Recent Fellows

Joshua G. Stein – Professor of Architecture & Sustainable Practices, Woodbury University / Principal, Radical Craft – United States

Joshua G. Stein will be developing an ongoing research project, The Geological Atlas of the Built Metropolis, which reimagines the city’s seemingly discrete architectural objects as a continuous geological landscape that traces material trajectories backwards in space and time, suturing the city with the sites of extraction and production and the laboring populations it has historically attempted to push outside its identity.

John Jasperse – Choreographer, Astistic Director, Director of the Dance Program at Sarah Lawrence College – United States – Bogliasco and Baryshnikov Arts Center Joint Fellowship

John Jasperse will be creating choreography for a project that examines ageism inherent in the broader culture and the dance world, in particular. In resistance to a stance which views aging as a process solely of loss, Jasperse will be working on joy and dance’s ability to connect us to our temporal reality and embodied presence in this world. This project will culminate in a residency at the Baryshnikov Art Center in New York City, realized in cooperation with the Bogliasco Foundation.

Rashaun Mitchell – Choreographer – United States – Van Cleef & Arpels Bogliasco Special Fellow in Dance

Project in collaboration with Silas Riener

Rashaun and Silas draw from their embodied “Desires Lines” practice – which combines improvisatory movement, vocalization, and object manipulation – to build Open Machine, a site-responsive, community-oriented performance installation. Open Machine interrogates the tension of the virtual and the real, where logics and syntaxes of coding and game theory are applied to live bodies and relational scenarios. Projected footage, documented scores, and audience participation influence performers’ paths and expose the mechanics of creation.

Cynthia Oliver – Choreographer, Professor of Dance, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign – United States

Cynthia Oliver will be working on a book project - an experimental text that weaves memoir, historical record and choreographic examination of her work in relation to her rich cultural and aesthetic histories. The work will contribute to documenting the involvement of Black artists in avant-garde and postmodern dance and experimental performance worlds. The book’s working title, “Circling Black, Circling Back” refers to a characteristic choreographic strategy that distinguishes her work.

Neta Pulvermacher – Choreographer, Associate Professor of Dance, Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance – Israel

Since her parents' passing, Neta Pulvermacher has become increasingly obsessed with her German Jewish family history. The inevitable passing of the last living links to her family’s past, raises deep questions about the ephemerality of memory, history and experience. When the last person who remembers is gone, whole worlds, events, aunts, uncles, distant relatives and acquaintances disappear forever. In The Archives, she seeks to conjure a richly layered post memory performative landscape, where traces of these memories might hover.

Silas Riener – Choreographer – United States – Van Cleef & Arpels Bogliasco Special Fellow in Dance

Project in collaboration with Rashaun Mitchell

Rashaun and Silas draw from their embodied “Desires Lines” practice – which combines improvisatory movement, vocalization, and object manipulation – to build Open Machine, a site-responsive, community-oriented performance installation. Open Machine interrogates the tension of the virtual and the real, where logics and syntaxes of coding and game theory are applied to live bodies and relational scenarios. Projected footage, documented scores, and audience participation influence performers’ paths and expose the mechanics of creation.

Caterina Borelli – Filmmaker – Italy

Giovanna’s century - an image book project - traces the evolution of the role of women in Italy in the XX century, through the story of one of them, Giovanna Moro (1920-2012). Giovanna's story will be a composite of different experiences and will come to represent that of all women in the country. By underlining and showing the relevance of the connection between personal and public events, the book will follow the pattern set by the 1970’s Italian feminist motto: The personal is political.

Julia Haslett – Filmmaker, Associate Professor in the Department of Communication, University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill – United Kingdom/United States

Julia Haslett will be developing a new feature-length documentary about ecopsychology, specifically the role nature can play in helping people recover from trauma and mental illness. The film documents ecopsychology practices and through its form (pacing, shot composition, sound design, etc.) will be therapeutic to watch. This new project builds on Haslett's recent film Pushed up the Mountain, which is about plants and the people who care for them. Like her first feature, An Encounter with Simone Weil, it is essayistic, personal, and poetic.

Jeannette Louie – Filmmaker and Visual Artist – United States

US Being Epic is a short experimental documentary portraying the evolution of an individual who spawns a Chinese American family. The film explores identity as being a fluid presence where the self modulates singularity in reaction to contextual time. Using an archive of family images that spans decades of photographic history, memory alludes to an ever-growing chronicle that culminates into the definition of cultural consciousness.

Costică Brădăţan (Philosophy) – Professor of Humanities in the Honors College at Texas Tech University – Romania/United States

Costică Brădăţan will be working on a book manuscript that explores the philosophical significance and social function of dissent. Drawing on developments in the history of Western thought, the book makes the argument that dissent is fundamental for the health of a community’s civic, intellectual, and cultural life. One of the main tasks of the project is to distill – from the life and ideas of Diogenes the Cynic, Spinoza, Rousseau, Nietzsche, Hannah Arendt, and other contrarians – the difficult art of swimming against the current, and to make a case for its relevance and urgency today.

Corey Byrnes (Literature-Scholarship) – Assistant Professor of Modern Chinese Culture at Northwestern University – United States

Corey Byrnes' project reconsiders the discourse of China's "rise" and the threat it is so often seen as posing. Combining approaches from literary and cultural studies, environmental humanities, animal studies, and oceanic studies, it reveals how long-standing discourses surrounding China as threat are being resurrected in response to global environmental and public health crises, while also bringing into view how Chinese artists and publics imagine and respond to perceived threats.

Jennifer DeVere Brody (Visual Arts-Scholarship) – Professor of Theater and Performance Studies, Stanford University – United States – Virginia Howard Fellow

Jennifer DeVere Brody is writing a book entitled Moving Stones: About the Art of Edmonia Lewis. The project analyzes works by and about the American born Black and Ojibwe diasporic sculptor, Edmonia Lewis (1844-1907), who worked in Rome in the mid-nineteenth century. The book includes theoretical sections about sculptures arguing that setting stones in motion can produce new approaches to the moving sculptural work of the 19th century’s most acclaimed international (and apparently first) professional female “colored artist.”

Corinne A. Kratz (Visual Arts-Scholarship) – Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and African Studies Emerita, Emory University – United States

Corinne Kratz's book project, Rhetorics of value: Exhibition, Design, Communication, examines exhibit design as central to understanding how museum exhibits create and convey meanings and values. It analyzes exhibits as multilayered communication that artfully combines such media as objects, texts, images, lighting, space, and narratives to fashion the persuasive form of designed space. Through design, exhibits can shape the ways we know, the stories we tell, and our contours of meaning and engagement.

Catriona Seth (History) – Marshal Foch Professor of French Literature, All Souls College, University of Oxford – United Kingdom

Catriona Seth's current project concerns a talented Scottish painter, Katherine Read (1723-1778), whose career took her from Dundee, where she was born, to France, Italy, England and then India. She defies most of our expectations regarding women artists. Seth is trying to piece together her different networks. She aims to examine the success Read achieved in her lifetime, particularly as a portraitist, and the way she shaped her career, but also the reasons for her absence from the canon.

Gordon Teskey (Literature-Scholarship) – Francis Lee Higginson Professor of English Literature, Harvard University – Canada/United States

Gordon Teskey will work on his book The Metaphysics of the Metaphysicals. Poets of the Renaissance, including Amelia Lanyer, John Donne, Ben Jonson, George Herbert, Andrew Marvell, and Lucy Hutchinson, invented new metaphysical grounds for figurative language, using society, the ego, transcendence, consciousness, and materialist science as foundations for their poems. This project takes seriously the term metaphysics as reflecting the quest for solid grounds for poetry-making, a quest that is still urgent today.

Patricia Zalamea (Visual Arts-Scholarship) – Associate Professor of Art History, Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá – Colombia

What did it mean to be a humanist in colonial spaces of the Spanish and Portuguese Empires? This comparative and transregional study of humanist circles in the Andean world (Tunja, Cusco, Lima), Chile, and Brazil, analyzes the paradoxes of humanist identities in conflicted spaces of hybridity. Despite important differences, these case studies of interrelated artistic and literary productions evidence a cosmopolitan world view in their reinterpretations of the Classics in an American context.

Laura Burnett – Landscape architect – United States – Van Cleef & Arpels Bogliasco Special Fellow in Landscape Architecture

Project in collaboration with Martin Poirier

Grounds for design | examinations and interventions at Bogliasco. This collaborative project seeks to understand the Villa dei Pini grounds, then prepare design interventions shaped through interaction with other fellows. The product will be drawings and sketches organized as a framework for understanding the history, function, and vision of the place.

Martin Poirier – Landscape architect – United States – Van Cleef & Arpels Bogliasco Special Fellow in Landscape Architecture

Project in collaboration with Laura Burnett

Grounds for design | examinations and interventions at Bogliasco. This collaborative project seeks to understand the Villa dei Pini grounds, then prepare design interventions shaped through interaction with other fellows. The product will be drawings and sketches organized as a framework for understanding the history, function, and vision of the place.

Kim Addonizio – Poet and novelist – United States – Van Cleef & Arpels Bogliasco Special Fellow in Poetry

Kim Addonizio will be working on poems and prose related to place and displacement, focusing on locations from New York City to Kansas, Greece and Italy. Part of her project will explore family, immigration, memory, and identity related to her Italian ancestry, which she will be researching during her residency at Bogliasco.

Melissa Febos – Writer/Associate Professor of Creative Writing, University of Iowa – United States

While in residency at Bogliasco, Melissa Febos will be working on her fifth book, The Dry Season, a deeply researched memoir about the author’s year of celibacy, an expectedly sensual and revelatory time during which she examined her own intimate patterns and their cultural underpinnings, and began a wide-ranging exploration into the lives of women throughout history who used celibacy and other forms of divestment to forge radical paths of liberation.

Terry Kurgan – Writer and visual artist, Research Associate at the Wits Institute of Social and Economic Research, and staff member of the School of Creative Writing, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg – South Africa

Terry Kurgan will work on Patrimony: My Father Myself—the title piece in a linked collection of essays circulating around her soldier/father’s 1948 Arab/Israeli war album. The essay will discuss two photographs, both shot at the edge of graves—one in Ein-al-Beida, Palestine, and the other in a forest outside Panevėžys in Lithuania—as entry point to the taboo subject of the entangled histories, injuries and trauma resulting from the catastrophic impact of both the Holocaust and the Nakba.

Nicole Sealey – Poet, Visiting Professor at Boston University – United States

Nicole Sealey will be at work on Talking Out of Turn: Notes From the Field, a collection of personal essays that recounts much of her time as one of only a few Black women senior-level literary arts professionals.

Laura Marconi – Composer – Italy/Germany

Laura Marconi recently received a grant intended to fund the composition of a series of works for the female vocal sextet Sjaella. For Sjaella's next project, Marconi will concentrate on songs from the Italian folk repertoire, dealing with topics that are still little known: the theme of violent lullabies, feminicide, and women's work in the fields during the war.

Allie Martin – Ethnomusicologist, Asssistant Professor, Dartmouth College – United States

Gentrification is often considered through a visual lens, where development and neighborhood change are seen. But what does gentrification sound like? Intersectional Listening: Gentrification and Black Sonic Life in Washington, DC engages the sounds of gentrification, drawing from ethnomusicology, Black Studies, and digital humanities. At its heart, the book is an ethnography how Black people throughout the city are experiencing gentrification as a sonic, racialized process.

Camilo Mendez – Composer, Assistant Professor of Music, Hong Kong Baptist University – Colombia/Hong Kong

Camilo Mendez intends to work on Aira/Sonora for prepared/enhanced string quartet. This work is part of the compositional cycle Archipelago Sierpinski. The piece will be scored for a prepared/enhanced string quartet and will be produced in collaboration with the JACK quartet.

Matthew Ricketts – Composer – Canada/United States – William Thomas McKinley Bogliasco Fellow

Matthew Ricketts will compose a new work for countertenor, oboe solo and string orchestra (commissioned by the Orchestre classique de Montréal for Tim Mead), setting poetry of Mark Wunderlich. Ricketts first encountered Mark's work while at Civitella Ranieri in 2021, where they read his ekphrastic "Portrait of Mary Magdalene" beneath that very fresco by Piero della Francesco in Arezzo. Ricketts is thrilled and honored to return to Italy to begin work on this unique project.

Steven Kazuo Takasugi – Composer, Associate of Music, Harvard University – United States – Aaron Copland Bogliasco Special Fellow in Music

Steven Takasugi will complete the orchestration for his Piano Concerto for pianist Roger Admiral and the SWR Symphony Orchestra for the Donaueschingen New Music Festival and will finish the score for a new septet for the Montréal-based ensemble, No Hay Banda. Takasugi will also prepare audio samples freshly recorded by Ensemble Tzara in Zürich for a new septet and will design the choreographic notation and audio stage directions for a percussion trio for the Melbourne-based ensemble, Speak Percussion.

Amy Cook – Professor of English & Associate Dean for Research and Innovation, College of Arts and Sciences, Stony Brook University – United States

Shadow Play explores works of art that enable us to tell and retell our own story of loss and grief, to dance with what is missing. Dawoud Bey’s “Birmingham Project,” Itaru Sasaki’s Wind Phone, and various public memorials, for example, stage or render present loss for the purposes of metabolization and transformation. The project is punctured throughout by the artefacts of Cook's own loss: voicemail messages to the dead and the dying.

Holly Hughes – Professor Stamps School of Art and Design, Theatre and Drama, and Women and Gender Studies at the University of Michigan – United States

Holly Hughes will be working on a solo theater piece entitled Indelible in the Hippocampus Is the Laughter which explores victim testimony in sexual assault cases as a kind of endurance art akin to the performances of Marina Abramović and Yoko Ono. The work, her sixth solo, hopes to provoke questions about a legal system which requires victims to create a public spectacle of their most intimate suffering while failing to address structural issues that allow abuse to flourish.

Don Nguyen – Playwright – United States

In Nguyen's new play, Don, an astrophotographer, returns home to reconnect with his estranged Vietnamese father only to discover that the communication gap between them has grown even wider in the wake of his father’s recent deafness. Hoping that sign language will provide a bridge to overcome that distance, Don begins taking lessons. Performed in English, Vietnamese and Sign Language, The World is Not Silent is a multilingual play that explores how language simultaneously divides and unites us.

Melisa Tien – Playwright, Professor of experimental theatrical writing, Sarah Lawrence College – United States – Bogliasco and Baryshnikov Arts Center Joint Fellowship

Melisa Tien will be working on an opera about Chinese American architect I.M. Pei and the challenges he faced in constructing the glass-and-steel pyramid that was added to the Musée du Louvre during its renovation in the 1980s. The opera relates Pei’s struggles to realize his proposed design, his eventual transformation of the Louvre and its identity, and perhaps most significantly, how tradition and nationalism can sometimes become obstacles to the forward trajectory of a culture and a people.

Soulé Déesse – Professor of the Practice, Drawing and Painting, School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University – United States

The New Pantheon is a series of thirteen wall installations, which creates an assembly of new syncretistic and hybrid divinities for our time. The pagan and Christian pantheons reproduce the human binary gender division that the artist challenges with the creation of a new set of divinities and a new iconography for each divinity. It is an Afrobaroque project, rooted in the vision and practice of Afrofuturism, and a commentary on our human and post-human identity, and on the future of race and sexuality.

Carlos Estevez – Visual Artist – United States

During his residency, Carlos Estevez will continue working on his tarot card series, which include the Cosmic Tarot deck. His new piece will be called Tarot Bogliasco and will be based on Estevez's personal experiences. More specifically, the cards will be inspired by his relationship with his surroundings, the local culture and exchanges with other residents. Tarot Bogliasco will be a kind of existential diary in the form of visual poetry, capturing his daily life in Bogliasco.

Georgette Maag – Visual Artist – Switzerland – Fondation Gianni Biaggi De Blasys Special Fellow

Georgette Maag's artistic research is based on observing and enhancing environmental perception, in the tradition of Strollology. Unlike her former studies in the historic center of Genoa, she will this time concentrate on the landscape, exploring the surroundings of Bogliasco with her camera, collecting moments that manifest the interaction of man, nature, environment, time, and ephemerality in a multi-layered way. The footage will be developed into atmospheric poetic video installations.