Cory Henry

Founder and Director of Atelier Cory Henry, Visiting Critic/Professor at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, Washington University in St. Louis – United States

Cory Henry founded the eponymous interdisciplinary design studio, Atelier Cory Henry, following 14 years working with renowned architects, including Michael Graves. Cory has maintained a commitment to addressing contemporary urban conditions through a combination of poetic design solutions and socially conscious ideals. He has developed a reputation as a contextually sensitive designer, with a strong dedication to generating spaces through collaborations, research, listening, and understanding of cultural narratives, contextual conditions, and values.

Cory Henry’s project undertaking in Bogliasco Foundation is the design of an exhibition/installation highlighting the relational dynamics and role of public space as an arena to foster, or deny, democratic practices. The installation is a continuation of his research and teaching in examining the social and economic realities of spatial inequities – primarily within public space – and the different ways in which disadvantaged communities articulate their own identities and transform space to place.

Mai Lê Hô

Choreographer, Artistic Director of LayeRhythm – France/Vietnam/United States

Mai Lê is a French-Vietnamese street/club dance artist and educator, curator, and the founder of LayeRhythm Productions INC, a NYC-based non-profit organization dedicated to highlighting freestyle voices in the performing arts landscape. The cutting-edge monthly jam session layers live musicians and vocalists with freestyle dancers and was acclaimed by the New York Times (2018). In 2023, Mai Lê was awarded a Dancing Futures residency by Pepatian & BAAD! Bronx In 2021, she was selected to be virtual artist-in-residence with Asian American Arts Alliance, and movement curator for Asian Cultural Council’s East West Fest.

Mai Lê Hô plans to continue developing Walking in Layers, a multidisciplinary work merging Vietnamese, French, and American influences and artists through music, dance, video and fashion, addressing layers of identity. The work bridges her French-Vietnamese roots with her city-centered life as a dance artist led by her passion for NYC street/club dance and music. The residency will make space for research, rehearsals, and planning/deepening of collaborations, resulting in a new interactive arts experience that centers street/club forms, traditional textile techniques from northern Vietnam coupled with modern eco-fashion clothing, music, and video animation.

Katrien Jacobs

Adjunct Associate Professor in Cultural Studies, Chinese University of Hong Kong / Associate Researcher in the Department of Languages and Cultures at the University of Ghent – Belgium

Katrien Jacobs is an artist-scholar and associate professor who works at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and Ghent University. Jacobs has lectured and published widely about sexuality and gender representations in and around digital media and AI, contemporary arts and online activism. She has also produced documentaries and performance art pieces alongside her academic and ethnographic fieldwork.

Sparkling Deepfakes on the Metabolic Chair is a video installation that will invite gallery visitors to sit down in a metabolic chair, a space for digesting artworks at one’s own pace, while watching a video about redeeming deepfakes. The background is a concern with how deepfake technology is increasingly being hijacked as misinformation and sex-phobic misogynist hate-speech. During the residency period, Jacobs will prepare the artwork and collaborate with other participants in watching and commenting on her work-in-progress on a dedicated chair.

Kevin Benham

Jon Emerson/Wayne Womack Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture – United States

Kevin Benham was the Prince Charitable Trusts/Kate Lancaster Brewster Rome Prize recipient 2020-2021 and the recipient of a MacDowell Fellowship in 2024. He received his MLA from the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University and his M.Arch. at the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, The University of Michigan.

Kevin Benham’s research and work focus on landscape phenomena and the temporal qualities inherent in the discipline. To that end, he produces temporal and ephemeral land art installations that elucidate phenomena requiring careful observation through space and time.

Rachel Kadish

Fiction writer and essayist – United States

Rachel Kadish’ work has been read on NPR and has appeared in The New York Times, Paris Review, and Pushcart Prize Anthology. Her most recent novel, The Weight of Ink, received a National Jewish Book Award and was a USA Today bestseller. She has been the Koret writer-in-residence at Stanford University and a fellow of the NEA, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and Harvard/Radcliffe’s Bunting Institute. She is a spokesperson for Artists for Understanding.

Set in a reeling Poland following the 2010 Smolensk air disaster, The Belnord explores the long echo of war crimes for descendants of bystanders as well as victims. The novel traces the colliding fates of three characters: a gay Polish Catholic teen in a town with an uneasy past; an American scientist caught in Poland’s climate change upheaval; and a Holocaust refugee born in a DP camp. The Belnord explores how we’re haunted by the past, and what it takes on a human level for us to move forward.

Patrick Giguère

Composer – Canada – William Thomas McKinley Bogliasco Fellowship

Patrick Giguère is a composer based in Montréal. He writes music for acoustic instruments but is increasingly interested in improvised and collaborative musical practices. His music is performed in the Americas and in Europe. He worked with the London Symphony Orchestra, François-Xavier Roth, Susanna Mälkki, Bozzini Quartet, Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, Paramirabo, Thin Edge New Music Collective, Aventa Ensemble, ECM+, Orchestre de la francophonie and Nouvel Ensemble Moderne.

Patrick Giguère will work on a piece called Chercher la trace du chemin à prendre for musicians practicing Persian classical music and Western classical music. The work will set to music poems, in French and Farsi, by contemporary poets from Québec and Iran. The chosen poems engage themes like disenchantment, reconstruction of identity, but also about finding a way forward. The creative process will go beyond the score and the unidirectionality of Western classical music in order to explore different hierarchies and relationships between the musicians.

Helen Paris

Artistic Director of Curious performance company – United Kingdom

Dr Helen Paris is artistic director of Curious performance company. From 2011–2018 she served as a professor of performance making at Stanford University. She has performed at venues and festivals including the Guling Street Avant-Garde Theatre, Taiwan, London’s Cultural Olympiad and the Sydney Opera House. Paris is also a fiction writer. Novels include Lost Property (2022) and The Invisible Women’s Club, (2023) both published by Penguin. She is represented by Greene & Heaton agency, London.

In Touch extends Paris’s artistic research exploring human biology in performance and includes the arena of ‘neuro arts’ which is radically changing how we understand and translate the power of the arts. As well as looking at the enormous benefits of touch and tactile memory, In Touch is about the intrinsic value of the arts, including their importance to both mental and emotional health, at a moment when they are being systematically devalued.

Scott Hunt

Visual Artist – United States

Scott Hunt creates enigmatic narrative charcoal drawings. He has had seven solo shows in the U.S. and Europe and has been in many group exhibitions, including Really?, curated by the esteemed American collector, Beth Rudin DeWoody. Hunt received the 2017 FID Prize for Drawing, grants from The New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) and The Pollock-Krasner Foundation and is a Yaddo Fellow. His drawings are part of the permanent collection of The Israel Museum and The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art.

Historically, Scott Hunt has made figurative, narrative drawings. With this project, SMILE!, he will be pivoting toward a more sculptural combination of drawing and 3-dimensional elements contained within Cornell-like shadow boxes. The series will explore the intense pressure that the male gaze has placed on women, coercing them to augment their appearance so as to increase their appeal to the opposite gender. The series will scrutinize conceptions of gender roles, beauty, race, sexual power, and feminism.

Sarah Skaggs

Artistic Director of Sarah Skaggs Dance / Director of Dance, Associate Professor of Dance Studies, Theater and Dance Department, Dickinson College – United States

Sarah Skaggs, artistic director of Sarah Skaggs Dance, has been making dances in New York City for over 25 years. She has received numerous fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts, The Jerome, Harkness, Greenwall and Rockefeller foundations. Her work focuses on the relationship between the body and spirituality as impacted by social and political dynamics. Currently, she is the director of the dance program at Dickinson College.

Range is a dance project that reframes the well-worn topic of aging and dance from one based on dwindling bodily possibilities to one of limitless capabilities. The work addresses issues surrounding aging and the dancing body, particularly westernized notions of beauty and grace. Embracing a new poetics of the crease, the fold, and the dent, she aims to recast an aging body as something “written on,” an embodied life writ large and decades in the making.

Broderick Fox

James Irvine Professor of Media Arts & Culture, Occidental College – United States

Broderick Fox is a media practitioner and scholar whose creative work, teaching, and research engage media production, documentary studies, media aesthetics, and the potential for digital technologies to expand voice and produce social change. His award-winning documentaries foreground queer voices, including his own. His book Documentary Media: History, Theory, Practice (Routledge) is now in its second edition.

During his residency, Broderick Fox looks forward to completing principal editing on his latest documentary Through Flood and Fire, in which a group of queer American teenagers seek out an array of LGBTQ+ and QTBIPOC community elders to imagine more inclusive and sustainable futures. Fox is eager to engage other fellows in interdisciplinary, transnational dialogue around these issues and find ways to counteract the rising tide of reactionary political forces who seek to silence such exchange and social progress.

Kenneth Guest

– (Public Humanities) – Professor of Anthropology, Baruch College, CUNY – United States

Ken Guest (BA Columbia U.; PhD City University of New York) teaches courses on immigration, religion, China, and New York City. Fluent in Chinese, he is author of God in Chinatown: Religion and Survival in New York’s Evolving Immigrant Community (NYU Press 2003); four leading US textbooks, including Cultural Anthropology: A Toolkit for a Global Age (WW Norton 2024) now in 4th Editions; and myriad other articles and papers.

The Wallet, both history and memoir, explores Ken Guest’s family’s engagements with missionaries, colonialism, independence movements and war in India, China, and the Philippines, 1925-1945, including three years in a Japanese World War II concentration camp. Exploring intergenerational impacts of trauma and resilience, the project maps stories and strategies for asserting humanity and meaning in the face of extreme violence and hate, tools essential to escaping today’s pandemics of chaos and war.

Beth Saunders

– (History) – Curator and Head of Special Collections and Gallery at the Albin O. Kuhn Library & Gallery University of Maryland – United States

Beth Saunders’ writing on photography has appeared in numerous edited volumes, exhibition catalogues, and journals. She is co-author of Apollo’s Muse: The Moon in the Age of Photography (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2019). Her research has been supported by The Met, the American Academy in Rome, and the MFA Houston.

Beth will be working on a book tracing the simultaneous introduction of photography to Italy in 1839 and the birth of Italy’s nationalist movement, the Risorgimento, within an international context. This project illuminates how Italy’s distinctive political and cultural circumstances made it an influential center of transnational exchange, and argues that dispersal and transnationalism were both characteristic of and necessary for the development of the new medium of photography and of Italian nationalism.

Janice P. Nimura

Author – United States – Olivetta Fellowship

Janice P. Nimura received a Public Scholar Award from the National Endowment for the Humanities in support of her work on The Doctors Blackwell, a New York Times bestseller and a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in biography. Her previous book, Daughters of the Samurai: A Journey from East to West and Back, was a New York Times Notable book in 2015. She is a fellow of the Society of American Historians and was recently a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at Wesleyan University's Bailey College of the Environment.

Nimura is currently researching a new project on Rachel Carson and some of the 19th-century women who preceded her as close observers of and generators of wonder in the natural world. Though best known for the environmental manifesto Silent Spring, Carson did not set out to be an activist--she was first famous for a trio of bestselling books about the sea. Her ability to merge science and poetic prose makes her part of a lineage of women who looked closely at nature and taught a wide audience how to feel a sense of awe and responsibility.

Mohammad Tarazi

Writer – Lebanon – Straus Family Foundation Fellowship

Mohammad Tarazi has published nine novels in Arabic, including a trilogy in historical fiction centered on the Arab presence in East Africa: The Islands of Cloves, Malindi, and The Bride of Comoros. Tarazi has also authored works in children's literature and cultural heritage. Six of his novels have been nominated for the Sheikh Zayed Book Award in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, including his most recent publication, “Soundless Microphone”, which was released in April 2023. His work has been translated into Kurdish and Persian.

Mohammad Tarazi plans to work on his tenth novel while at Bogliasco. It will be a continuation of his latest novel, revolving around a young man in Lebanon. The protagonist dreams of escaping his chaotic and lawless hometown, where corrupt leaders dominate and blare propaganda, along with alien ideologies. He faces obstacles in migrating to another country while watching his city decay, with the cemetery next to his home expanding into fig orchards, Romanian ruins, and houses.

Joanna Dudley

Director, performer, singer – Australia/Germany

Project in collaboration with Philip Miller

Joanna Dudley is an internationally acclaimed Australian director, performer, and singer who has collaborated extensively with William Kentridge and Philip Miller, notably on Refuse the Hour and Paper Music. Dudley created solo roles for major opera productions, pioneered multimedia installations like WE WILL SLAM YOU WITH OUR WINGS, and featured at prestigious venues worldwide. Additional collaborations include Schaubuehne Berlin and artists like Seiji Ozawa and Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui.

Human/Avian Murmurations is a sonic installation by composer Philip Miller and performer Joanna Dudley that explores humanity's complex relationship with birds, addressing their cultural significance and the urgent threat of extinction. Featuring immersive visuals by William Kentridge, it merges natural history, opera, and film. Their collaborative efforts aim to raise awareness and conservation efforts through various mediums.

Philip Miller

Composer – South Africa

Project in collaboration with Joanna Dudley

Philip Miller is a South African composer and sound artist whose practice traverses many different media and musical styles: from his internationally acclaimed choral composition Rewind: A Cantata for Voice, Tape and Testimony based on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, to his numerous multimedia collaborations and films with the artist William Kentridge exhibited in museums and galleries all over the world.

Human/Avian Murmurations is a sonic installation by composer Philip Miller and performer Joanna Dudley that explores humanity's complex relationship with birds, addressing their cultural significance and the urgent threat of extinction. Featuring immersive visuals by William Kentridge, it merges natural history, opera, and film. Their collaborative efforts aim to raise awareness and conservation efforts through various mediums.

Tammy Ryan

Playwright – United States

Tammy Ryan is a playwright and librettist based in Pittsburgh. Her wide-ranging work has been commissioned, developed, and performed at theaters across the U.S. and internationally, including The Alliance Theater, Florida Stage, Repertory Theater of St. Louis, Premiere Stages, Portland Stage Company and The Pittsburgh Public Theater among others. A resident playwright of New Dramatists, she is a winner of the Francesca Primus Prize and the inaugural recipient of the 2024 Leah Ryan “Boost” Commission Award.

During her residency, Tammy Ryan will complete this commission for a new play centering around the transport of the Treasures of Tutankhamun exhibit of 1978 to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Told from the point of view of the working-class family whose patriarch is the Teamster truck driver responsible for moving the artifacts into the museum, The Boy King In Queens explores themes of family, class, race, and the collisions between generations both contemporary and ancient.

Irina Nakhova

Visual Artist – Russia/United States

Irina Nakhova is an independent artist who works and lives between Moscow and the US since 1989. She is a pioneer of the genre of total installation in Soviet underground art, a recipient of the Kandinsky Prize in 2013, and the first woman to have a solo exhibit in the Russian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, in 2015. Nakhova works in painting and interactive installation that employ sculpture, digital printing, video, and audio, together with biting wit and a historical and social perspective.

Irina Nakhova will be working on the ongoing project Trip, a non-narrative video installation for multiple projections, using specially filmed video, archival and documentary footage, as well as film, video, and photographs from her personal archive. As the world is evolving into a more hostile place, her work is encompassing current wars and conflicts. The installation explores themes of individual and collective memory in relation to current political and social transformation.