Fellows in Residence
Fall 2024 (group 3)
Dance
Ximena Garnica & Shige Moriya
Multidisciplinary artists – Colombia/Japan/United States
Colombian-born Ximena Garnica and Japan-native Shige Moriya are a multidisciplinary artist duo based in New York, creating works ranging from sculptural, video, light, and mixed-media installation art to contemporary dance and theater performances, publications, and research projects. Their works ponder questions of being, perception, interdependency, and coexistence. Garnica and Moriya have received awards from the USA, including Creative Capital, National Dance Project, and National Endowment for the Arts. They are the co-artistic directors of LEIMAY and the LEIMAY Ensemble.
Ximena and Shige will be working on their multi-year and multi-part project, Extinction Rituals. They will organize and integrate materials from their envisioned dance opera, triptych video, photographic series, and environmental action campaign. They will also work on a related short collection of writings focusing on the subjects that guide their multidisciplinary artistic practice. This collection will be integrated into the LEIMAY archive, documenting 25+ years of history as a creative force in the NY performance landscape.
Film/Video
Salome Chasnoff
Filmmaker and installation artist – United States
Salome Chasnoff is a filmmaker and installation artist who is inspired by the enlightening, humanizing, and healing capacities of storytelling. She has collaborated on films with people with disabilities, queer and trans youth, older sex workers, rural health workers, and women in prison. Her awards include Purpose Prize Fellowship, Ida B. Wells Bravery in Journalism, 21 Leaders for the 21st Century, and Illinois Arts Council Fellowship. She is a Senior Lecturer at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Beyondmedia was a pioneering Chicago organization at the forefront of democratizing mediamaking in the 1990s-2000s, guiding marginalized people to make videos in their own voices and inject them into public discourse to influence issues affecting their lives. Weaving archival footage with new interviews, Chasnoff’s documentary will focus on the transformative power of narrative agency, asking in a time of unprecedented connectivity and unprecedented social disintegration if storytelling can still heal.
Humanities Scholarship
Catherine Conybeare
(Classics) – Leslie Clark Professor in the Humanities, Bryn Mawr College – United Kingdom/United States
Catherine Conybeare teaches classics at Bryn Mawr College. Her most recent book, Augustine the African, places North Africa at the centre of Augustine of Hippo’s life and thought; it will be published by Liveright in 2025. She has written widely on the Latin literature and culture of late antiquity and is the editor of a series from Cambridge University Press, “Cultures of Latin”, which explores Latin as a continuous tradition from antiquity to the present.
The new project, Latin, Music, and Meaning, starts from two ideas: that a swathe of Western music is grounded in Latin, thanks to its emergence from hymnody and plainchant; and that it is through music that our contemporaries are most likely to encounter Latin. Four sections on hymns, plainchant, polyphony, and silence will be interspersed with case studies of pregnant Latin phrases in different musical settings to explore how the combination of words and music may generate meaning.
Humanities Scholarship
Martien Halvorson-Taylor
(Literature Scholarship) – Associate Professor of Religious Studies, University of Virginia – United States – Natalie and Richard Jacoff Foundation Fellowship
Martien Halvorson-Taylor is a scholar of the literature, religions, and history of the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament). She has published extensively on the concept of “exile” and “migration” in the ancient world; as well, how biblical literature has been interpreted to articulate the major human questions and provide for existential reflection. In addition to her scholarly publications, she is co-host of the podcast Sacred & Profane and the author of Writing the Bible on Audible/Amazon.
Martien Halvorson-Taylor is completing an English translation of the Song of Songs, a love poem in the Bible, that brings to bear both her knowledge of biblical languages as well as her interdisciplinary collaborations with scientists, poets, and musicians. She seeks to render a translation that both accounts for the poem in its historical context but also gives insight into why this work endures, meeting us in our current human experience of love and the natural world.
Literature
Nick Makoha
Poet and playwright – Uganda/United Kingdom
Dr Nick Makoha is the founder of Obsidian Foundation and the winner of the 2021 Ivan Juritz and the Poetry London Prize. Nick’s 2017 debut collection, Kingdom of Gravity, was shortlisted for the Forward’s Best First Collection and was a Guardian’s best books of the year. His poems appear in the Cambridge Review, the New York Times, Poetry Review, Poetry Wales, Poetry London, 5 Dials, Boston Review, Callaloo Birmingham Lit Journal, and Wasafiri.
Nick Makoha is working on a poetry manuscript, The New Carthaginians, and an accompanying book of essays called All the World is Mine (working title). The former is a three-part poetic sequence that explores the pivotal event in Ugandan history of the seven-day Entebbe hijacking in 1976, alongside other intertwining material linked by the motif of flight and its reinvention into a new myth. The latter is a book of essays based on ekphrastic poems named after Basquiat's paintings.
Music
Jason Thorpe Buchanan
Composer – United States/Germany – Aaron Copland Fund Fellowship
Jason Thorpe Buchanan is a tri-continentally active composer and music technologist. Artistic Director of the [Switch~ Ensemble], and Artistic Associate/Lecturer at the Hochschule für Musik Dresden’s Hybrid Music Lab. He has been commissioned and sought internationally, with collaborators including Alarm Will Sound, Interface, Talea, Slagwerk Den Haag, TACETi, and Line Upon Line. Scenes from his multimedia opera Hunger have received performances at Darmstadt, The Industry’s FIRST TAKE, & MATA.
The End of Forgetting, a collection of works composed for subsets of eleven musicians alongside generative electronics, video, and light, will investigate memory and the complex ramifications of our relationship to technology. Spontaneous choices of each musician, through audio analysis and gestural data from sensors, govern behavior of an interactive processing environment, analogous to causality we experience in daily life. Upcoming collaborations include projects with EMPAC, the [Switch~ Ensemble], Hypercube, and Ensemble NADAR.
Theater
Malina Prześluga
Playwright – Poland
Malina Prześluga is a playwright and a writer. Her plays have been staged around a hundred times in Poland and abroad and translated into thirteen languages. Her work has been published in the most prominent theater journals and anthologies. She received the IBBY award for her book Ziuzia and won Poland's most prestigious award – the Gdynia Dramaturgy Award – for her plays Debil and Jeszcze tu jesteś. She was awarded by the Polish Ministry of Culture for achievements in the field of literature and dramaturgy.
Give me three ways to fix everything. Do you believe any of them work? How do you cope with a personal, creativity, or global crisis? Prześluga wishes to gather real and imagined monologues of herself and others, sharing various experiences from different parts of the world. She wants to collect “Many Great Ideas on How to Fix Everything and a Few Bad Ones”. Let it be a study of human ability of recover. A play that gives hope, because too many she has written so far have taken it away.
Visual Arts
Liza Ambrossio
Multidisciplinary Artist – Mexico/France
Liza Ambrossio is a Mexican multidisciplinary artist, filmmaker and women’s rights activist who lives and works in France, Spain, Mexico, and the USA. She is the author of The rage of devotion, Blood orange, and Toda devoción causa ira. She has received the annual photography residence from the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris, France, and was a member of the Casa de Velazquez. Ambrossio has received favorable reviews from top international curators and art critics such as Cuauhtémoc Medina.
I am not a map, I am a labyrinth is an attempt at symbolic justice after confronting the incest experienced in the artist's childhood, exploring the history of mental imbalance in the field of love, both personal and global, and at the same time an ecofeminist nod in parallel to the climate crisis, where the physical, psychological, moral, and institutional vulnerability is explored in the face of the powers that surround us from childhood to death and how they directly affect women.