The Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College offers an architecturally bold and dynamic environment for innovative artistic presentation in the Hudson Valley.

The Frank Gehry-designed center provides audiences with a world-class complex that inspires risk-taking performances and provocative programs in orchestral, chamber, and jazz music and theater, dance, and opera by American and international artists.


Designed by internationally acclaimed architect Frank Gehry, the 110,000-square-foot Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College houses two theaters; four rehearsal studios for dance, theater and music; and professional support facilities. Sosnoff Theater, an intimate, 900-seat theater with an orchestra, parterre and two balcony sections, features an orchestra pit for opera and an acoustic shell designed by Yasuhisa Toyota that turns the theater into a first-class concert hall for performances of chamber and symphonic music.

The infinitely flexible Theater Two houses Bard's Theater and Dance Programs during the academic year.

The Fisher Center is also the new home of the Bard Music Festival, entering its 15th season in August 2004, and will play host to companies from theUnited States and abroad during Bard SummerScape, a festival of opera, theater, and dance.

In the early 1970's Bard College's theater, the Old Carriage House, on the Blithewood estate burned down.

Eventually, in the late 1970's the college completed the building of what is now the Avery Arts Center with limited facilities to house theater, dance, and music near the Edith C. Blum Institute, and later in the 1980's added the 375 seat F.W. Olin Auditorium for lectures and small chamber programs.


Through the 1980's and 1990's it became clear that the college needed to expand its teaching and performance space to meet its curriculum needs and to create a regional performing arts facility which could be part of a larger-scale effort to develop the Hudson Valley as a destination point for cultural tourism.

The current facility is the result of planning that began in the early 1990's in cooperation with community leaders. The success of the effort to build the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College coincides with the development of other facilities in the region including the opening of the DIA Center, the expansion of Storm King, and the success of Bard's own Center for Curatorial Studies with its exhibition space.

This new facility is one which will be devoted primarily to teaching and college events during the academic year and used as a public performing arts facility and venue for the college's graduate programs in the arts during the summer months.

Photographs of Fisher Center by © Peter Aaron/Esto