list, a Writers Community Residency from the YMCA, National Writer’s Voice, and the Robert Chesley Award, among others. His plays include Maleta Mulata (Campo Santo); Sleepwalkers (Area Stage, Carbonell Award; and Alliance Theatre); Tight Embrace (Intar); and Blind Mouth Singing (Teatro Vista, and National Asian American Theatre Company). His plays have been published by Playscripts and TDR/The Drama Review. The Mark Taper Forum, South Coast Repertory, New World Theater, Hartford Stage, and Playwrights Horizons have all commissioned his work. He is a Usual Suspect at New York Theatre Workshop and a member of New Dramatists. Cortiñas is cofounder of Fulcrum Theater. His poetry, fiction, and nonfiction have been published in many journals and anthologies. He has taught at University of Rochester, Denison University, University of Miami, and Children’s Theater Center, Minneapolis.

Annie Dorsen is an Obie Award–winning director and writer whose works explore the intersection of algorithms and live performance. Dorsen received a B.A. from Yale College and M.F.A. from Yale School of Drama. In her work, she tries to “make perceptible how ideas change over time: where they come from, how they influence and are influenced by politics and culture, and how they take root in the body, physically and emotionally.” Since 2010, she has worked with algorithms as full creative collaborators in what she calls "algorithmic theater.” Recent algorithmic works include The Great Outdoors (2017) and Yesterday Tomorrow (2015), performed in New York and throughout Europe; Youtube 1–4, a series of short videos made from YouTube comments; A Piece of Work, a deconstruction of Hamlet; and Hello Hi There, a dialogue inspired by a televised debate between Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault. Other works include the 2008 Broadway musical Passing Strange, which won the Obie for best new theater piece and was the subject of a film by Spike Lee that was screened at the Sundance and Tribeca Film Festivals; Magical, a 2010 collaboration with choreographer Anne Juren; and Pièce sans Paroles, with Juren and DD Dorvillier. Dorsen is the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships from, among others, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Fondation d’Enterprise Hermès New Settings Program, New York State Council on the Arts, and MAP Fund. In addition to the Obie, honors also include the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts and the Audelco Award for best director of a musical. She is currently a visiting artist in residence at Bard College. She has taught or served as guest lecturer or instructor at the University of Chicago, Columbia University, California Institute of the Arts, and Brown University.

About the Guggenheim Fellowship Program
Since its establishment in 1925, the Foundation has granted more than $360 million in Fellowships to over 18,000 individuals, among whom are scores of Nobel laureates, Fields Medalists, poets laureate, members of the various national academies, and winners of the Pulitzer Prize, Turing Award, National Book Award, and other important, internationally recognized honors. The Guggenheim Fellowship program remains a significant source of support for artists, scholars in the humanities and social sciences, and scientific researchers. New and continuing donations from friends, Trustees, former Fellows, and other foundations have ensured that the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation will be able to continue its historic mission. The Dorothy Tapper Goldman Foundation is once again underwriting the Fellowship in Constitutional Studies, and a grant from the Aaron Copland Fund for Music is supporting supplemental grants for composers. For more information on the Fellows and their projects, please visit the Foundation’s website at http://www.gf.org.

About Bard College
Founded in 1860, Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, is an independent, residential, coeducational college offering a four-year B.A. program in the liberal arts and sciences and a five-year B.A./B.S. degree in economics and finance. The Bard College Conservatory of Music offers a five-year program in which students pursue a dual degree—a B.Music and a B.A. in a field other than music. Bard offers M.Music degrees in conjunction with the Conservatory and The Orchestra Now, and at Longy School of Music of Bard College in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Bard and its affiliated institutions also grant the following degrees: A.A. at Bard High School Early College, a public school with campuses in New York City, Cleveland, Baltimore, and Newark, New Jersey; A.A. and B.A. at Bard College at Simon’s Rock: The Early College, in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, and through the Bard Prison Initiative at six correctional institutions in New York State; M.A. in curatorial studies, M.S. in economic theory and policy, and M.S. in environmental policy and in climate science and policy at the Annandale campus; M.F.A. and M.A.T. at multiple campuses; M.B.A. in sustainability in New York City; and M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. in the decorative arts, design history, and material culture at the Bard Graduate Center in Manhattan. Internationally, Bard confers dual B.A. and M.A. degrees at the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences, St. Petersburg State University, Russia (Smolny College); dual B.A. and M.A.T. degrees at Al-Quds University in East Jerusalem; and dual B.A. degrees at American University of Central Asia in Kyrgyzstan and Bard College Berlin: A Liberal Arts University.

Bard offers nearly 50 academic programs in four divisions. Total enrollment for Bard College and its affiliates is approximately 5,500 students. The undergraduate College has an enrollment of more than 1,900 and a student-to-faculty ratio of 10:1. In 2016, Bard acquired the Montgomery Place estate, bringing the size of the campus to nearly 1,000 acres. For more information about Bard College, visit bard.edu.

This event was last updated on 09-02-2019

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