DIY at Bard Graduate Center is a public festival that explores different approaches to making. DIY@BGC gathers together thinkers, curators, and artists to reflect on their own immersive approaches to creating scholarship, writing, visual art, and choreography. This interdisciplinary event takes inspiration from our current exhibitions, Fabricating Power with Balinese Textiles and The Codex and Crafts in Late Antiquity, in which each curator’s research explores craft processes as experiential and devotional acts.

Full Festival Schedule:

Monday, May 7
6:30 pm
Creativity, Choreography, and Embodied Knowledge
Timothy Ingold and Stephen Petronio in conversation
Moderated by Dean Peter N. Miller

Thursday, May 10
6:30 pm
Resistance, Power, and Transformation
Tanya Aguiñiga and Sheila Pepe in conversation
Moderated by Elissa Auther

Friday, May 11
6:30 pm
Some Methodologies of Making
Thomas Thwaites, Janine di Giovanni, and Nomi Stone in conversation

Saturday, May 12
2–4 pm
Biocentric Interconnectedness: We All Contribute to the Web
A participatory performance in with artist-in-residence Neil Goss
Drop in any point and stay as long as you like


Thomas Thwaites is a designer (of a more speculative sort), interested in the societal impacts of science, technology, and economics. He holds an MA in Design Interactions from the Royal College of Art, and a BSc. in Human Sciences from University College, London. His work has been acquired by the Victoria & Albert Museum for their permanent collection, and is exhibited frequently and internationally at major galleries worldwide, including at the National Museum of China, the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul, the Science Museum (London), and the Zero 1 Biennial (California). He is the author of two books; The Toaster Project, and GoatMan both published by Princeton Architectural Press, and receiving Korean, Japanese and Norwegian editions. He is currently a visiting assistant professor in Industrial Design at Rhode Island School of Design.

Janine di Giovanni
is the Edward R. Murrow Fellow at the Council on Foreign Affairs in New York. She has worked for over 25 years as a human rights reporter and investigator in conflict zones in the Balkans, Africa, and the Middle East. Her most recent book, The Morning They Came for Us: Dispatches from Syria has been called “searing and necessary” by the New York Times and has won three awards a well as being named one of the best human rights books in 2016. It has been translated into 18 languages. It was shortlisted for the Helen Bernstein Award at the New York Public Library for Excellence in Journalism.


Nomi Stone is an anthropologist and a poet. Kill Class, her second collection of poems based on her fieldwork, is forthcoming from Tupelo Press in 2019. She is currently at work on her ethnography, Human Technologies and the Making of American War, a finalist for the University of California Press’s Atelier Series. Poems appear recently or will soon in POETRY, American Poetry Review, The New Republic, The Academy of American Poets’ “Poem-a-Day” series, Bettering American Poetry 2017, The Best American Poetry 2016, Tin House, New England Review, and elsewhere. Anthropological scholarship appears recently in the journal Cultural Anthropology(2017). Her current work is based on two years of fieldwork she conducted within war trainings in mock Middle Eastern villages erected by the US military across America. Stone has a PhD from Columbia, an MPhil in Middle East Studies from Oxford, an MFA in poetry from Warren Wilson and teaches at Princeton University.