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Inclusive College Community

Bennington College Music faculty Michael Wimberly is an award-winning musician, composer, and sound designer who excavates and explores music of the African Diaspora and improvisation. He talks about how Bennington prepares vibrantly unique and driven students for the uncertainty of the world.
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Build your 4-year academic plan

Stretch and grow

Learn broadly, and learn boldly. Work with your faculty advisor to take courses in areas guided by your interests and needs—not constrained by the learner you’ve been before—and make your choices as the learner you want to be. Build the foundation of your own education, and develop the Bennington Capacities—to inquire, research, create, engage, and communicate. As you gain your bearings and explore new opportunities, reflect on how your first year at Bennington will guide the next (and the next and the next!).

Bring your plan into focus

Create your own, unique educational Plan, one that connects across disciplines to feed your passion and curiosity and celebrates your strengths while addressing your weaknesses. Collaborate with your Plan committee—your faculty advisor and two more faculty mentors expert in areas that support your ambitions. Propose your Plan to them, hear their guidance, and work together to chart a course to a more mature phase of learning and creating.

Live your plan

Learn, make, and do the work of your Plan every day—even when that is re-making and re-doing—as your understanding of your goals and potential develops and grows. Lean into the faculty and peer relationships that set Bennington apart as an intellectual and creative community. Connect on- and off-campus experiences in your Plan as you move through classes, Field Work Terms, and personal growth. As your learning builds, look ahead with your Plan committee to advanced work and a final year you will be proud of.

Achieve and elevate

Culminate your Plan in a piece of advanced work that demonstrates your Capacities in the classroom, lab, studio, or all three: a study, production, public action campaign, or other achievement specifically yours. As you celebrate your accomplishment with faculty and classmates, elevate your thinking to consider how your plans and successes extend beyond Bennington into life and a career.

GET STARTED

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"While Bennington encourages intellectual exploration, I still have space to hone in on the technical requirements for graduate school."

Shlesha Pradhan
Class of 2024

"The voice here is very strong. And that is what I want to take: to be so passionate about my morals and what I believe in."

Alisha Bade Shrestha
Class of 2023

“The Plan is a great learning experience, because once you get out of school, you have to develop your own plan committee in life.”

Sawyer London
Class of 2024
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Connect with your own faculty team

Plan to be taken seriously and to be encouraged by your professors—stellar faculty who are shaping the fields you’re interested in. Bennington’s unique model of student-faculty collaboration—your own team of faculty committed to you and your ideas—is why 95% of Bennington graduates say faculty encourage them to pursue their goals, compared with 22% of graduates nationally.

Faculty Spotlight

A few of the extraordinary writers, artists, scientists, performers, policy makers, and scholars on our faculty.

Jenny Boully

Jenny Boully

Jenny Boully is the author of seven books, most recently, Betwixt-and-Between: Essays on the Writing Life. Her first book, The Body: An Essay, is regarded as a canonical text in experimental essays, poetic prose, and imaginative form.

Amie McClellan

Amie McClellan

Amie McClellan is a cell biologist who utilizes baker’s yeast to explore how “molecular chaperones” participate in helping proteins attain and maintain their structure and function, and how this relates to human diseases that arise when this process goes awry.

Levi Gonzalez

Levi Gonzalez

Dance artist Levi Gonzalez’s work employs a queer corporeal logic to resist narrow definitions of knowledge and experience.

Photo credit: Alex Escalante

Blake Jones

Blake Jones

Blake Jones’s research integrates Endocrinology, Behavioral Ecology, Cognitive Science, Ornithology, and Conservation Biology.

Susan Sgorbati

Susan Sgorbati

 

Michael Wimberly

Michael Wimberly

REQUEST INFORMATION

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Pursue high-profile internships every year

Real-world experience has been built into a Bennington education since the beginning. We call it Field Work Term, and it means you’re guaranteed not one or two but four internships. Every year you spend six weeks working off campus. This is another reason Bennington graduates earn such high marks from employers: they are truly experienced by the time they graduate and have built a valuable resume as well as earning a degree.

Recent field work placements

Google
The Associated Press
ABC News
Time Magazine
Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre
Sony Interactive Entertainment
Guggenheim
American Museum of Natural History
The Bronx Museum
The Dalton School
Ennead Architects
The Fresh Air Fund
GROW NYC
HarperCollins Publishers
Harvard Stem Cell Institute
International Rescue Committee
Mark Morris Dance Group
MASS MoCA
Museum of the Moving Image
The Nature Conservancy
Sundance Institute
University of California, Riverside, Brain Game Center
Yale School of Medicine
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Join an inclusive community on a 440-acre makerspace

Our entire campus is a gorgeous, creative incubator for all areas of study from astronomy to the visual arts with the classrooms, studios, labs, stages, equipment, and materials you need to create, to make, and to test your ideas.

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Best of the best

According to national rankings, Bennington equals excellence.

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Best College Theater

The Princeton Review 2024

5

Most Innovative Schools

U.S. News & World Report 2022

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Classroom Experience

The Princeton Review 2024

And we are affordable

19

Most economically diverse students at a liberal arts college

New York Times College-Access Index 2023

Ground breakers start here. Join them.

Culture creators, movement starters, icons, and iconoclasts make this place—and it makes them—from the computer scientist-designer behind Xbox to the makers of The Matrix and Twilight to alumni remaking urban public transportation to renewable energy entrepreneurs. Even before you graduate, you’ll have this alumni network to help you.

Connect With Our Admissions Team

Fill out the form to connect with our admissions team and find out more about Bennington. You'll also have a chance to receive a copy of the new viewbook below!

bennington_viewbook
Apply Today

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