Shawtane Bowen: Related Content

This fall, Bennington welcomes nine new full-time faculty members to the College.

At Bennington, José Rubén Ruiz Garrido '26 studies Drama with a focus on Acting and Stage Design. During his Field Work Term experience as a Lucille Lortel Fellow at Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), he gained a new approach to theater and a different perspective on the arts.

On the second Monday before opening night, rehearsal for this term’s faculty production—Sweat by Lynn Nottage—started with a fight. Student actors executed a choreographed-but-believable series of punches and holds. They threw each other across the barroom set while the assistant stage manager and fight captain Tennyson Perkins ’26 took careful notes to deliver to the breathless actors at the end of the scene.  

Then they did it again. And again. And again. Each time, they incorporated Perkins’s tweaks, and each time, the action was clearer and cleaner.  

As early as their first year at Bennington, acting, music, and creative writing student and Sutton Trust Scholar Miriam Campbell ’26 heard people in their classes talking about the Lucille Lortel Fellowship.

The Astronomy Club, a new Netflix sketch comedy show featuring the first all-Black house team at the Upright Citizen’s Brigade Theatre in New York is receiving rave reviews and earning loyal audiences beyond the stage it first originated.

Bennington College has partnered with Bennington Performing Arts Center, Oldcastle Theatre, and the Bennington Community Theater to participate in a rolling premiere of 7 original made-for-Zoom plays, collectively entitled The Days of Re-Creation: A Virtual Play.

Newly appointed Drama faculty member Shawtane Bowen shares his journey coming to Bennington and his experience of life on campus.

By Halley Le '25