Bard Graduate Center is devoted to the study of decorative arts, design history, and material culture through research, advanced degrees, exhibitions, publications, and events.

Bard Graduate Center advances the study of decorative arts, design history, and material culture through its object-centered approach to teaching, research, exhibitions, publications, and events.

At BGC, we study the human past and present through their material expressions. We focus on objects and other material forms—from those valued for their aesthetic elements to the ordinary things used in everyday life.

Our accomplished interdisciplinary faculty inspires and prepares students in our MA and PhD programs for successful careers in academia, museums, and the private sector. We bring equal intellectual rigor to our acclaimed exhibitions, award-winning catalogues and scholarly publications, and innovative public programs, and we view all of these integrated elements as vital to our curriculum.

BGC’s campus comprises a state-of-the-art academic programs building at 38 West 86th Street, a gallery at 18 West 86th Street, and a residence hall at 410 West 58th Street. A new collection study center will open at 8 West 86th Street in 2026.

Founded by Dr. Susan Weber in 1993, Bard Graduate Center has become the preeminent institute for academic research and exhibition of decorative arts, design history, and material culture. BGC is an accredited unit of Bard College and a member of the Association of Research Institutes in Art History (ARIAH).

Jacqueline M. Atkins (PhD 2006) is giving talks in London on May 14 and 15, organized by the Japan Foundation, London. The first is entitled “Worn with Pride: Textiles, Kimono, and Propaganda in Japan 1925-1945”; the second is “A Lost Art Revived: Tsujigahana, Itchiku Tsujigahana, and Itchiku Kubota.” On May 17, she will speak on “Challenging Convention: The Kimono of Itchiku Kubota” at Siebold Huis, Leiden, Netherlands. On May 21, at the Guimet Museum in Paris, she and Dale Carolyn Gluckman will lecture on “Performance and Presentation in the Life and Work of Itchiku Kubota.”

Jackie Killian (MA 2006) is major gifts officer, Foundation Relations and Planned Giving, at Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library in Delaware.

Kristina Preussner Gropper (MA 2009) is the research manager for institutional advancement at Pratt Institute in New York City.

Stephanie Lake (MA 2000, PhD 2009) is publishing a monograph on the fashion designer Bonnie Cashin with Rizzoli (spring 2016). Cashin was the subject of her doctoral dissertation, and Stephanie owns her personal archive, including her clothing collection. She also designed a capsule collection of one- of-a-kind jewelry commissioned by the Minneapolis Institute of Arts to complement their current exhibition Habsburg Splendor: Masterpieces from Vienna’s Imperial Collections.

Grace Chuang (MA 2010) has been named the Samuel H. Kress Institutional Fellow at the Institut national d’histoire de l’art, Paris.

Genny Cortinovis (MA 2010) is a researcher in the Department of Decorative Arts and Design at the St. Louis Art Museum. She is currently co-curating an exhibition on modern design in St. Louis between 1935 and 1965. She gave birth to a daughter, Dorothea Rose, last year.

Adrienne Bateson (MA 2011) is assistant registrar at the Jewish Museum in New York City.

Lauren Arnold (MA 2012) is the deputy registrar and rights and reproductions coordinator at the American Folk Art Museum in New York City.

Roisin Inglesby (MA 2012) is curator of Architectural Drawings, Historic Royal Palaces, Tower of London.

Casey Mathern (MA 2013) is curator of objects and exhibits at the Goodhue County Historical Society in Red Wing, Minnesota.

Charlotte Trautman Wittmann (MA 2012) is working in the membership department at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City.

Rebecca Mir (MA 2012) oversees two digital media labs in the Sackler Center for Arts Education at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. She helps integrate digital media into educational offerings by training educators and piloting new programs. She also works with an interdepartmental team on the Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art Initiative: www.guggenheim.org/MAP.