Upcoming Fellowship Recipients
Spring 2026
Spring 2026 - group 3
Dance
Sasha Ivanochko
Choreographer — Canada
A choreographer, educator, and arts leader, Sasha Ivanochko has shaped Canadian contemporary dance for over 30 years. Her critically acclaimed work has toured internationally, and her contributions to the field have been recognized with numerous awards. Most recently, she was appointed to the 100th Class of Guggenheim Fellows. Sasha is also studying in psychotherapy, and her creative themes often incorporate intersecting interests in art and mental health and wellness.
“Ritual: An Ancestral Conversation” examines the encoded rituals of Sasha's Canadian Ukrainian heritage, developing a contemporary choreography that embodies these forms as a dance of resistance to cultural erasure. During her residency, Sasha will refine a movement vocabulary that weaves traditional and contemporary forms, investigating how ritual shapes identity and practice. This process deepens her engagement with cultural transmission in performance.
Film/Video
Robert Epstein
Filmmaker, Director, and Author — United States
Rob Epstein was a full professor at California College of the Arts for twenty years, where he co-founded the MFA Film Program, served as co-chair of the Film Program, and is now professor emeritus. He has also been a visiting professor in the Graduate Film Program at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. He has served on the Board of Trustees of the Sundance Institute and BAMPFA, as well as three terms on the Board of Governors of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences representing the Documentary Branch. Rob was recently awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from California College of the Arts. Over the years, Rob and collaborator Jeffrey Friedman have amassed hundreds of hours of archival material: pre-interviews, outtakes, and other never-before-seen footage. Together, these materials constitute a significant historical record, tracing the evolution of LGBTQ+ identities from the 1970s to the present. They document pivotal events, including the election and assassination of Harvey Milk and the AIDS epidemic—moments that galvanized the queer community and shaped its identity. Among the videotaped pre-interviews are many individuals from the so-called “lost generation”—the cohort of gay men decimated by AIDS who would have been mentors to today’s young queer generation.
During their residency at the Bogliasco Center, Rob and Jeffrey will begin developing a long-simmering idea: a film or installation project that revisits and reimagines our archival collection, titled Outtakes.
Film/Video
Jeffrey Friedman
Filmmaker, Director, and Author — United States
Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman have been making movies together for over 35 years. Their first film, Common Threads: Stories From the Quilt, won the Academy Award for Documentary Feature. This was Rob’s second Oscar, having won previously for The Times of Harvey Milk. Both films were chosen for the National Film Registry at the Library of Congress, as was Rob’s previous film Word Is Out. Rob and Jeffrey have had career retrospectives at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London, Film at Lincoln Center in New York, the Taipei International Film Festival in Taiwan, the Cinémathèque Québécoise in Montreal, and the Pink Apple Film Festival in Zurich. They are members of the Directors Guild of America and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. They co-authored the textbook The Art of Nonfiction Movie Making. Jeffrey has had a distinguished career editing his own and other people’s films, including two Oscar-nominated shorts and one Oscar-winning feature. He has taught in the documentary graduate program at Stanford University.
During their residency at the Bogliasco Center, Jeffrey and Rob will begin developing a long-simmering idea: a film or installation project that revisits and reimagines their archival collection, titled Outtakes.
History
Nemata Blyden
Author, Professor, and Researcher — United States – Virginia Howard Fellow
Nemata Blyden (M.Phil., Ph.D. Yale University) is the Armstead Robinson Professor of 19th Century African American History at the Carter G. Woodson Institute, University of Virginia. A scholar specializing in African American, African Diaspora, and African history, Nemata Blyden is the author of African Americans and Africa: A New History (Yale University Press, 2019), and West Indians in West Africa, 1808-1880: A diaspora in reverse (University of Rochester Press, 2000). Most recently she published “Stevie Wonder’s Ghanaian citizenship reflects long-standing links between African Americans and the continent,” for The Conversation (2024). Her principal thematic interests have included nineteenth century African American history, African and American and Caribbean migrations to Africa and African American engagement with Africa.
Nemata's project, A Black Atlantic Family History, interprets and connects histories of Black Atlantic lives by examining the history of two families in the Americas, contextualizing their history within a broader Atlantic history. By looking at the lives of an extended family whose history spans the American South, the Caribbean, Europe and West Africa, it illuminates the history of African descended people from the 18th to the 20th century, exploring major themes in African Diaspora history.
Humanities Scholarship
Martín Bergel
(Public Humanities) Professor and Researcher — Argentina/Italy
Martín Bergel is professor of Latin American and Global History at the University of San Martín, and researcher of CONICET (Buenos Aires). He also directs the MA Program in Intellectual History at the University of Quilmes. He was visiting researcher at Harvard University and fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, in Berlin. Among his books, he has published El Oriente desplazado, Los intelectuales y los orígenes del tercermundismo en Argentina, and two anthologies by Peruvian José Carlos Mariátegui.
“The Other Last Utopia. Genoa 2001 and the Memoirs of an Alternative Globalization” This project aims to produce a historical-philosophical essay and a series of personal chronicles about the city of Genoa, 25 years after the protests against the G8 Summit held in July 2001 in the context of the “movement of movements” for global justice. The author, who traveled from Buenos Aires and was present at those demonstrations, proposes a “return to Genoa” as a way of unearthing the lost stories of a historic moment that heralded an alternative globalization and other horizons of possible worlds.
Literature
Haneen Al Sayegh
Novelist and Poet — Lebanon
Haneen Al Sayegh is a Lebanese novelist and poet, born in Mount Lebanon in 1986. She holds a BA in English literature, and an MA in teaching English curricula from the American University of Beirut. She has published three volumes of poetry and was awarded the Naji Noaman literary award. Her first novel, “The Women’s Covenant”, was shortlisted for the Internation Prize for Arabic Literature and was translated to German and English.
Haneen will work on a novel with the following synopsis: Torn between a German mother and a Druze Lebanese father, she survives two family abductions, silence, and scars too deep for words. Love comes like a promise, but trauma builds walls she cannot climb. Among horses, she finds what humans denied her: gentleness, trust, and healing. Between fractured identities and haunted memories, she realizes that the wholeness she was seeking was never a place or a person, but a quiet flame she carried all along.
Music
Ka Baird
Composer, Performer, and Sound Artist — United States
Ka Baird is a performer, sound artist, musician and composer based in New York City. Using extended voice and microphone techniques along with electronics, field recordings and traditional instrumentation, they explore the outer dimensions of sound through performance. They are known for their vigorous, ritualistic delivery that seeks extreme release through physical exertion and psychic extension. Ka has collaborated with many other artists, both in structured compositions and in their dedicated practice of improvisation.
"Yomp" is an in progress performance work that explores and contrasts the idea of the march versus a walk as a way to explore detours and indirect trajectories. "Yomp" plays with the idea of a march constantly falling apart, symbolizing a refusal to submit to regimented time demands. The piece also plays with the form of the American drum and fife tradition, drum corps, and the use of music in the military. Ka will spend their time researching the histories of the march and its uses in various cultures and contexts. They will explore methods for analyzing the rhythms of geographical spaces and will explore the area and make field recordings both as source material for their performance piece as well as a way of choreographing a sound walk throughout the city.
Theater
Junauda Petrus
Writer, Filmmaker, and Performance Artist — United States
Junauda Petrus is an abolitionist, writer, filmmaker, and performance artist of Black Trinidadian and Crucian descent, born on Dakota/Anishinaabe land (Minneapolis). Her work fuses ancestral dreaming, poetics, and radical imagination to envision Black liberation and sweetness. She is the 2025–2026 poet laureate of Minneapolis and author of The Stars and The Blackness Between Them (Coretta Scott King Honor), and Can We Please Give The Police Department to the Grandmothers?
While at the Bogliasco Center, Junauda will develop Erotics of Abolition: LOVE TEMPLES (EoA: LT), an immersive, experimental-healing space, performance and literary project that envisions alternative futures of community care, healing, and abolition. EoA: LT is a vision where Love Temples replace police precincts and serve as sanctuaries for the radical work of abolition. EoA: LT will offer pre-emptive joy, cultural creative play, political education, healing, and abolition practices of community care.
Visual Arts
Fernando Sicco
Artist, Curator, Psychologist — Uruguay
Fernando Sicco defines his artistic work as the creation of devices to generate sensitive and critical experiences, regardless their form or medium. He began his relationship with art through analog photography and video, later incorporating installation, body research, and digital resources alongside web content. His work has been exhibited in several international biennials, group exhibitions and solo shows since 1989. Between 2009 and 2020 he was responsible for the creation and curating of the Contemporary Art Space in Montevideo, transforming a former panoptic prison into an internationally recognized place for freedom, encounter, and communication
SMALL LAND OF LAWLESS DEAD is an art project that explores family experience, funeral habits and bureaucracy, and also the role of local cultures in their encounters with migrants. As a final stage of research, Fernando will gather new material in the Liguria region, from where his father and grandparents emigrated to Uruguay in 1951. Starting from a factual situation that violates the funeral regulations of his country but was maintained with the complicity of the authorities, he is taking charge of that legacy through art.