Video

At Bennington, students work closely with faculty to design the content, structure, and sequence of their study and practice—their Plan—taking advantage of resources inside and outside the classroom to pursue their work. 

We practice video at Bennington in the framework of visual art, casting a wide net that encompasses analog and digital, experimental and documentary, critical and poetic approaches to the medium. Students make films, videos, and installations in a dynamic studio environment that includes production facilities, editing and screening rooms, and the breathtaking landscape of the campus itself. We emphasize formal innovation, conceptual rigor, historical consciousness and the capacity to collaborate as hallmarks of a vibrant moving image practice. Students analyze works from film history alongside contemporary art in order to build a vocabulary to articulate their own perspectives and critique one another’s work. Students learn the fundamentals of form (composition, mise-en-scène, lighting, editing, sound) in harmony with thematic inquiry (politics, race, gender, social justice, the environment) before pursuing advanced independent work. Courses in animation, media studies, music, dance, drama, and across the humanities are crucial to broadening students’ perspective and essential to making work that is significant, relevant, and alive to the possibilities of video today.

Student Work

The Anxiety of Childhood

Gambrels

Aquarium

LaFlammes

More student work

Faculty

Mariam Ghani

Mariam Ghani is an artist, writer, and filmmaker. Her work looks at places, spaces and moments where social, political and cultural structures take on visible forms, and spans video, sound, installation, photography, performance, text and data. 

 

Jen Liu

Jen Liu is a New York-based visual artist working in video, performance, and painting, on topics of national identity, economy, and the re-motivating of archival artifacts. She is a 2017 recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship in Film/Video, as well as the NYSCA/NYFA Fellowship in Digital/Electronic Art.

Beatriz Santiago Muñoz

Beatriz Santiago Muñoz is an artist whose expanded moving image work is entangled with Boalian theater, expanded cinema and feminist practices. She tends to work with non-actors, and incorporates improvisation into her process. Her recent work is on the sensorial unconscious of anti-colonial movements and feminist experiments with language and narrative. 

Visiting Faculty & Technicians

John Crowe

Technical Instructor in Video and Design/Animation

John Crowe works primarily in video and large scale installation. Without narrative, but with a physical mis-en-scene, appropriated video/film loops and sculptures distill cinema into vignettes.

Laura Sofía Pérez

Visiting Faculty

Laura Sofía Pérez is a visual artist and filmmaker. Her work deals with themes of family history, displacement, and in-betweenness. She often works in collaborative settings of experimentation and improvisation.