Bard College has named French curator Sandra Terdjman as its Keith Haring Chair in Art and Activism for the 2026-27 academic year. Terdjman cofounded KADIST, the arts organisation that supports artists and exhibitions internationally, and her work has long centred on artists who intervene directly in situations of injustice rather than treating social questions as subject matter alone. The chair, established as an annual award in 2014, lets scholars, activists and artists teach and carry out research within Bard's Center for Curatorial Studies graduate programme and its undergraduate Human Rights programme.

Terdjman succeeds Colombian-born interdisciplinary artist Carlos Motta, whose practice investigates the social conditions and political struggles of sexual, gender and ethnic communities. The succession underlines the chair's dual character: it is both an academic post and a position shaped by practice, held by people whose work moves between exhibition-making, research and public engagement. Simon Castets, executive director of the Keith Haring Foundation, noted that Terdjman's long-standing support for artist-led community efforts fits the foundation's mission.

Castets also placed her among a line of previous chairs who have advanced Haring's conviction that the contemporary artist carries a responsibility to oppose the dehumanisation of culture. That framing matters because the chair is not a conventional visiting lectureship: it asks its holder to test, in teaching and in research, what happens when artists act as artists inside unjust situations with the aim of changing them, rather than illustrating a position from outside.

For Bard, the appointment connects its upstate New York campus to an international curatorial network, and for Terdjman it extends a career spent building infrastructure for artists into the classroom. Students in both the graduate curatorial programme and the Human Rights programme will encounter a practitioner whose institutional work has consistently treated art as a form of intervention, and the year is likely to be watched for how that approach translates into seminars, research and public programming.