87 Notable alumni of Bennington College

Emily Mason was an American abstract painter and printmaker. Mason developed her individual approach to the Abstract Expressionist and color field painting traditions with her veils of color and spontaneous gestural mark. Mason was born and raised in New York City, where she lived and worked until her death.

Miranda Kennedy is an American journalist and writer. Her first book, Sideways on a Scooter: Life and Love in India, was published by Random House in 2011. Part memoir, part reported nonfiction, it tells the story of several Indian women to describe the slow pace of social and cultural change in India. The book received praise from The Washington Post,...

Jules Rosskam is an American filmmaker, artist, and educator. His films, which include transparent, against a trans narrative (2008), Thick Relations (2012), and Paternal Rites (2018), have helped shape the discussion around transgender narratives in 21st century film. Rosskam is also a noted fine artist, lecturer, and professor. He is currently assistant professor of visual arts at the University of...

James Roland "J. R." Mitchell was an American jazz drummer and educator who sought to promote awareness of the African American music experience. In the early 1980s, jazz journalist and Washington Post music critic W. Royal Stokes wrote, "J. R. Mitchell is the renaissance man of jazz."

Barrett Warner is an American short story writer, poet, essayist, critic, and editor. The author of Until I’m Blue in the Face (1990), My Friend Ken Harvey (2014), and Why Is It So Hard to Kill You? (2016), his work has appeared in numerous literary journals and zines. He is a recipient of the Salamander fiction prize, the Tucson Festival...

Jeanne Mackin is an American author and a fellow of the American Antiquarian Society. Her published novels include A Lady of Good Family, The Beautiful American, The Sweet By and By, Dreams of Empire, The Queen's War and The Frenchwoman. She published a trilogy of mysteries with New American Library, writing as Anna Maclean. The mysteries were also translated and...

Genevieve Belleveau is an American performance artist and singer based in New York City and Los Angeles. Belleveau is best known for her relational art pieces which involve the audience in the art. She confronts within her work issues of human connection, technology and religious ritual. She was also a driver of a Mister Softee ice cream truck and has...

Martha Rockwell is a retired American cross-country skier and coach, who competed at the Winter Olympic Games in 1972 and 1976. She has been cited in the U.S. as a "pioneer" and a "legend" in women's cross-country skiing, having been the U.S. women's cross-country ski champion 18 times between 1969 and 1975 as part of the first U.S. national cross-country...

M. B. Goffstein was an American writer and illustrator of books for children and adults. She was the recipient of three New York Times Best Illustrated Children's Books of the Year (A Little Schubert, Natural History, and An Artist), Special Recognition from the Jane Addams Children's Book Award (Natural History), and a Caldecott Honor for Fish for Supper.

Denise Provost is an American politician who represented the 27th Middlesex District in the Massachusetts House of Representatives from 2006 until 2020 and was a member of the Somerville, Massachusetts Board of Aldermen from 2000 to 2006.

Margo Baumgarten Davis is a photographer, educator and author of several photographer's books.

Eugenia Kim is a Korean American writer and novelist who lives in Washington, D.C. She is most known for her debut novel, The Calligrapher's Daughter (2008), which was critically acclaimed and won multiple awards, including the 2009 Borders Original Voices Award for Fiction. Kim teaches at Fairfield University's MFA Creative Writing program.

Michael Klein is an American Lambda literary award-winning fiction writer, poet, and faculty member of the English department at Goddard College and The Frost Place Conference on Poetry.

Lindsay Howard is an American curator, writer, and new media scholar based in New York City whose work explores how the internet is shaping art and culture.

Cynthia Lee Macdonald was an American poet, educator, and psychoanalyst.

Harold Davis is an American photographer and author.

Hendl Helen Mirra is an American conceptual artist. "[Like Henry David Thoreau, she is a] maximalist in a minimalist robe", with an idiosyncratic practice. She is engaged with ideas common to buddhist and pragmatist philosophies, and since 2008 her art practice has been integrated with walking. She has said of walking: "It is an unskilled activity, and a modest activity,...

Mohammed Naseehu Ali is a Ghanaian-born writer based in New York City.

Roxana Robinson is an American novelist and biographer whose fiction explores the complexity of familial bonds and fault lines. She is best known for her 2008 novel, Cost, which was named one of the Five Best Novels of the Year by The Washington Post. She is also the author of Georgia O'Keeffe: A Life, and has written widely on American...

Bessie Schonberg was a highly influential dancer, choreographer and teacher of the 20th century. She was at the center of contemporary modern dance from her beginning at Bennington College up until her death in 1997. Her career spanned sixty-five years and she helped mold a new generation of modern dancers including Lucinda Childs, Elizabeth Keen, Meredith Monk and Carolyn Adams...

Jamie Quatro is an American fiction writer. Her debut story collection, I Want to Show You More, was published by Grove Press in 2013. Her first novel, Fire Sermon, was published in 2018.

Tara Ison is an American novelist, short story writer, and essayist.

Virlana Tkacz is the founding director of the Yara Arts Group, a resident company at the world-renowned La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club in New York. She was educated at Bennington College and Columbia University, where she earned a Master of Fine Arts in theatre directing.

Will Stratton is an American singer-songwriter and composer. He released his first album during the summer after graduating from high school and has so far released eight full solo albums and two EPs. He is currently signed to Bella Union.

James Geary is an American writer, former Europe editor of Time and deputy curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard. In this role he is also editor of Nieman Reports, oversees other Nieman print and online publications and manages a range of duties related to the Nieman Fellowship program and the foundation's journalism outreach efforts.

Patricia Johanson was an American artist. Johanson is known for her large-scale art projects that create aesthetic and practical habitats for humans and wildlife. She designed her functional art projects, created with and in the natural landscape, to solve infrastructure and environmental problems, but also to reconnect city-dwellers with nature and with the history of a place. These project designs...

George Davis Whitmore was an American playwright, novelist, and poet. He also wrote non-fiction accounts about homosexuality and AIDS.

Jasmin Darznik is a novelist and academic. She is the New York Times bestselling author of four books: the memoir The Good Daughter: A Memoir of My Mother's Hidden Life, and the novels Song of a Captive Bird, The Bohemians, and the forthcoming American Goddess, set in old Hollywood.

Dan Cameron is an American contemporary art curator. He has served as senior curator for Next Wave Visual Art at Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), an annual exhibition of emerging Brooklyn-based artists since 2002. He is also a member of the graduate faculty of School of Visual Arts (SVA) in New York, where he teaches the MFA symposium each spring...

Katharine Holabird is an American writer, best known as the author of the Angelina Ballerina series, illustrated by Helen Craig, and the Twinkle series, illustrated by Sarah Warburton.

David Moss is an American composer, percussionist and self-taught vocalist, founder of the David Moss Dense Band; co-founder and artistic director of the Institute for Living Voice, Antwerp. His performances are noted for their innovative style, multimedia approach and improvisation. Moss has lived in Berlin, Germany since 1991, when he received a fellowship from the prestigious Berlin Artist Program of...

Ashley Gjøvik is an American program manager and activist who is known for her labor complaints against Apple Inc. Gjøvik was terminated in 2021 by Apple for leaking confidential intellectual property.

Mark Barnes is an American attorney serving as a partner in the Ropes & Gray health care and life sciences practice based in Boston. He was director of policy for the New York State Department of Health AIDS Institute, and associate commissioner for medical and legal policy for the New York City Department of Health under the mayoralty of David...

Zuleikha Chaudhari is a theatre director and lighting designer based in New Delhi and Mumbai, India. She is also a Visiting Faculty at The Dramatic Art and Design Academy, New Delhi.

Ujwal Thapa was a Nepali youth leader and activist, entrepreneur, and social worker. He was the president of the Bibeksheel Nepali party.

Heather Dewey-Hagborg is an information artist and bio-hacker. She is best known for her project Stranger Visions, a series of portraits created from DNA she recovered from discarded items, such as hair, cigarettes and chewing gum while living in Brooklyn, New York. From the extracted DNA, she determined gender, ethnicity and other factors and then used face-generating software and a...

Ivy Claire Pochoda is an American novelist and former professional squash player. Pochoda grew up in Brooklyn, New York. She currently lives in Los Angeles.

Lizbeth Meg Rosenberg is an American poet, novelist, children's book author and book reviewer. She is currently a professor of English at Binghamton University, and in previous years has taught at Colgate University, Sarah Lawrence College, Hamilton College, Bennington College, and Hollins College. Her children's book reviews appear monthly in The Boston Globe.

Kathleen Harriman Mortimer was an American journalist and socialite who played an important role in helping her father and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt with behind-the-scenes management of the American delegation to the Yalta Conference. Her father W. Averell Harriman was then the US Ambassador to the Soviet Union, and he played an important role in assisting Roosevelt, since the conference...

Marcia Judith Freedman was an American-Israeli activist and politician. She advocated for a two-state solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, as well as for women's and gay rights. Born in Newark, New Jersey, Freedman immigrated to Israel in 1969, where she played a leading role in the development of the second-wave feminist movement during the 1970s. She served as a member...

Alexander William Bleeker is an American musician. He is best known as the bassist and occasional lead vocalist of the indie rock band Real Estate, with whom he has recorded six studio albums. He is also the frontman and primary recording artist of the indie rock band Alex Bleeker and the Freaks, with who he has recorded three studio albums.

Bruce Berman is an American film industry executive and executive producer. He is the chairman and CEO of Village Roadshow Pictures, a position he has held from 1997 to 2021. His credits as an executive producer include American Sniper, The Lego Movie, The Great Gatsby, the Ocean's trilogy, Sherlock Holmes and its sequel, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, Happy...

Jonathan Elias is an American composer best known for his film soundtracks.

Elizabeth Swados was an American writer, composer, musician, choreographer, and theatre director. Swados received Tony Award nominations for Best Musical, Best Direction of a Musical, Best Book of a Musical, Best Original Score, and Best Choreography. She was nominated for Drama Desk Awards for Outstanding Director of a Musical, Outstanding Lyrics, and Outstanding Music, and won an Obie Award for...

Amanda "Binky" Urban is an American literary agent and partner at ICM Partners.

Elizabeth MacDonald Jolas is a French and American composer.

Jovita Moore was an American television news anchor who worked for WSB-TV in Atlanta, Georgia, from 1998 until her death.

Anne Waldman is an American poet. Since the 1960s, Waldman has been an active member of the Outrider experimental poetry community as a writer, performer, collaborator, professor, editor, scholar, and cultural/political activist. She has also been connected to the Beat Generation poets.

Charles Bock is an American writer whose debut novel Beautiful Children (published by Random House) was selected by The New York Times as a Notable Book of the Year for 2008, and won the 2009 Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

James Tenney was an American composer, music theorist, and pianist. He made significant early musical contributions to plunderphonics, sound synthesis, algorithmic composition, process music, spectral music, and microtonal tuning systems including extended just intonation. His theoretical writings variously concern musical form, texture, timbre, consonance and dissonance, and harmonic perception.

Brix Smith is an American singer and guitarist, best known as the lead guitarist and a major songwriter for the English post-punk band the Fall during two stints in the band (1983–1989, and 1994–1996).

Joan Hinton was a nuclear physicist and one of the few female scientists who worked for the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos. Dismayed at the use of the atomic bomb against the Japanese, she went to live and work in China, staying on after the establishment of the People's Republic of China after 1949. She and her husband Erwin (Sid)...

Gale Arnot Brewer is an American Democratic politician from the state of New York who has represented the 6th New York City Council district since January 2022, a position she previously held from 2002 to 2013. From January 2014 to December 2021, she served as the 27th Borough President of the New York City borough of Manhattan.

Melissa Anne Rosenberg is an American television writer, television producer, and screenwriter. She has worked in both film and television and has won a Peabody Award. She has also been nominated for two Emmy Awards, and two Writers Guild of America Awards. Since joining the Writers Guild of America, she has been involved in its board of directors and was...

Diane Marie Antonia Varsi was an American film actress best known for her performances in Peyton Place – her film debut, for which she was nominated for an Academy Award – and the cult film Wild in the Streets. She left Hollywood to pursue personal and artistic aims, notably at Bennington College in Vermont, where she studied poetry with poet...

Judith Jones was an American writer and editor, initially known for having rescued The Diary of Anne Frank from the reject pile. Jones is also known as the editor who championed Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking. She retired as senior editor and vice president at Alfred A. Knopf in 2011 and fully retired in 2013 after more...

Tom Sachs is an American artist who lives and works in New York City.

Hildegard E. Peplau was an American nurse and the first published nursing theorist since Florence Nightingale. She created the middle-range nursing theory of interpersonal relations, which helped to revolutionize the scholarly work of nurses. As a primary contributor to mental health law reform, she led the way towards humane treatment of patients with behavior and personality disorders.

Christopher Barron Gross, best known as Chris Barron is an American singer and songwriter, best known as the lead singer of Spin Doctors.

Jonathan Allen Lethem is an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer. His first novel, Gun, with Occasional Music, a genre work that mixed elements of science fiction and detective fiction, was published in 1994. In 1999, Lethem published Motherless Brooklyn, a National Book Critics Circle Award-winning novel that achieved mainstream success. In 2003, he published The Fortress of Solitude,...

Sheila Miyoshi Jager is an American historian. She is a Professor of East Asian Studies at Oberlin College, author of two books on Korea, co-editor of a third book on Asian nations in the post-Cold War era, and a forthcoming book on great power competition in northeast Asia at the turn of the 19th-20th century. She is a well-known historian...

Sally Mann is an American photographer known for making large format black and white photographs of people and places in her immediate surroundings: her children, husband, and rural landscapes, as well as self-portraits.

Helen Frankenthaler was an American abstract expressionist painter. She was a major contributor to the history of postwar American painting. Having exhibited her work for over six decades (early 1950s until 2011), she spanned several generations of abstract painters while continuing to produce vital and ever-changing new work. Frankenthaler began exhibiting her large-scale abstract expressionist paintings in contemporary museums and...

Betty Aberlin is an American actress, poet, and writer. She is best known for playing Lady Aberlin on the children's television series Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, a role she played for the entirety of the show's 33-year run.

Kiran Desai is an Indian author. Her novel The Inheritance of Loss won the 2006 Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Fiction Award. In 2015, The Economic Times named her one of 20 most influential global Indian women.

Michael Kevin Pollan is an American journalist who is a professor and the first Lewis K. Chan Arts Lecturer at Harvard University. Concurrently, he is the Knight Professor of Science and Environmental Journalism and the director of the Knight Program in Science and Environmental Journalism at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism where in 2020 he co-founded the UC...

Allison Mills, also known as Alley Bean, is an American actress, known for her roles on television. She starred as Norma Arnold, in the coming-of-age ABC comedy series, The Wonder Years (1988–1993). In 2006 she began playing the role of Pamela Douglas, the sister of the late Forrester matriarch Stephanie Forrester (Susan Flannery), on the CBS soap opera, The Bold...

Andrea Rita Dworkin was an American radical feminist writer and activist best known for her analysis of pornography. Her feminist writings, beginning in 1974, span 30 years. They are found in a dozen solo works: nine books of non-fiction, two novels, and a collection of short stories. Another three volumes were co-written or co-edited with US constitutional law professor and...

John Billingsley is an American actor best known for his role as Doctor Phlox on the television series Star Trek: Enterprise.

Farahnaz Pahlavi is the daughter of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the late Shah of Iran, by his third wife, Farah Diba.

Donna Louise Tartt is an American novelist. She wrote the novels The Secret History (1992), The Little Friend (2002), and The Goldfinch (2013), which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was adapted into a 2019 film of the same name. She was included in Time magazine's 2014 "100 Most Influential People" list.

Yasmin Aga Khan is a Swiss-born American philanthropist known for raising public awareness of Alzheimer's disease. She is the younger daughter of American movie actress and dancer Rita Hayworth, and the third child of Aly Khan. Her paternal half-brother was Karim al-Husayni, Aga Khan IV.

Anne Ramsey-Mobley was an American actress. She was best known for her film roles as Mama Fratelli in The Goonies (1985) and as Mrs. Lift in Throw Momma from the Train (1987), the latter of which earned her nominations for an Academy Award and a Golden Globe Award. Additionally, Ramsey's respective turns in both aforementioned films earned her two Saturn...

James Timothy Daly is an American actor, producer and director, best known for his roles as Joe Hackett on the NBC sitcom Wings and his recurring role as drug-addicted screenwriter J.T. Dolan on The Sopranos. He starred as Pete Wilder on the ABC medical drama Private Practice from 2007 to 2012. He is also known for his voice role as...

Bret Easton Ellis is an American author and screenwriter. Ellis was one of the Literary Brat Pack and is a self-proclaimed satirist whose trademark technique as a writer is the expression of extreme acts and opinions in an affectless style. His novels often share recurring characters.

Elizabeth Anne Ford was First Lady of the United States from 1974 to 1977, as the wife of President Gerald Ford. As first lady, she was active in social policy, and set a precedent as a politically active presidential spouse. She was also Second Lady of the United States from 1973 to 1974, when her husband was vice president.

Carol Elaine Channing was an American actress, comedian, singer and dancer who starred in Broadway and film musicals. Each of her characters typically possessed a fervent expressiveness and an easily identifiable voice.

Peter Hayden Dinklage is an American actor. Portraying Tyrion Lannister on the HBO television series Game of Thrones (2011–2019), he won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series a record four times. Dinklage also received a Golden Globe Award in 2011 and a Screen Actors Guild Award in 2020 for the role.

Justin Paul Theroux is an American actor and filmmaker. He gained recognition for his partnership with David Lynch on the surrealist art films Mulholland Drive (2001) and Inland Empire (2006). He also appeared in films such as Romy and Michele's High School Reunion (1997), American Psycho (2000), Zoolander (2001), Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle (2003), Miami Vice (2006), The Girl on...

Holland Taylor is an American actress. She won the 1999 Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series for her role as Judge Roberta Kittleson on ABC's The Practice (1998–2003) and she received four Primetime Emmy Award nominations for her role as Evelyn Harper on Two and a Half Men (2003–15).

Alan Wolf Arkin was an American actor, filmmaker and musician. In a career spanning seven decades, he received numerous accolades, including an Academy Award, a BAFTA Award, a Golden Globe Award, and a Tony Award as well as nominations for six Emmy Awards.

Michael Jamal Brooks was an American talk show host, writer, left-wing political commentator, and comedian. While co-hosting The Majority Report with Sam Seder, he launched The Michael Brooks Show in August 2017 and provided commentary for media outlets, making regular appearances on shows such as The Young Turks. Brooks contributed to various publications, including HuffPost, The Washington Post, Al Jazeera,...

David James Lazar is United States-born rabbi-educator, and Rabbi at Or Hamidbar in Palm Springs, California. He has worked in Israel and Europe for more than 30 years.

Nathalie Handal is a poet, writer and professor at New York University. She has published 10 books, including Life in a Country Album.

Char Davies is a Canadian contemporary artist known for creating immersive virtual reality (VR) artworks. A founding director of Softimage, Co, she is considered a world leader in the field of virtual reality and a pioneer of bio-feedback VR. Davies is based in rural Quebec and San Francisco.

Richard Deacon CBE RA is a British abstract sculptor, and a winner of the Turner Prize.