Upcoming Fellowship Recipients
Fall 2026
Fall 2026 - group 1
Dance
K.J. Holmes
Dance Artist, Vocalist, and Writer — United States
K.J. Holmes is a dance artist, actor, vocalist, writer, teacher who has collaborated with dancers Simone Forti, Karen Nelson, Lisa Nelson, Steve Paxton; poets Julie Carr, Edwin Torres; musicians Roy Campbell, Jr., Jeremy Carlstedt. She has produced at Chocolate Factory, Danspace Project, The Kitchen, NDA, PS 122, Roulette, Arts for Arts NYC and nationally/internationally; performed with Matthew Barney, Miguel Guiterrez, Karinne Keithley Seyers; and teaches at NYU/ETW, Movement Research. K.J. is a 2026 Guggenheim Fellow.
K.J. will be developing Blu/print, an improvised and structured dance/theater/music piece. Blu/print is a somatic search for origins—etymologies, physiologies, archeologies, geologies, musicologies—across time/space. She will be fine tuning a solo made with a distillation of texts created in residency at the Peripheral Center, Trumso Norway. The solo is an overture for an ensemble piece with three dancers and two musicians. She will also continue to deepen her research into the ensemble material.
Film/Video
Shuchi Talati
Filmmaker — India/United States
Shuchi Talati is a filmmaker from India whose work challenges dominant narratives around gender, sexuality, and South Asian identity. Her feature film, Girls Will Be Girls, won the John Cassavetes Independent Spirit Award and also a couple awards at the an Audience Award and Special Jury Award at Sundance. Shuchi’s short film, A Period Piece, was selected for SXSW and her film Mae and Ash won numerous awards. She lives in NYC and is a graduate of the American Film Institute and an alum of Berlinale Talents.
FUTURE OF SEX is a screenplay-in-progress set in a remote utopian community where each member lives in symbiosis with a plant or animal—their symbiont. It’s difficult work with frequent losses. Climate grief, burnout, low desire and erotic dissatisfaction are widespread. So they decide to revive an idealistic sex-as-a-public-service program. They hope pleasure and connection will help people cope with grief. But the program creates emotional fractures that threaten the community’s very survival.
History
Justin Crumbaugh
Author and Chair of Spanish, Latina/o and Latin American Studies, Mount Holyoke College — United States
Justin Crumbaugh’s research explores expressions of right-wing extremism in contemporary Spain, from the Spanish Civil War and Franco dictatorship to the rising reactionary nostalgia of recent years. His books include Destination Dictatorship (2009) and Spanish Fascist Writing (2021), and his articles have addressed topics such as the spectacle of tourist development, counter-terrorism discourse, and political architecture. His current book project traces the history of political victim enshrinement in contemporary Spain.
From the ubiquitous exaltation of the caídos or "fallen" fascists of the Spanish Civil War throughout the Franco dictatorship, to the victims of the armed Basque separatist organization ETA, to those claiming to be harmed by African migrants, successive spectacles of sacralized suffering have anchored reactionary thought and culture in Spain for nearly a century, whether under dictatorship or democracy. At the Bogliasco Center, Justin will be finishing a book manuscript on this topic.
Humanities Scholarship
Lester Tomé
Author and Professor of Dance History, Smith College — Cuba/United States
Lester Tomé, an associate professor of dance history at Smith College, has published about ballet in Cuba in the contexts of early twentieth-century avant-gardism, the Cuban Revolution, and contemporary migration and transnationalism. His research has appeared in publications such as the Cambridge Companion to Ballet, Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Ballet, and Routledge Companion to Dance Studies, and has been supported by fellowships from Harvard, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Humanities Center.
At the Bogliasco Center, Lester will advance his research on avant-garde ballet and Futurism as transatlantic phenomena in the 1910s-1930s. He will write about Skyscrapers, a Jazz-Age ballet that mobilized Futurist imagery to depict the rhythms of urban life in the American city. Premiered by the Metropolitan Opera in 1926, it featured a jazz-inflected score by John Alden Carpenter, Futurist set designs by Robert Edmond Jones, and Broadway-style dance numbers by choreographer Sammy Lee.
Literature
Diane Mehta
Poet and Author — United States
Diane Mehta was born in Frankfurt, grew up in Bombay and New Jersey, and makes her home in New York City. She is the author of Happier Far: Essays (2025) and two collections of poetry: Tiny Extravaganzas (2023) and Forest with Castanets (2019). Her writing has been recognized by the Café Royal Cultural Foundation and fellowships at Civitella Ranieri and Yaddo. Her work is in The New Yorker, Southern Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Kenyon Review, and A Public Space. www.dianemehta.net
Diane will work on Jenga: A Ballet Book, about her three years as poet in residence with New Chamber Ballet in New York City. She will draw connections and reveal patterns between her poems, notes, photos, and the fractured rhythms of rehearsal. The book is a way to make sense of what she saw in the studio every week, with the choreographer, and with six female dancers who worked together to share weight, create temporary structures, and drag or cradle one another in scenes of conflict or love.
Music
Snežana Nešić
Composer, Accordionist, and Professor of Composition, Dr. Hoch's Conservatory Frankfurt — Serbia/Germany
Snežana Nešić is a Serbian-German composer, accordionist, and conductor, and Professor of Composition at Dr. Hoch’s Conservatory Frankfurt. Both as a composer and performer, she has received numerous international prizes, fellowships, and residencies. Her music has been commissioned and performed internationally by, among others, the Gewandhaus zu Leipzig, North German Radio (NDR), Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, Philharmonie Luxembourg, Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, and State Opera Hannover.
During the residency at the Bogliasco Center, Snežana will work on the central fragment of her opera on Nikola Tesla, based on texts by Dante Alighieri, Nikola Tesla, J. W. von Goethe, Nicola Masciandaro, and her own poetry. The project explores the intersection of scientific vision, metaphysical thought, and light as a visual, sonic, and symbolic phenomenon.
Philosophy
Nadia Harhash
Writer and Researcher — Palestine
Nadia Harhash is a writer from Jerusalem whose work moves between philosophy, history, and narrative. She holds a PhD in Philosophy, Gender, and Cultural Studies. An author of fiction and nonfiction, she also writes public commentary on culture and politics. Her work explores belonging, memory, and the layered histories of place.
HERstory Jerusalem is a historical-literary guide foregrounding women’s presence from antiquity to the twenty-first century through a city shaped by the movement of civilizations, faiths, and empires. Combining archival research with narrative reconstruction, it reframes inherited historical narratives and re-situates women within layered urban memory. During the residency, Nadia will complete the English manuscript.
Theater
Shayan Lotfi
Playwright — Canada/United States
Shayan Lotfi is a resident playwright at New Dramatists and was the Tow Playwright-in-Residence at the Atlantic Theater, where his play What Became of Us premiered. He is the recipient of the Horton Foote Award from the Dramatists Guild, a Citation of Excellence from the Laurents/Hatcher Foundation, a New Play Award from the Edgerton Foundation; fellowships from MacDowell, Yaddo, and Instituto Sacatar; and commissions from Manhattan Theatre Club, Atlantic Theater and South Coast Repertory. In addition to writing, he also works as an urban policy consultant.
Set in Istanbul during two distinct moments in the city’s history when it experienced an influx of Iranian asylum seekers passing through to onward destinations, Shayan's project at the Bogliasco Center is a stage play that explores the transitional in-between spaces – physical and otherwise – that refugees inhabit when moving from origin to destination. Key questions of interest include: what do we owe our countries in times of rapidly-changing socio-political conditions; and, is there a moral dimension to the choice between the self-interest of migrating versus ‘staying and fighting'?