Fellows in Residence

Nell Breyer – Choreographer/multidisciplinary artist – United Kingdom/United States

Nell Breyer’s research at Bogliasco – entitled “It is the same story all over the world, repeated again and again” – focuses on the displacement of 65+ million people around the globe. The scale of human refuge, exile and migratory movements is incomprehensible today. Her project collects narratives, gestures, movements, and experiences to attempt to respond to the catastrophic scale of displacement in contemporary history, through a choreographic framework.

Vikram Iyengar – Choreographer/Director – India

Project in collaboration with Eurig Salisbury

The aural structure of Welsh Cynghanedd poetry and sonant nature of Indian Kathak dance rhythmic syllables have conceptual synergies, but very different grammars. Iyengar and Salisbury explore the agreement and friction between their forms, practices, and traditions; and propose conflict, dis/comfort and instability as spaces to fully inhabit. They wish to create material of visceral and vibrant beauty, danger and harmony, whether through a performance piece, a digital a sound installation, or a co-written paper.

Ginger Krebs – Choreographer, visual artist and Associate Professor, Adjunct, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago – United States

Ginger Krebs will be working on Median, a dance for four performers that is comprised of interlocking parts, like origami folds or atoms arranging themselves to form a crystal. The performance investigates visibility, simulation, control, and the moment-by-moment feedback loops that constitute cooperation. At Bogliasco, Ginger will study image capture technology and control in distributed networks, and develop a second “phase” of movement material for the project.

Bebe Miller – Choreographer, Artistic Director, Professor Emerita at the Ohio State University – United States – Virginia Howard Fellow

Bebe Miller will be developing a new dance as well as video and written materials, referencing archival remnants of her practice. Her curiosity about the how and why of her work has to do with understanding how a choreographic syntax — the signifiers of structure and meaning — evolves in conjunction with the times. During this encounter with what her body used to believe as true, she is curious about where a new rendering in all three disciplines will take her.

Ranee, Aparna, and Ashwini Ramaswamy – Choreographers, Founders and co-Artistic Directors, Ragamala Dance Company – India/United States

Ragamala's new work, The Dharma Forest, is inspired by New York based author Keerthik Sasidharan’s novel of the same name, in which he re-examines the South Asian foundational epic, The Mahabharata. A living text that remains central to Hindu life today, Mahabharata is the story of a great war where the mortal enemy is one’s own kin. The Dharma Forest imagines and chronicles the testimonies of nine characters—each embodying an emotional valence (rasa) that is intimately experienced and yet universally recognizable.

Philip Barnes (Classics) – Classics faculty, John Burroughs School / Artistic Director, Saint Louis Chamber Chorus, St. Louis (MO) – United Kingdom/United States – John Burroughs Bogliasco Fellow

The choruses of Sophocles' tragedy Antigone were intended to be performed as song and dance. This project takes the main choruses from the drama and recasts them in a form that consciously invites both music and movement. A similar technique is applied to the monologues of Creon, Ismene, and Antigone. This new translation seeks to expose the musicality of the original Greek without crowding out space for original music. This project is the culmination of collaborations begun two decades ago.

Harvey G. Cohen (History) – Cultural Historian, King’s College London, Department of Culture, Media and Creative Industries – United States/United Kingdom

Cohen’s forthcoming book Roll Away The Stone will document why African American gospel music and its industry is important historically as well as artistically, from 1930-1965. Black gospel music represented a segregated, innovative and moving body of work, initially flowing largely unrecognized below the mainstream of American life, rarely appearing on sales charts, relegated to odd hours of the radio schedule on black stations, yet earning enormous eventual influence worldwide. Cohen will be working on a chapter about black gospel’s founding figure, Prof. Thomas A. Dorsey.

Amber Esseiva (Visual Arts-Scholarship) – Associate Curator, Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University – Switzerland/Senegal/United States

Amber Esseiva’s research endeavors are dedicated to the life and work of architect and educator Amaza Lee Meredith (1895–1984). Born in Virginia, Meredith became known as the first Black queer female architect in the U.S. Her research will use Meredith’s archives as a starting point. Roughly 5,000 pieces outline her prowess in the fields of architecture and public education through letters, blueprints, and photographs. This research will inspire the commission of new projects by contemporary artists and scholars.

Ruth Glynn (Literature-Scholarship) – Professor of Modern Italian Culture, University of Bristol – Ireland/United Kingdom

Ruth Glynn’s Fellowship will be devoted to completion of a book chapter. The book addresses cultural representations of Naples and its relationship with the Italian nation-state, from the start of the Second Republic (the ‘Republic of the Cities’) to the present day. Her specific focus will be Chapter 2, which explores the nationalization of the ‘Neapolitan Renaissance’ of the 1990s in Italy’s first soap opera and critiques of the same in literary works of the early 2000s. 

Lila Ellen Gray (Music-Scholarship) – Ethnomusicologist/Cultural Anthropologist, Associate Professor of Music, Dickinson College, Carlisle, PA – United States

The voice of Amália Rodrigues, the “Queen of Fado” and Portugal’s most celebrated diva, was extraordinary for its interpretive power, soul wrenching sound, and international reach. Lila Ellen Gray will be completing an interdisciplinary book that uses Rodrigues’ first performance at the fabled Olympia Theater in Paris (1956) as a prism through which to examine the internationalization of peripheral popular musics and the making of female musical stardom in the mid-20th century.

Ariane Koek (Visual Arts-Scholarship) – Independent creative producer, curator and writer – United Kingdom

Ariane Koek specializes in arts, science, technology, and ecology and is using the time and space of the Fellowship to finish and submit her book proposal on major science laboratories who are initiating contemporary arts programs. Having initiated and directed for its first five years the Arts at CERN program at the particle physics laboratory outside Geneva, Switzerland, she is drawing on her insights and experience to explore how and when science and art meet in a scientific setting, they generate new possibilities for culture and society at large.

Joseph P. McDermott (History) – Emeritus Reader in Chinese History, Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Cambridge – United States/United Kingdom

As part of his current project Alternative Chinas, Joseph P. McDermott plans to write up his research findings on a group of bondservants in sixteenth and seventeenth-century China. With the aid of neglected life-writings and other private documents he has unearthed in Chinese libraries, he will explore how these low-status men and women (usually concubines) often secured surprising power over their lives, and then discuss their reflections on their life experiences.

Janice Ross (Dance-Scholarship) – Professor in the Department of Theatre and Performance Studies, Stanford University – United States

Janice Ross explores a timely and urgent subject: the unique bonds between incarceration and performance. Tracing the role art can play in changing lives of detainees through culinary training programs in Italian prisons, she investigates role play, sensory escape into the aromas of food, and kitchen labor and waitstaff training as choreographies of transformation. Understanding the role of performance in the context of punishment reveals how social reality and meanings are intimately tied to representation.

Michael Wutz (Literature-Scholarship) – Brady Presidential Distinguished Professor of English, Weber State University – Germany/United States

Michael Wutz’ proposal investigates the continued relevance of contemporary fiction in the Anthropocene, especially how current forms of narrative are responding to climate change. The project, in that sense, has a double focus that eventually branches out into a third: how does ambitious fiction engage the larger ecological crises affecting the planet?

Ama Codjoe – Poet – United States – Van Cleef and Arpels Bogliasco Special Fellow in Poetry

Ama Codjoe will be writing poems toward a second full-length manuscript. Drawing on archival research of mid-twentieth century sideshow performers, “Joy Dark” explores and exposes the complexities and fault lines embedded in questions of authenticity and African American performance and how kinship is communicated, authenticated, and performed.

Bonnie Costello – Professor of English, Emeritus, Boston University – United States

Bonnie Costello is building a collection of essays – part family history, part local description, part travel writing, and part meditation – on the topics of place, mobility, and transformation. All of these pieces blend her perceptions with historical and literary accounts, creating a layered gaze. Costello is interested in how an idea of place arises, not from one person's synoptic view, but from attention to the intersections of diverse paths and intentions over time.

Eurig Salisbury – Poet, Lecturer in Creative Writing at the Department of Welsh and Celtic Studies, Aberystwyth University – United Kingdom

Project in collaboration with Vikram Iyengar

The aural structure of Welsh Cynghanedd poetry and sonant nature of Indian Kathak dance rhythmic syllables have conceptual synergies, but very different grammars. Iyengar and Salisbury explore the agreement and friction between their forms, practices, and traditions; and propose conflict, dis/comfort and instability as spaces to fully inhabit. They wish to create material of visceral and vibrant beauty, danger and harmony, whether through a performance piece, a digital a sound installation, or a co-written paper.

Eleni Sikelianos – Poet, Professor of Literary Arts, Brown University – United States

Eleni Sikelianos will be working on a hybrid book (prose, image, poetry) meditating on inheritance, both familial and planetary. We come from lineages immediate and vast. Genetics are one piece of the chorus, and when these pieces appear and voice themselves, that is part of the human performance. Ancestral histories run alongside the ways our lives are intertwined, even genetically, with the plants and animals around us, and with the shape of the landscape. What poetic forms could reflect evolutionary history?

Alessandro Baticci – Composer and flutist – Italy/Austria

Alessandro Baticci will work on a new violin concerto, Icona, in which the soloist is playing on a digitally-enhanced violin. Through gestures and playing data digitally collected in real-time, the soloist simulates multiple instruments and interacts with the orchestra. Baticci is one of the inventors of this technology. Icona is scheduled to be performed in Victoria, Canada, in 2023.

Eric Chasalow – Composer, Irving Fine Professor of Music, Brandeis University – United States – Edward T. Cone Bogliasco Special Fellow in Music

In his recent work, Eric Chasalow creates alternate versions – one for concert hall and another that recontextualizes materials into non-linear pieces for museum spaces. He will continue this exploration at Bogliasco with three pieces: a song cycle for soprano Stephanie Lamprea, a piece for clarinet and electronics for a consortium of players led by Benjamin Fingland, and a percussion quartet for Talujon.

Elliott Miles McKinley – Composer, Associate Professor of Music Composition, Theory, and Technology, Roger Williams University – United States

Elliott Miles McKinley will focus on a large-scale work, a sextet for string quartet, bass clarinet, and marimba commissioned by Transient Canvas and the Semiosis String Quartet. The work, titled The Pale Blue Dot, takes inspiration from the famous soliloquy penned by Astronomer Carl Sagan upon seeing the Earth (the “pale blue dot”) and Moon as photographed by the deep space probe Voyager 1 from a distance of six billion miles in February 1990. McKinley will also begin work on a second sonata for violin and piano.

Nina Young – Composer – United States – Aaron Copland Bogliasco Special Fellow in Music

Nina Young will be working on To hear the things we cannot see for the Boston-based group Hub New Music. The piece takes inspiration from several poems found in Rosie Stockton's Permanent Volta, and features recordings of Rosie's voice mixed with acoustic instrumental chamber music and electronic sounds. In parallel, she will refine a new evening-length immersive spatial audio installation piece that will be premiered in April at the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) in Troy, NY.

Mat Sweeney & Sebastian Peters-Lazaro – Writer/Director/Composer, and Designer/Choreographer – United States

Mat Sweeney and Sebastian Peters-Lazaro (Four Larks) work with music, movement, and design to compose new performance works staged in unexpected locations with immersive mise-en-scène. Their collaged intertextual librettos combine historical and contemporary writing, framed around recurrent mythologies and rituals. At Bogliasco they will begin exploratory research on a new roving opera in conversation with Dante's Purgatorio.

Amy Quan Barry – Writer, Professor of English, University of Wisconsin-Madison – United States

While in residence at Bogliasco, poet, novelist, and playwright Quan Barry will work on a two-act play titled Dirty Work in which characters confront the limits of artificial intelligence and the possibilities AI presents for housing the eternal soul. Barry also hopes to begin outlining a novel project set in Antarctica tentatively titled My God is Godly, a quote spoken by the widow of explorer Robert Scott upon learning of his death.

Evan Fallenberg – Novelist, translator, chair of the Department of English Literature and Linguistics, Bar-Ilan University – Israel

Evan Fallenberg will be working on final revisions of a new novel – his fourth – as well as shaping the contours of two new projects: a play about two translators translating a play, and a collection of essays about Palestinians and Jews in the Galilee.

Winter Miller – Playwright – United States

Winter Miller will be adapting her play No One Is Forgotten into a libretto for a Radio Opera in 3D Spatial Audio to premiere in 2023 with composers Paola Prestini and Sxip Shirey. The story is about a journalist and an aid worker who are held captive. The opera queries intimacy, surrender, and the will to live. At Bogliasco, Miller will also work on her play Spare Rib, a tragicomedy about abortion, for a January 2023 workshop in NYC and hopes to develop the first draft of her next children’s book.

Ana Calzavara – Visual Artist – Brazil

How can a medium like painting be meaningful in our technological world? Which are the possible interconnections that have arisen among the very different processes of building images today? In our times of late Capitalism, efficiency, planning, progress, and control are some of the valued key words. Ana is interested in the opposite, exploring ideas such as unpredictability, failure, fragmentation, and deceleration. She plans to develop a series of monotypes and gouache paintings on paper exploring these qualities that will be exhibited in September 2022 in Brazil.

Angela Ellsworth – Multidisciplinary Artist and Professor in the School of Art, Arizona State University, co-founder and acting director of the Museum of Walking – United States

Angela Ellsworth expands her creative research in the Plural Wife Project, from the invisibility of women within religious institutions (specifically Mormonism) to the invisibility of female artists and spiritualists of the 19th century. Inspired by artists Agnes Pelton, Hilma af Klint, and Emma Kunz, her new work consists of sculptures, paintings, and drawings based on occult practices, sacred geometries, and "magical" instruments for perceiving the world in a new way.

Alice Miceli – Visual Artist – Brazil

Alice Miceli's focus is on a new line of research that looks at questions of landscape representation from within the Amazon Jungle, both virtually untouched green areas as well as devastated and burned areas.

Gary Petersen – Visual Artist – United States

For several years now, Gary Petersen has been working with an idiosyncratic hard edge geometric vocabulary that embraces an over-the-top exuberance of color and shape. During his residency, he plans to expand upon his vocabulary of forms. He will be working on paper, using colored pencils, ink pens, and graphite pencils. While at Bogliasco, Petersen wishes to explore the art and architecture of Genoa, particularly the Byzantine and Islamic influence, as a possible source material for his work.

Chin Chih Yang – Visual artist – Taiwan/United States

Chin Chih Yang transforms excess waste into drastically new forms, creating not only installations with distinct textures but also wearable pieces utilized for other projects. “Rejuvenate x Illuminate” is crucial at this time as the world is suffering from multiple crises; in this pivotal moment, we must take time to pause and reflect more about our relationship with nature. The goal is to encourage people from all walks of life to come together and collaborate in peace, love, and understanding.