Upcoming Fellowship Recipients
Spring 2025
Spring 2025 - group 4
Dance
Nichole Canuso
Choreographer – United States
Nichole Canuso’s dedication to dance manifests as performances, installations, films and intimate dialogues. Her projects often use technology to bring performers and audiences together in tender exchanges. Her work has been awarded fellowships (Pew fellow 2017; New York Stage & Film fellow 2021) and presented nationally (New York Live Arts, American Repertory Theater, Los Angeles Performance Practice) and internationally (Hungary, Mexico, Poland, Sweden, Italy, Czech Republic).
While in residence Nichole will be developing Lunar Retreat, a multi-sensory, interactive performance installation. Named after the slow, rhythmic inevitability of the growing distance between the earth and the moon, Lunar Retreat explores our individual and communal experiences of the cycles of caretaking, loss and transformation. Choreographic prompts on headphones will guide participants into a labyrinthine performance experience in which they can explore and reflect both alone and together.
Film/Video
Tamar Baruch
Filmmaker – Israel
Tamar Baruch is a filmmaker born in 1987 in Haifa, Israel. Drawing on her experience as a first-generation immigrant of Tunisian and Iranian descent, she directs her films towards critical human-rights issues, with a particular focus on refugee narratives. Baruch received an M.A. in Documentary Film from NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, where she was a Fulbright fellow, and a B.F.A. in Film from Tel-Aviv University's Steve Tisch School of Film and York University's Film Department.
Tamar Baruch will be working on a new feature-length film set in Senegal. The story centers on a love affair between a French activist and a Senegalese fisherman. The couple migrates to France in hopes of starting a life, but once in France, they struggle to belong. Through this film, Baruch aims to examine the enduring effects of colonialism on Senegalese and French societies, exploring the dissonance and struggle faced by characters caught between different cultural, political, and social worlds.
Humanities Scholarship
Milena Anfosso
(Classics) – Author and Scholar – United States/Italy
Milena Anfosso (PhD, Sorbonne University) has held research appointments at Harvard University and UCLA. Multilingual herself, she has published and lectured on multilingualism in Antiquity, focusing on linguistic interactions among different populations in Anatolia between the 2nd and 1st millennium BCE, with a particular interest in ancient curses and black magic. Additionally, Milena has worked on Calabrian dialectology and folklore. Based in Los Angeles, she has served as a linguistic consultant in the entertainment industry and is currently co-authoring a YA fantasy novel.
At Bogliasco, Milena will work on her monograph exploring Timotheus of Miletus’s language in the Persians (late 5th-century BCE), a complex piece of Greek literature that narrates the Battle of Salamis (480 BCE) from the Persians’ perspective. Using her extensive knowledge of Ancient Greek, Phrygian, Lydian, and Old Persian, Milena explains Timotheus’s unusual linguistic choices in terms of sociolinguistic mimesis. She also discusses the strategies that he used to convey the 'otherness' of his characters in comparison with other ancient authors and in the frame of so-called 'New Music.'
Humanities Scholarship
Harry Browne
(Public Humanities) – Senior Lecturer, School of Media, Technological University Dublin – Ireland/United States
Harry Browne is Senior Lecturer in the School of Media at Technological University Dublin. An experienced journalist and researcher, he is the author of three books: Hammered by the Irish (Counterpunch/AK Press 2008), The Frontman (Verso, 2013, with other editions in Spanish and Italian) and Public Sphere (Cork University Press, 2018). His journalism is anthologized in Great Irish Reportage (Penguin Ireland, 2013), and he is active in campaigning for peace and social justice.
Harry Browne is completing a book, Meaningful: Disinformation, social media and the imperatives of the algorithm. It explores how platform capitalism has distorted our information – but also how popular and scholarly texts on ‘disinformation’ have addressed that distortion with incomplete, propagandistic narratives. Combining insights from psychology, tech studies and critical theory, it proposes an aesthetic approach that rescues information and sociability from the clutches of algorithmic logic.
Literature
Catherine Ann Cullen
Poet, songwriter, children’s author – Ireland
Catherine Ann Cullen is an Irish Research Council/Poetry Ireland postdoctoral fellow at University College Dublin, researching a book on the lost street poets and tenement balladeers of the city. She was inaugural Poet in Residence at Poetry Ireland 2019-2022. Cullen is a recipient of the Kavanagh Fellowship for Poetry and a prize-winning poet, children’s author and songwriter. She has published three poetry collections and four children’s books, including The Song of Brigid’s Cloak (Beehive 2022).
‘Smither’, an old English word for a small piece, was transformed by the Gaelic diminutive ‘íní’ into the Irish word for fragments, and reimported into Hiberno-English as ‘smithereens’. To Cullen, the word represents the fragmented nature of language in a postcolonial society. Smithereens/Smidiríní is a poem sequence based on Hiberno-English words, a fascination for Cullen, whose poem Plámás (Poetry Ireland Review 131) explored the origin of an Irish word for flattery in the French ‘blancmange’.
Literature
Ladee Hubbard
Novelist – United States
Ladee Hubbard is the author of the novels The Talented Ribkins and The Rib King as well as the short story collection, The Last Suspicious Holdout. Her work has received a Hurston Wright Legacy Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Berlin Prize and a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship, among other accolades. She received her BA in English from Princeton University, a MFA in Creative Writing from The University of Wisconsin, Madison and a PhD in Folklore and Mythology from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Ladee Hubbard will be working on her novel, The Descendants, which places the 1980s War on Drugs in dialogue with the larger history of African Americans being used in medical experiments in the United States. The novel also considers parallels between anxiety over the integrity of the U.S. border and internal segregation through which the marginalization of certain populations has historically been physically enacted through practices such as Jim Crow Laws, redlining, and the streamlining of certain communities into the prison system.
Music
Shih-Hui Chen
Composer, Professor at the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University, member of the Performing Arts and Culture program committee at the Asia Society Texas Center, and founder of 21C: Classical, Contemporary, and Cross-Cultural Asian Music –Taiwan/USA
Recipient of the 2023 Walter Hinrichsen Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Shih-Hui Chen’s compositions have been recognized by the American Academy in Rome, the Fulbright Program, and the Guggenheim Foundation. She has collaborated with the Philadelphia, Cleveland, and National Taiwan Symphony Orchestras. Her recent works include a mixed-media viola concerto, sisila ila ila; saying goodbye, featuring shadow puppetry, a Beethoven quartet, Taiwanese indigenous singing, and whale songs.
Kimchi, Pickles, and Wine is a musical/theatrical work featuring live musicians, video, a chef/narrator, and a tasting event. It explores global fermented foods in three parts: musical stations on fermentation sounds, a live show with music, narration, and fermentation videos, and a tasting of global fermented foods and drinks. The work celebrates shared food traditions and highlights the importance of preserving them across cultures.
Theater
Mary Prescott
Interdisciplinary artist – United States
Mary Prescott is a Thai-American interdisciplinary artist, composer, and pianist who explores the foundations and facets of identity and social conditions through experiential performance. Featured in “21 for ‘21: Composers and Performers Who Sound Like Tomorrow,” The Washington Post describes Mary’s work as “a bright light cast forward... uncompromising,” and “masterfully envisioned.” Mary is an awardee of the McKnight Composer Fellowship, NPN Creation and Development Fund, and many others.
Ancestral Table is a shared meal and interdisciplinary performance that examines the relationships between ecology, migration, cultural inheritance and maternal legacy through Mary’s Thai mother’s family recipes.
Visual Arts
Shimon Attie
Visual Artist – United States
Shimon Attie’s projects seek to re-imagine new relationships between place, time, and identity. He often engages local communities to find new ways of representing their history, memory, and potential futures. Attie is particularly concerned with issues of loss, communal trauma and the potential for regeneration, and how the histories of marginalized communities can be introduced into the landscape of the present. Attie has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, Rome Prize, Radcliffe Institute, NEA, and The Lee Krasner Award, among others.
While at Bogliasco, Shimon Attie will engage in creative experimentation and risk taking necessary to grow and push his artistic practice. This will culminate in the creation of a new project. Given Bogliasco’s location on the Mediterranean where issues of migration and refugees come to the fore, and building on his earlier projects, he would like to create a work that engages migration and perhaps local refugee communities. He would begin with deep, multi-faceted research, in all its forms, from which a project would emerge.
Spring 2025 - group 3
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).”
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.
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.
Literature
Jennifer Grotz
Poet and translator, Professor at the University of Rochester, Director of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conferences – United States
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
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
Philip Venables
Composer – United Kingdom/Germany
Philip Venables' previous operas, 4.48 Psychosis (2016, Sarah Kane), Denis & Katya (2019, Ted Huffman) and The Faggots and their Friends Between Revolutions (2023, Ted Huffman), have been performed worldwide by leading companies and won numerous awards. Philip studied at Cambridge University, the Guildhall School of Music & Drama and the Royal Academy of Music. 2025 sees the premiere of Philip’s fourth opera, We Are The Lucky Ones (Ted Huffman & Nina Segal) at Dutch National Opera.
At Bogliasco, Philip Venables will start work on a new opera for one of the major European opera houses. The opera will be a radical new version of a well-known piece of classic literature, written in collaboration with playwright Nina Segal, the title to be announced in due course. It will be his fifth opera, and second opera with orchestra, following 4.48 Psychosis, Denis & Katya, The Faggots and their Friends Between Revolutions, and We Are The Lucky Ones.
Theater
Mfoniso Udofia
Storyteller and educator – Nigeria/United States – Virginia Howard Fellowship
Mfoniso Udofia is a first-generation Nigerian-American storyteller and educator. Her plays Sojourners and The Grove will be produced by the Huntington Theatre, and productions of her plays Sojourners, runboyrun, Her Portmanteau and In Old Age have been seen at NYTW, A.C.T., Playwrights Realm, Magic Theater, National Black Theatre, and Boston Court. She is the recipient of the 2017 Helen Merrill Award, the 2017-18 McKnight National Residency and Commission and is a member of New Dramatists.
Mfoniso Udofia will be working on two plays. Lifted is about a brilliant and fiercely independent scholar, Toyoima Ufot, who has forged her own lonely path, isolating herself in the hallowed halls of academia, but can't outrun her past forever. Forced to contend with her choices and her history, Toyoima makes a voyage to her fatherland – Akwa Ibom, Nigeria – and finds herself on a healing journey where she is ultimately exonerated, because amongst family, one can never be made an outcast. In Old Age is a play about Abasiama Ufot and an elder man who make an unlikely spiritual connection.
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.