Fellows in Residence
Spring 2025 (Group 3)
Dance
Jennifer Harge
Choreographer, artist, and educator – United States
Jennifer Harge is an artist and educator based in Detroit, Michigan. Using movement as an organizing principle, she spills across choreography, installation, film, and language—collapsing form and gifting herself the freedom to play, wander, and be with multiplicity. Her creative research conjures and theorizes Black pleasures and longings through intimate collaborations with her ancestral lineages and direct arts community.
FLY | DROWN is a storytelling project honoring Black women’s self-sovereignty. Told from the perspective of Black women’s flesh, dreams, homes, and prayers, FLY | DROWN is a world where Black women can simply be. Harge is currently developing a new chapter introducing JJ LOVE: a Black, queer auntie from everywhere and nowhere, who centers Black women’s sexuality as a “tender space of sanctuary, self-imagination, intimacy and creative play… (Jennifer C. Nash, 2018).”
Film/Video
Giovanni Piperno
Film director, photographer – Italy
After studying photography at the European Institute of Design and with Leonard Freed (Magnum), Giovanni Piperno worked as a camera assistant on Italian and international films. Since 1994, he has directed numerous documentaries, tv programs, and short films. The latest documentary 16 millimeters to the revolution was presented at the 41st Torino Film Festival and was released in theaters in February 2024. Piperno teaches documentary at the C.S.C. of Rome and at the Gian Maria Volonté Cinema School.
Giovanni Piperno wishes to make a film to show how much talent and energy can be found among young people in the Italian suburbs. In 2015/16, he and his team conducted a workshop in the Tor Sapienza neighborhood of Rome, producing three short films. These stories inspired a film, and they developed a script with the participants. Today, the script needs updating to reflect contemporary music, the impact of social media on young people's lives, and a different area of Italy.
Humanities Scholarship
Jonah Siegel
(Literature Scholarship) – Distinguished Professor of English, Rutgers University – United States
Jonah Siegel is Distinguished Professor of English at Rutgers University. His books include Desire and Excess: The Nineteenth-Century Culture of Art (2000), Haunted Museum: Longing, Travel, and the Art-Romance Tradition (2005), The Emergence of the Modern Museum: An Anthology of Nineteenth-Century Sources (2008), Material Inspirations: The Interests of the Art Object in the Nineteenth Century and After (2020), and Overlooking Damage: Art, Display, and Loss in Times of Crisis (2022).
Why is contemporary culture so fascinated by art collections at risk or destroyed? How did the museum go from being a site of promise to a location of trauma or remorse? At Bogliasco, Jonah will be working on the Introduction to The Sadness of Curators, a study of the ways in which concepts of collecting and display manifested in popular culture — including films, streaming media, and novels—as well as in recent controversies about restitution may be traced to important sources in earlier eras.
Humanities Scholarship
Nancy Yousef
(Literature Scholarship) – Distinguished Professor of English, Rutgers University – United States
Nancy Yousef is Distinguished Professor of English at Rutgers University. She is the author of three books—Isolated Cases, Romantic Intimacy, and The Aesthetic Commonplace—as well as numerous essays on literature and philosophy from the 18th century to the present. She has been the recipient of fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the National Humanities Center. In winter 2025, she will be a Visiting Research Fellow at Oxford University.
Thinking with Words: Undisciplined Readings in Modern Philosophy aims to revive dialogue between philosophers and literary critics by reminding both of their shared historical commitment to elucidating the role of language in shaping thought, articulating feeling, and reflecting on the conditions of meaningful thought and feeling. The book advocates for collaborative possibilities that philosophy and literary studies might together realize in the midst of a broader cultural reckoning with the value of the liberal arts.
Literature
Jennifer Grotz
Poet and translator, Professor at the University of Rochester, Director of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conferences – United States – Van Cleef & Arpels Fellowship in Poetry
Jennifer Grotz is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Still Falling. Everything I Don't Know, the selected poems of Jerzy Ficowski, co-translated from the Polish with Piotr Sommer received the PEN Award for Best Book of Poetry. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Nation, The New Republic, New York Review of Books, Ploughshares, New England Review, and in five volumes of the Best American Poetry anthology.
At Bogliasco, Jennifer Grotz will compose and revise poems towards her still-untitled fifth collection of poetry.
Literature
Susan Sellers
Novelist, translator and editor – United Kingdom
Susan Sellers has published several books on gender and women’s writing. She has translated the French feminist Hélène Cixous and edited the British novelist Virginia Woolf. As a creative writer she has published stories, reflections on the practice of writing, and novels including Vanessa and Virginia which has been translated into sixteen languages and adapted for the stage. She is Emeritus Professor at St Andrews University in Scotland where she taught literature and creative writing.
Susan Sellers is writing a novel about the pioneering French feminist Simone de Beauvoir, whose ground-breaking books – many of them autobiographical – transformed the lives of women across the globe. She plans to challenge the idea that de Beauvoir’s work has little to offer contemporary gender and queer debate, and to explore highly topical questions of truth: who controls it, can we trust the stories we read, how can we write truthfully about ourselves and others?
Music
Philip Venables
Composer – United Kingdom/Germany
Philip Venables' previous operas, 4.48 Psychosis (2016, Sarah Kane), Denis & Katya (2019, Ted Huffman) and The Faggots and their Friends Between Revolutions (2023, Ted Huffman), have been performed worldwide by leading companies and won numerous awards. Philip studied at Cambridge University, the Guildhall School of Music & Drama and the Royal Academy of Music. 2025 sees the premiere of Philip’s fourth opera, We Are The Lucky Ones (Ted Huffman & Nina Segal) at Dutch National Opera.
At Bogliasco, Philip Venables will start work on a new opera for one of the major European opera houses. The opera will be a radical new version of a well-known piece of classic literature, written in collaboration with playwright Nina Segal, the title to be announced in due course. It will be his fifth opera, and second opera with orchestra, following 4.48 Psychosis, Denis & Katya, The Faggots and their Friends Between Revolutions, and We Are The Lucky Ones.
Theater
Mfoniso Udofia
Storyteller and educator – Nigeria/United States – Virginia Howard Fellowship
Mfoniso Udofia is a first-generation Nigerian-American storyteller and educator. Her plays Sojourners and The Grove will be produced by the Huntington Theatre, and productions of her plays Sojourners, runboyrun, Her Portmanteau and In Old Age have been seen at NYTW, A.C.T., Playwrights Realm, Magic Theater, National Black Theatre, and Boston Court. She is the recipient of the 2017 Helen Merrill Award, the 2017-18 McKnight National Residency and Commission and is a member of New Dramatists.
Mfoniso Udofia will be working on two plays. Lifted is about a brilliant and fiercely independent scholar, Toyoima Ufot, who has forged her own lonely path, isolating herself in the hallowed halls of academia, but can't outrun her past forever. Forced to contend with her choices and her history, Toyoima makes a voyage to her fatherland – Akwa Ibom, Nigeria – and finds herself on a healing journey where she is ultimately exonerated, because amongst family, one can never be made an outcast. In Old Age is a play about Abasiama Ufot and an elder man who make an unlikely spiritual connection.
Visual Arts
Athena LaTocha
Visual Artist – United States – Anonymous Was A Woman Fellowship
Athena LaTocha’s massive works on paper explore the relationship between human-made and natural worlds. The artist often incorporates local materials, while responding to the storied and, at times, traumatic histories that are rooted in place. LaTocha’s work has been shown in places such as the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; MoMA P.S.1; Smack Mellon; Green-Wood Cemetery; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts; and IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts.
Focusing on the environment surrounding Bogliasco and Genoa, LaTocha will be researching the local history and terrain, and documenting it through photography, video and audio recordings. Back in the artist studio at Bogliasco, the artist will develop a small body of work and prints based upon personal experiences of the area.