Low-Residency MFA in Dance

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 summer term dates in France are June 16–July 28, 2025.

Image: Studies Lab, Fall 2024

Critical and Experimental Formations of Study

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. 

What is the Program? 

The curriculum, built within an experimental and mobile architecture, relies heavily on a collaborative, international interdisciplinary network of individuals committed to deep engagement and expansive relationships.

The program has two cohort models. A full-time cohort model, where students study continuously for four terms (summer, fall, spring, and summer) and a flex-cohort model for students who need more flexibility and enroll in six or seven terms. The summer term dates in Montpellier, France are June 16–July 28, 2025.

Students complete a total of 60 credits for the degree.

Connect With Your Faculty Team 

Immersed in these dynamic relationships created by members of this community from around the world, students develop practices, pedagogies, and research models that value experimentation and continuously question the role of dance within and beyond traditional environments. Using symposia, retreats, and residency frameworks as ways to gather and learn, this program aims to foster new communities and networks of exchange for knowledge production and artistic practices. 

Faculty, mentors, affiliated artists, and guest lecturers represent an intentionally diverse array of approaches to theorizing and practicing embodied knowledge in relation to citizenship and art-making. 

Connect with the Leadership Team

How to Apply

The Low-Residency track is designed for mid-career artists, teachers and dance professionals.

Students applying to the low-residency MFA in Dance must complete the online low-residency MFA Application. Additionally, we require:

• an artistic portfolio that may include choreographic works, curatorial platforms, pedagogical experiences and creative projects that exemplify the applicant's research, practice and trajectory of study. Submissions should be examples of applicants' most recent work and must include a work’s description.
• an artist statement and essay, 350–500 words each.
• a CV or resume.
• two letters of recommendation from mentors, mentors, teachers or professionals in the dance world with whom you have worked.
• transcripts from all schools attended.

Submitting Your Application

We encourage you to submit your application entirely online. However, if you would like to include work whose physicality is critical to its nature, please reference this work in your digital application and then send a single package to Bennington College, Office of Admissions, One College Drive, Bennington, VT 05201. Please include your first and last names and your date of birth. All materials must be received by the application deadline.

Deadlines

Applications are due February 3, 2025

Scholarships & Financial Aid 

Research scholarships are available to all applicants.  

Tuition 

Tuition for the Low-Residence MFA in Dance is $1,076 per credit

Questions?

Email lrmfadance@bennington.edu with any questions about this program.