Our Faculty + Staff

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Dr. Chrys Margaritidis

Director of Educational Programs Chrys Margaritidis oversees the curriculum for Bard NYC to ensure academic rigor and a meaningful experience for students. He works closely with Bard NYC faculty and other staff members to develop academic pathways, course content, and co-curricular programming. Chrys also teaches a variety of courses on applied ethics, the ethics of AI, and civic engagement.
Chrys is a Bard College alumnus with a BA in economics; he also holds a MA in international finance from Brandeis University and a PhD in philosophy from the University of Reading (UK). His research interests include ethics, theory of knowledge, and academic freedom. Prior to joining Bard NYC, Chrys spent more than twenty years in the administration of the Central European University, where he most recently worked as Dean of Students.

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Dr. Lucilla Pan

Associate Director

  Lucilla Pan’s focus as associate director is on experiential learning and program implementation. She works closely with students on internship applications and career development. She also works in the day to day management of the program and student success.

Lucilla has a BA in philosophy from Boston College and a PhD in philosophy from Emory University. A former philosophy faculty member of Manhattanville College, Lucilla has taught in ethics, political philosophy, philosophy of race, and aesthetics. Her research interests include Soren Kierkegaard, ethics, and moral freedom.

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Elmira Bayrasli

Director, BGIA Certificate Program
  Elmira Bayrasli joined BGIA in 2016 as an adjunct lecturer. She is the co-founder of Foreign Policy Interrupted and the host of Project Syndicate's podcast Opinion Has It. She is the author of From the Other Side of the World: Extraordinary Entrepreneurs, Unlikely Places, a book that looks at the rise of entrepreneurship globally.

Elmira has lived in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, where she was the chief spokesperson for the OSCE Mission from 2003–2005. From 1994–2000 she was a presidential appointee at the US State Department, working for Madeleine Albright and Richard Holbrooke. Elmira provides analysis on foreign policy, particularly on Turkey, global entrepreneurship, and gender issues. Her work has appeared in Reuters, Foreign Affairs, The New York Times, and more. She earned her BA in political science and middle eastern studies at New York University and her MA in middle eastern languages and literatures at Columbia University. 

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Erica Kane

Associate Director of Experiential Learning
  Erica Kane obtained her BA in international studies, globalization, development, and human rights from Arcadia University (’09) . She worked with under-served public middle school students in southwest Philadelphia as an AmeriCorps volunteer from 2010–2011 and with high school students in 2012 through City Year Orlando. Erica completed her MS in public policy and management from Carnegie Mellon University's Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy in 2014, having studied at Carnegie Mellon's campus in Adelaide, Australia. After working for elected officials in the New York State Senate and Assembly, and at Cornell University's Hudson Valley Research Laboratory, Erica joined BGIA as deputy director in 2019.

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Destinee Nelons

Residence Life Manager

  Destinee joins the Bard NYC team with nearly a decade of experience working in residence life and youth success at different institutions across the US and internationally. Her work is shaped by a highly relational approach that centers holistic wellbeing and retaining curiosity, both in academic life and post-graduation. She earned her Master of Research degree at the University of St. Andrews in social anthropology, which informs every aspect of Destinee’s work, including student advocacy, creating equitable policies, and fostering the next generation of culturally-aware change agents in the world.

Outside of business hours, Destinee prioritizes a vivid creative life to balance out work and infuse play. She has numerous poems published in literary journals and anthologies and creates digital portrait illustrations. Her current projects include running her blog The Secret Anthropologist to document her life in NYC and grapple with her latest research interests.

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DW Fitzpatrick

Arts Liaison

  DW attended the School of Visual Arts, Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. They have solo and group exhibitions at Bellwether Gallery, MoMA PS1, the Baltimore Contemporary Art Museum, and more. Honors include residencies at BOFFO, FIAR, and the Tokyo Institute of Technology, and grants from the Jerome Foundation and Art Matters. Previously, DW taught at the ICP-Bard Program in Advanced Photographic Studies and Yale University's School of Art.

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Dr. Gabriel Perron

Academic Director, Bard-Rockefeller Semester in Science Dr. Gabriel G. Perron is an associate professor of biology at Bard and a visiting scientist at the New York Genome Center in New York City. With an M.Sc. from McGill University and a Ph.D. from the University of Oxford, Dr. Perron has honed his expertise in food safety, microbial genomics, and the evolution of antibiotic resistance in super-bugs. His work has resulted in over 40 peer-reviewed publications in leading international journals, and he is a regular contributor to public discussions on topics such as environmental health, public health, and food safety. Currently Dr. Perron's research focuses on investigating the impacts of antimicrobial resistance evolution on human and environmental health with a focus on urban environments.

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Grace Lubell

Recruitment and Admissions Manager
  Grace Lubell earned a BA in Asian studies from Skidmore College, where she studied abroad twice in Nagoya and Osaka, Japan. She became interested in Japanese Buddhist art and went on to earn an MA in Japanese Humanities from Kyushu University, Japan. Upon returning to New York, she worked at a Japanese art gallery on Manhattan’s Upper East Side from 2015–2017, and then became an associate program officer of Japanese studies at the Japan Foundation from 2017 to 2021. Grace joined Bard NYC as the program manager of BGIA in 2021.

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Zarlasht (Zar) Sarmast

Business Manager
  Zarlasht Sarmast completed her undergraduate degree at the American University of Central Asia in the department of International and Comparative Politics in 2020. While studying at AUCA, Zar was working for the “The Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit GmbH” (GIZ) in Bishkek as a communications specialist. Before starting her academic and professional journeys in Bishkek, Zar served as the spokesperson for the International Committee of the Red Cross in Afghanistan. She has previously worked with United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) and was part of many different peace building and humanitarian projects.

Zar finished her first Master’s degree at the Organization for Security and Co-Operation in Europe (OSCE Academy), and her second at AUCA in the department of Applied Psychology. Zar played an important role in the evacuation of over 370 Afghan students of AUCA and AUAF from Kabul to Bishkek, which inspired her to author her photo storybooks A Journey From Kabul to Bishkek and Our Journey to Bard. Currently Zar works as the business manager for Bard NYC and she also serves as the civic engagement program coordinator at the Open Society University Network and the Bard Center for Civic Engagement.

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Josie Snider

Assistant Director, MA in Global Studies
  Josie joined the MAGS team after graduating with an MA in global studies from the University of Vienna and Leipzig University. Her master’s thesis focused on censorship of criticism of Israel in Germany, exploring it through the lenses of Holocaust memory culture, news media, and interviews with activists and academics. Prior to studying in Austria and Germany, she spent four years teaching English in Madrid to adults and children of all levels and backgrounds. Josie also holds a BA in marketing communications from Emerson College. While in Boston, she interned and worked in marketing and development for multiple organizations with focuses ranging from local arts and culture to education and anti-classism initiatives.

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Duncan MacDonald ’23

Program Manager, MA in Global Studies Duncan joined the MAGS team in July 2023 after graduating from Bard College in May with a joint BA in Political Studies and French Studies. His Senior Project explored France's model of a feminist foreign policy from an ontological security perspective, leading to an investigation and critique of France's depiction of a feminist national self. During his time at Bard, he participated in the Bard Globalization and International Affairs (BGIA) certificate program where he interned with partner organization Foreign Policy Association, as well as an exchange semester at the Institute for Field Education (IFE) in Paris where he interned at Association Pierre Claver, a nonprofit organization offering comprehensive French language, culture, and society courses to refugees living in Paris to provide them with the range of skills and tools needed for life as a newcomer to France. 

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Aarati Akkapeddi

Aarati Akkapeddi is a Telugu-American cross-disciplinary artist, coder, and educator based in Lenapehoking (Brooklyn, NY). They combine code-based and analog techniques such as photography and printmaking to create artwork about intergenerational and collective memory. Their creative work has been supported by institutions such as Ada X, The Photographers’ Gallery, ETOPIA Center for Art & Technology, Fotomuseum Winterthur, and LES Printshop. They currently work as a designer and developer for The Experimental Humanities Collaborative Network where they create digital spaces and tools.

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Cynthia Conti-Cook

Cynthia Conti-Cook ’03 is a tech fellow working with the Ford Foundation’s Gender, Racial, and Ethnic Justice team to help build grantees’ capacity to respond to the expanding use of surveillance technologies against immigrant communities, as well as the potential use of technology to criminalize people who seek or aid abortions. As a civil rights litigator and public defender, most recently at the Legal Aid Society of New York, Cynthia led class and individual civil rights federal and state actions, bringing impact litigation on a range of policy matters. She also pioneered a first-of-its-kind public database (CAPstat) that tracks misconduct by New York City police officers, providing a critical means of transparency to an issue that has historically been shrouded in secrecy. Her work on CAPstat has been featured in the New York Times, the New York Daily News, and El Diario, and is being replicated by other public defender offices across the country. Cynthia served as a 2018–19 Data & Society fellow, working on a variety of topics related to surveillance and the intersection of technology and social justice.

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Noah Fischer

Alternating between activism, satire, and contemplation, Noah’s work spans drawing, writing, performance, and sculpture. He has focused on the role cultural institutions play within capitalism and the indebtedness of creative communities, co-organizing Debtfair for the 2017 Whitney Biennial. Fischer’s writings have appeared in Hyperallergic, Frieze, Brooklyn Rail and October, and handed out at direct actions on the streets.  Fischer’s solo and collaborative work has been exhibited at Guggenheim, MoMA, Brooklyn Museum, ZKM, the 56th Venice Biennale, 7th Berlin Biennale and Whitney Biennial. He is currently writing and illustrating a science fiction novel about direct democracy.  Fischer teaches at Parsons and NYU and lives in Brooklyn.

 

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Elizabeth Frank

Born in Los Angeles, Elizabeth Frank attended Bennington College and received her BA, MA and PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. She has been a member of the Division of Languages and Literature at Bard College since 1982, where she is the Joseph E. Harry Professor of Modern Languages and Literature. In 1986 she received the Pulitzer Prize in Biography for Louise Bogan: A Portrait. She is the author of three artist monographs: Jackson Pollock, Esteban Vicente, and Karen Gunderson: The Dark World of Light, as well as a novel, Cheat and Charmer, and two co-translations from Bulgarian of the novels Isaac’s Torah and Farewell, Shanghai by Angel Wagenstein. She lives in Brooklyn and has three cats.

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Ed Halter

Ed Halter is a writer and film programmer living in Brooklyn. He is the author of From Sun Tzu to Xbox: War and Videogames, as well as the editor of Mass Effect: Art and the Internet in the Twenty-First Century (with Lauren Cornell) and From the Third Eye: The Evergreen Review Reader (with Barney Rosset). His criticism has appeared in 4Columns, Artforum, the Criterion Collection, Film Comment, the New Yorker, the Village Voice, and elsewhere. He runs Light Industry, a venue for cinema in Brooklyn, and serves as critic in residence at Bard College, where he has taught since 2005.

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Suzy Hansen

Suzy Hansen is an ASU Future Security Fellow, and she is working on a book about life in one Istanbul neighborhood. The book will focus on the neighborhood's experience with the Syrian refugee crisis, the long history of internal and external migration in Turkey, and the dramatic changes in Turkish politics and social and urban life during the years of Recep Tayyip Erdogan. She is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, and the author of Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World, which was a finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction. She is also the winner of the Overseas Press Club's Cornelius Ryan Award for best nonfiction book on international affairs.

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Richard Harrill

Richard Harrill has been designing high impact experiential learning programs in Europe and the US for more than three decades. He earned a BA and JD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has served as a youth policy researcher at Columbia University, a consultant to the Ford Foundation, and a senior fellow at the Bonner Foundation. For more than a decade, he was executive director for the Center for Social Justice at his alma mater, designing and scaling its Bonner Leaders Program, Global Gap Year Fellowship, and CUBE social ventures accelerator. A youth service organization he built with Hungarian secondary school teachers, based on his Peace Corps experience in that country, was awarded the Echoing Green Fellowship in 2001 for its innovative work in service-learning and experiential education. 

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Fahmidul Haq

Fahmidul Haq is currently a faculty member at Bard NYC, and also served as a Visiting Professor at Bard College and Visiting Research Professor at the University of Notre Dame, USA. In addition, he dedicated nearly two decades to teaching in the University of Dhaka, Bangladesh. His academic interests include film studies, new media culture, and critical media studies. Fahmidul has publications spanning both English and Bengali languages, and his books include Identity, Cinema, and Bangladesh Independent Cinema and Cinema of Bangladesh: A Brief History. Beyond his academic career, Fahmidul Haq is recognized as a human rights defender, digital content creator, and public intellectual. His online activism revolves around the cultural and political landscape of Bangladesh, making him a dynamic and influential figure in both academic and public spheres.

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Cecile Kuznitz

Kuznitz holds a BA from Harvard University and a MA and PhD from Stanford. She has been awarded fellowships from institutions including the Hebrew University of Jerusalem Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. She is the author of YIVO and The Making of Modern Jewish Culture: Scholarship for the Yiddish Nation. She was visiting assistant professor of Jewish history at Georgetown University from 2000–2003.

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Jonas H. Khemiri

Jonas Hassen Khemiri is the author of five novels, seven plays, and a collection of plays, essays and short stories. His work has been translated into more than 30 languages and his plays have been performed by more than 100 international companies. His latest novel, The Family Clause, was a finalist for the National Book Award in the United States and won the Prix Médicis Étranger, France’s highest literary honor for translated fiction.

Khemiri was born in Stockholm, Sweden, and moved to New York for a Cullman Fellowship at the New York Public Library. He is currently teaching in the creative writing program at NYU.

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Michael Martell

Mike Martell is an associate professor and chair of economics at Bard. He graduated from the University of Oregon, in his home state, with a BA in business administration prior to completing his MA and PhD in economics at American University. Martell previously taught at Franklin and Marshall College, Elizabethtown College, the University of Mary Washington, and American University.  He has professional experience as an economist in the Department of Labor, the Bureau of Labor Statistics in the Office of Occupational Safety and Health, and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
 
Martell’s research interests center around the economics of equity and inclusion and he has written about the causes, consequences, and potential remedies for inequalities experienced by sexual and gender minorities.  His research contributes to an understanding of unequal labor market outcomes, the impacts of equal rights laws (such as anti-discrimination and same-sex marriage laws), and the intrahousehold dynamics of LGBTQ+ individuals. His work has been supported by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the AU Innovative Research in Gender Economics program.  His teaching interests mirror the fields in which he publishes: labor and industrial relations, health and demographic economics, public policy, household and feminist economics as well as the economics of inequality and discrimination. He is also a fellow at the Global Labor Organization and a member of the inaugural American Economic Association Committee on the Status of LGBTQ+ Individuals in the Economics Profession (CSQIEP). 

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Elisa Slattery

Elisa Slattery was formerly senior program officer with the Open Society Foundations’ Women’s Rights Program, where she focused on sexual and reproductive rights. Prior to joining Open Society, Elisa was a consulting researcher at Amnesty International, where she documented human rights violations stemming from Ireland’s highly restrictive abortion law. She previously worked with the health law program of the International Development Law Organization in Rome. Elisa also served as the regional director for the Africa program at the Center for Reproductive Rights, where her work focused on promoting reproductive rights through national, regional, and international accountability mechanisms and addressing the intersection of HIV and reproductive rights.

Elisa has worked as a consultant on workers’ rights issues in Kenya, conducted comparative legal and human rights research on the rights of incarcerated parents at the Brennan Center for Justice, and researched the impact of welfare reform on families with disabilities at the University of North Carolina’s Frank Porter Graham Child Development Center. She holds a JD from Columbia Law School and a MA in history from Duke University.

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Drew Thompson

Drew writes and teaches on African, African-American, and Black Diaspora visual and material culture, the history of photography, Black modernism, and museums as (de-)colonial spaces. His work is animated by an interest in the role of the visual arts in historical processes like decolonization, as well as a desire to tell stories about under-recognized artists and art movements. His books include Filtering Histories: The Photographic Bureaucracy in Mozambique, 1960 to Recent Times and his upcoming second monograph Coloring Black Surveillance: The Story of Polaroid in Africa, the Anti-Apartheid Struggle, and the Contemporary Art World, seeks to draw connections between the invention of instant color photography, the anti-apartheid struggle, and the use of Polaroids in US prisons. He also works with the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, currently working on a posthumous survey of the Black American artist Ben Wigfall and his artist workshop Communications Village.

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Tom Wolf

Tom Wolf is professor emeritus of art history and visual culture at Bard. His primary areas of research are Asian American art and the history of art in the Woodstock, New York art colony. His publications include “The Tip of the Iceberg: Early Asian American Artists in New York” in Asian American Art, A History, “Doris Lee in Woodstock,” in Simple Pleasures—The Art of Doris Lee, and “Global Connections: Miguel Covarrubias, Isami Doi, Aaron Douglas and Winold Reiss,” exhibited at The Samuel Dorsky Museum.

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Elisabeth Zerofsky

Elisabeth Zerofsky writes about politics and society in the US and Europe. Her recent work has focussed on illiberalism in democracies and geographic inequalities. She has written for the New Yorker, the Times Magazine and the Times Book Review, and the Wall Street Journal, among other publications. She was a 2017 Livingston Award finalist and a fellow with the Robert Bosch Foundation Fellowship Program.