People

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Chrys Margaritidis

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 cocurricular programming. Chrys also teaches a variety of courses on applied ethics, 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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Elmira Bayrasli

Elmira Bayrasli joined BGIA in 2016, as an adjunct lecturer, teaching "Foreign Policy in the Time of the Internet." 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 presidential appointee at the United States State Department, working for Madeleine Albright and Richard Holbrooke, respectively. Elmira provides analysis on foreign policy, particularly on Turkey, global entrepreneurship, and gender issues. Her work has appeared in Reuters, Foreign Affairs, the Washington Post, Quartz, Techcrunch, Fortune, Forbes, CNN, NPR, BBC, Al Jazeera, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times. Bayrasli sits on several boards, including Invest2Innovate, Turkish Women's International Network, Turkish Philanthropy Funds, and Our Secure Future. 
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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Lucilla Pan

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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Erica Kane

Erica Kane obtained her BA in international studies, globalization, development, and human Rights with minors in anthropology and Spanish from Arcadia University (’09) and participated in study abroad programs in London, Barcelona, and Greece. She worked with under-served public middle school students in southwest Philadelphia as an AmeriCorps volunteer with City Year Greater Philadelphia from 2010–2011 and with high school students in 2012 with 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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Tom Wolf

Tom Wolf is Professor Emeritus of Art History and Visual Culture at Bard College. His primary areas of research are the history of art in the Woodstock, New York, art colony, and Asian American art. His publications include “The Tip of the Iceberg: Early Asian American Artists in New York” in Asian American Art, A History, Stanford University Press, 2008; The Artistic Journey of Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2015; “Doris Lee in Woodstock,” in Simple Pleasures—The Art of Doris Lee, Weatherspoon Art Museum, 2020, and “Global Connections: Miguel Covarrubias, Isami Doi, Aaron Douglas and Winold Reiss,” The Samuel Dorsky Museum, 2024

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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 (2006) as well as the editor of Mass Effect: Art and the Internet in the Twenty-First Century (2015, with Lauren Cornell) and From the Third Eye: The Evergreen Review Reader (2018, 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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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 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 introducing service-learning and experiential education into its post-communist school system. 

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DW Fitzpatrick

Attended the School of Visual Arts, Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Solo and group exhibitions at, among other venues, Bellwether Gallery, MoMA PS1, and Museum 52 in New York; Tokyo Institute of Technology; Saatchi Gallery, London; Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; M + B, Los Angeles; Yale University School of Art Gallery; Center on Contemporary Art, Seattle; and Baltimore Contemporary Art Museum. Honors include residencies at BOFFO and FIAR, Fire Island, New York, and Tokyo Institute of Technology; and grants from the Jerome Foundation and Art Matters. Previously taught at ICP-Bard Program in Advanced Photographic Studies and Yale University School of Art. At Bard since 2015.

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Suzy Hansen

Suzy Hansen, ASU Future Security Fellow, is working on a book about life in one Istanbul neighborhood. The project 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 and the winner of the Overseas Press Club's Cornelius Ryan Award for best nonfiction book on international affairs.

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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 on 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 with and without invitation at Guggenheim, MoMA, Brooklyn Museum, ZKM, the 56th Venice Biennale, 7th Berlin Biennale and Whitney Biennial. In a sort of side career, for nearly 20 years he has been performing and building sets with Berlin Based performance troupe And company&Co. 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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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 & printmaking to create artwork about intergenerational/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/developer for The Experimental Humanities Collaborative Network where they create digital spaces and tools.

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Elisabeth Zerofsky

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

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Cynthia Conti-Cook

Cynthia Conti-Cook 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’s work at Ford also includes supporting the mass incarceration team’s efforts to help the field leverage technology to advance police accountability, and to help the team better understand and respond to algorithmic bias in bail, sentencing, and parole considerations. 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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Drew Thompson

I write and teach on the subject areas of African, African-American, and Black Diaspora visual and material culture, the history of photography, Black modernism, and museums as (de-)colonial spaces. My work is animated by a profound interest in the role of the visual arts in historical processes like decolonization, and a desire to tell stories about under-recognized artists and art movements. To date, my work has focused on the history of photography in Southern Africa, particularly photography’s role in Southern and Lusophone Africa’s liberation struggles and each region’s post-colonial development. The culmination of this work is the book Filtering Histories: The Photographic Bureaucracy in Mozambique, 1960 to Recent Times (University of Michigan Press, 2021). My second monograph, provisionally titled 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. Art curating is a critical component of my scholarship and teaching. At present, I am working with the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts on a posthumous survey of the Black American artist Ben Wigfall and the artist workshop Communications Village that he established.

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Gabriel Perron

Dr. Gabriel G. Perron is an accomplished Associate Professor of Biology at Bard College and a Visiting Scientist at the prestigious 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. Dr. Perron's passion for cutting-edge research has taken him to some of the world's leading institutions, including Imperial College London and Harvard University, where he developed innovative techniques to study the spread of antibiotic-resistance genes and pathogens in environmental microbiomes. Dr. Perron's work has resulted in over 40 peer-reviewed publications in leading international journals, making him a recognized authority in his field. In addition, he is a regular contributor to public discussions on topics such as environmental health, public health, and food safety, further cementing his reputation as an influential voice in the scientific community. 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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Michael Robinson Cohen

Michael Robinson Cohen is a founding member of the New York City–based architecture collective Citygroup and author of the forthcoming book Housing as Housing. The collective was created to challenge the structural and cultural forces that shape architectural practices. Driven in particular by the profession’s inability to address the global housing crisis and protect the city from unbridled, profit-driven development, the group aims to establish an enclave for the production of theory and strategy that supports an alternative approach to architecture and a life of dignity for everyone in the city. Other design activism work includes Dialogue Not Monologue, a debate series; the Hollygrove Design Initiative in New Orleans; and the Hester Street Collaborative in New York. Professional experience with Bernheimer Architecture, Abruzzo Bodziak Architects, and Leroy Street Studio.