Recent Fellowship Recipients – Spring 2025
Spring 2025
Architecture
Doris Sung
Architect, Associate Professor of Architecture, University of Southern California – United States
Doris Sung brings active systems to sustainable design far beyond the simple "greening" of a building. With the belief that buildings can be more sensitive to the changing environment like human skin, she seeks ways to make the building skin dynamic and responsive. Through grant-funded research, she is developing smart materials, such as thermobimetals, to self-ventilate, self-shade, self-structure, self-assemble and self-propel in response to changes in temperatures--all with zero-energy and no controls.
Witnessing smart materials move on their own is magical. For this purpose, this residency will be used to refine a series of pop-up designs made of paper and thermobimetal (a material that curls when heated). They will be distributed as literal laptop dynamic exhibitions in a book format. Additional time will be spent on refining the text and graphics of the publication. The pop-up pages will be arranged in a sunny interior location to freely react to the moving sun at the Bogliasco Foundation.
Dance
Tess Dworman
Choreographer and performer – United States
Tess Dworman is a Brooklyn-based choreographer, performer, and audio describer. In New York, her work has been presented by many institutions including Abrons Art Center, the Chocolate Factory Theater, and Pageant. She performed and toured extensively in the work of Tere O’Connor and Juliana F. May. In 2020, Tess was honored as an “Outstanding Breakout Choreographer” by the Bessie New York Dance & Performance Awards.
During her fellowship, Tess will continue to develop a project entitled “The Con,” which merges her research in dance, impersonation, stand-up comedy, documentary filmmaking, and audio description. These forms come together through her longtime practice of solo improvisation. The ground for this work is a satirical questioning into the consumption of experimental performance, capitalistic provocations on liveness and presence, and the ethos of experimental performance in this time.
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).”
Dance
Sam Kim
Choreographer – United States – Van Cleef & Arpels Fellowship in Dance
Sam Kim is an experimental choreographer, dancer and teacher who has been making and performing in dances for over two decades. She was born to Korean immigrants, and currently lives and works in Brooklyn. Sam has received multiple commissions from Danspace Project at St. Mark’s Church, Zenon Dance Company, The Chocolate Factory Theater, The Kitchen, PS122, New York Live Arts, Dance Theater Workshop and Highways Performance Space (LA), among many others, to make and present her body of work.
Sam looks forward to the premiere of her latest work, The Fall, at The Chocolate Factory Theater in fall 2025. Inspired by her recent works, Procession and Angle of Incidence, as well as American Ninja Warrior and The Olympics, The Fall will traffic in high-stakes athletic action and scrutiny to make visible the shape and force of human will.
Film/Video
Lisa Leeman
Writer/director/producer, Professor of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California – United States
Lisa Leeman has been making award-winning documentary films for thirty-five years. Her cinematic portraits illuminate contemporary social issues through intimate character-driven stories, filmed over many years, as people navigate critical turning points. Leeman’s acclaimed films include Metamorphosis, One Lucky Elephant, Out of Faith, Who Needs Sleep, and Awake. She is a member of the Motion Picture Academy, a tenured Professor of Cinematic Arts and endowed chair at University of Southern California.
While at Bogliasco, Lisa Leeman will be writing and editing her documentary film Walk by Me, a portrait of a transgender artist’s life over thirty years, which is a follow-up to her groundbreaking first documentary, Metamorphosis (Sundance Filmmakers Trophy; POV/PBS, 1990). Filmed over nine years, Walk by Me weaves past and present to explore aging, art and resiliency, faith, friendship, and the blurred boundaries in documentary filmmaking.
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.
Film/Video
Lynn Tomlinson
Director and animator, Associate Professor of Electronic Media and Film, Towson University – United States
Lynn Tomlinson is an internationally acclaimed animator based in Baltimore, Maryland. Her current work explores environmental themes, often imagining how non-human beings might view humanity's impact. Her films have screened at venues including the Museum of Modern Art, The National Gallery (USA), The Pompidou Center, and at international film festivals including Annecy International Animation Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, and Ottawa International Animation Festival. She is Associate Professor of Electronic Media and Film at Towson University (USA).
During her residency, Lynn Tomlinson will draw inspiration from the natural setting on the Italian coast to animate cyclical sequences for an ecological media artwork using colorful transforming visual imagery, music, and poetic lyrics. Animated cycles will create a musical canon-like composition of scenes that loop and build, imagining non-human perspectives, and evoking ecological empathy.
Humanities Scholarship
Octavian Gabor
– (Philosophy) – Professor of Philosophy, Methodist College – Romania/United States
Octavian Gabor is a professor of philosophy at Methodist College, where he also serves as the Dean of Academic Affairs. He has translated books from Romanian into English, and he has published articles on Dostoevsky and on Greek philosophy.
Octavian’s book project is a philosophical examination of the notions of truth, evil, and beauty in Dostoevsky’s writings (The Idiot, Crime and Punishment, and Brothers Karamazov). While the volume offers a comprehensive view of the notion of truth as it appears in his main novels, it primarily emphasizes that Dostoevsky works with a personal notion of truth (truth is a person), that he associates with beauty.
Humanities Scholarship
Carla Macchiavello
– (Visual Arts Scholarship) – Associate Professor of Art History, Music and Art, CUNY – Chile/United States
Carla Macchiavello Cornejo is an art historian and educator whose research centers on Latin American contemporary art with a decolonial approach; networks of solidarity and resistance against fascist, patriarchal, and colonial systems of power; and creative practices and pedagogies aimed at social and environmental change. She is coeditor of the periodical Más allá del fin for the collective research practice Ensayos, and the books Turba Tol Hol-Hol and Dismantling the Nation. Contemporary Art in Chile.
Carla will be working on a monograph on the artistic production of Patricia Saavedra involving the defense of human rights during the military dictatorship in Chile and the creation of transnational networks of solidarity and environmental advocacy focused on Rapa Nui. She will be critically examining Saavedra’s work in tandem with the cultural revitalization movements of the island while reckoning with Chile’s fraught colonial history.
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.
Landscape Architecture
Jeremy Mende
Designer and artist, Professor of Design at California College of the Arts – United States
Jeremy Mende is an interdisciplinary artist living and working in San Francisco. His work involves creating mirroring experiences: self-reflective events that focus attention on our individual responsibility for a collective world. His work has been exhibited internationally and is included in several permanent collections including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Jeremy is a Professor of Design at California College of the Arts.
At Bogliasco, Jeremy will be developing a series of sculptures that will mark the pathway to an earthwork he is building in California. These sculptures will function as experiential ‘sign posts’ to focus visitors’ attention on three key aspects of the larger earthwork: 1) the visitors’ relative scale against the horizon, (2) their sense of immersion within the natural landscape, and (3) their awareness of being in the moment of self-perception.
Literature
Carine Doumit
Independent film editor and writer – Lebanon
Carine Doumit writes and edits films and video installations. She also writes short texts and short stories in French, Arabic, and English. Through these intertwined practices and the back and forth between languages, she explores ways to produce multiple voices within a textual, sonic or visual object, as well as the potential of a polyphonic apparatus to blur the frontiers between the real and the imagined. She is a member of The Camelia Committee - مجموعة في الكاميليا, a collective that explores the shape-shifting relations between image, text, voice and sound, through writing, filmmaking and film programming.
THE STORY OF MAß [THE 476 YEAR OLD CHILD] is the second chapter from the BOOK OF CHILDREN project. Maß is the daughter of Liwaa, a poet, playwright, and a dear friend of the author. One day, Doumit finds in a painting at the Pinacotheque de Brera the exact double of Maß. This triggers a series of speculations about both children, the one inside and the one outside the painting, and an epistolary exchange with Liwaa in search for the meaning behind this extraordinary finding.
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
Sunita Puri
Writer and Director, Inpatient Palliative Care Service and Associate Professor of Medicine, University of California, Irvine – United States
Sunita Puri is a writer, palliative care physician, and author of That Good Night, a critically acclaimed literary memoir examining her path to the practice of palliative care and her quest to help patients and families redefine what it means to live and die well in the face of serious illness. The recipient of a Rhodes Scholarship and residencies from Yaddo and MacDowell, her work appears in the New Yorker, Atlantic, and New York Times. She lectures widely across the country and is an Associate Professor of Medicine at UC Irvine, where she directs the inpatient palliative care program.
Sunita Puri’s second book explores how trauma and illness reconfigure our relationships with our bodies. Through patient and personal stories, she questions tidy societal narratives of “healing” and “resilience” that suggest there are only certain recognizable ways to face and live with upheaval. By diversifying stories of embodied trauma and illness, and reframing the body as a site not only of suffering but transcendence, she explores how healing includes learning how to live in the one place we can’t leave until we do.
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
Daron Hagen
Composer / Filmmaker / Author – Founding Director of the New Mercury Collective – United States
Hagen’s debut in 1983 as the youngest composer ever premiered by the Philadelphia Orchestra launched an international polymathic creative life as a celebrated composer, pianist, conductor, college professor, concert impresario, festival artistic director, foundation president, stage director and auteur operafilm-maker — all recounted in vivid detail in the 2019 “ruthlessly honest and beautifully written” memoir, Duet with the Past.
Hagen will be film-editing I Hear America Singing, the final installment in The Bardo Trilogy, a sequence of composer conceived, written, directed, and edited opera-films that include Orson Rehearsed (2018) and 9/10: Love Before the Fall (2023) devoted to the exploration of the liminal zone between life and art, and life and what comes after. He will also be working on a collection of first-person essays about the nascent opera-film genre, which will also include his libretti and screenplays.
Music
Anthony Vine
Composer – United States – Edward T. Cone Special Fellowship in Music
Anthony Vine is a composer based in Brooklyn. He creates music about spirituality, beauty, and sound itself. His work across different media, including performance, installation, and sound sculpture, is minimal in form, yet acoustically dynamic and deeply emotive. His music has been performed internationally and awarded distinctions like the 2024 Rome Prize in Musical Composition at the American Academy in Rome and 2016 Gaudeamus International Composers Award. He also runs Bazetta University Press.
In Roman churches, background music (BGM) can sometimes be heard playing softly. Recordings of chant and hymnody blanket these capacious spaces, inducing calm and masking extraneous noise. The music—wistful, tender, and solemn—points to an idealized past of reverent candlelit worship. These expressions and histories have inspired Vine to compose his own church BGM. The music will cast remnants of sacred music in slow recursive patterns, inviting meditative and contemplative ways of listening.
Theater
Laura Sicignano
Writer and theater director – Italy
A writer and theater director, Laura Sicignano graduated with honors in Theater History from the Catholic University in Milan. In 1994, she founded the Teatro Cargo company, recognized by the Ministry of Culture from 1999 to 2017. From 2018 to 2022 she was Director of Teatro Stabile di Catania. She is currently consultant for Teatro Nazionale di Genova. She has received awards in Italy and abroad for her directing and dramaturgy. Her work addresses themes of History and Memory, Women's history, forgotten and defeated heroes, and journeys through space and time.
Running Women, a play written and directed by Laura Sicignano, will be produced by the National Theater of Genoa in late 2025. Running to achieve a goal. Running as an escape. Women’s movements allow a different point of view on reality. Is a dialogue between women from different cultures possible? Also starting from the intersection of different feminist thoughts, the theater experiments with a new idea of self and the world.
Theater
Cláudia Tatinge Nascimento
Professor, Chair of Theater and Dance, Macalester College – Brazil/United States
Cláudia Tatinge Nascimento is an artist-scholar from Rio de Janeiro. She is the author of After the Long Silence: The Theater of Brazil’s Post-Dictatorship Generation and Crossing Cultural Borders Through the Actor’s Work. Her articles are published in Brazil, Italy, Poland, Romania, and the USA. Most recently she directed Reasons for Moving, a piece about geopolitical displacement. Tatinge Nascimento is a fellow alumna of Caldera AiR, Trinity College Dublin, and Freie Universität-Berlin.
In Defense of Theater challenges the notion that innovative productions are “performance” rather than “theater.” This position is informed by the replication of passé theatrical forms by mainstream producers and conservatories; the rise in the 70s of the term “performance” to describe time-based visual arts; and funding agencies’ association of theater with text and new plays. The book rejects such short-sighted view to recognize and reclaim theatrical experimentation on the contemporary stage.
Visual Arts
Clare Goodwin
Visual artist – United Kingdom/Switzerland – Fondation Gianni Biaggi De Blasys Special Fellowship
Clare Goodwin is a renowned artist exploring 'Constructive Nostalgia.' She earned an MA in painting from the Royal College of Art, London in 1998 and has lived in Zurich since 2001. Goodwin's work, distinct from Zurich's 'Concrete Art' movement, blends narrative, nostalgia, and geometric, minimal abstraction across the mediums of painting, ceramics, and spatial environments. Goodwin’s art explores personal and collective memories, social histories, and gender stereotypes. Goodwin's work has been exhibited widely and has received awards in Switzerland and abroad. She is represented by Lullin+Ferrari gallery and co-founded StudioK3 project space in Zurich.
Clare Goodwin will develop a project combining collage, drawing, painting and writing. By deconstructing and reinterpreting images from vintage interior design materials (1960s-1990s), she will explore societal norms and domestic aesthetics of those eras. Using digital and analog collage techniques, she will create standalone works and content for an artist book. This project reflects her ongoing focus on spatial furniture assemblages and painting, integrating social and personal histories.
Visual Arts
Katharina Gruzei
Visual artist – Austria
Katharina Gruzei, born in 1983 in Klagenfurt, lives and works in Vienna and Linz, Austria. As an independent artist, she works in the media of photography, video, film, sound and installation. In her work, Katharina traces societal tendencies and addresses socio-cultural issues that range from gender-related topics to questions arising in urban surroundings. Another focus is feminist topics and her work in public space, which she mostly implements site-specifically.
Echoes of the Deep is a multimedia exploration of underwater ecosystems, intertwining visual and auditory elements to evoke its current metamorphosis through climate change. The project delves into ecological challenges while highlighting the ocean's historical significance in regard to wars and the conservation or containment of wrecks. The resulting video aims to spark conversations about humanity's profound impact on the ecological balance of our maritime world.
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.