Fellows in Residence

Architecture

Jennifer Newsom

Architect, Artist, and Professor of Architecture, Cornell University — United States

Jennifer Newsom is an architect, artist, and educator living and working in Ithaca, New York. Jennifer's installations examine how mechanisms of perception are inflected by memory, myth, and the architectural situation. She considers her built constructions in the context of social constructs, where bodies, images, and environments form loci of shifting meaning, often utilizing her work to mine the perceptual uncertainties at the boundary of what is actual and what is imagined. Her installations’ emphasis on ways of seeing and the agency of movement highlight the influence of those who encounter it; Jennifer considers her work a platform for visceral experience and chance.

At Bogliasco, Jennifer will cultivate a solo body of work — small-scale models, drawings, and texts — that bring the themes of her larger installations to more intimate registers. She will also continue work on a forthcoming publication reflecting on her practice and life. Combining essays, photography, drawing, and dialogic interludes to investigate themes of perception, representation, and embodiment, the project is an exploratory vehicle fusing many years of writing and making.

Classics

Danielle van Mal-Maeder

Researcher and Professor of Latin Language and Literature, University of Lausanne — Switzerland — Fondation Biaggi de Blasys Fellow

Danielle van Mal-Maeder is Professor of Latin Language and Literature at the University of Lausanne. She has worked at the University of Groningen and benefited from residences at the Swiss Institute in Rome and the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa. Her research focuses on the ancient novel and rhetoric. Director of a research center on ancient declamation, she collaborates on various international projects. From 2020 to 2026, she was subsequently Vice-Dean and Dean of the Faculty of Arts in Lausanne.

Her current research focuses on the Declamationes Minores, a collection of rhetorical exercises written in the 1st or 2nd century AD by a rhetor traditionally identified with the great Quintilian. This collection contains 145 declamations in Latin that have never been translated into French. The density and difficulty of this corpus also necessitate a commentary. This work is conducted in close collaboration with colleagues in France, Italy and Switzerland.

Dance

Hilary Brown-Istrefi

Choreographer, Performer, and Teaching Artist — Canada/United States

Hilary Brown-Istrefi is a Canadian-American choreographer, performer, and teaching artist based in Rockaway Beach, NY. Along with her twin sister Briana Brown-Tipley, she is the co-founder and director of Same As Sister (S.A.S.), an award-winning bi-national performance collective celebrating 13 years of collaborative and interdisciplinary storytelling. Their performance and film commissions have been presented and screened internationally in the US, Canada, Greece, Italy, and France.

Revealing the poignant intersections between twinship, blackness, mental illness, and art-making, Upstairs, In Our Bedroom is a multimedia dance performance that radically reimagines Same As Sister’s joint autobiography alongside that of the Barbadian-British outsider artists June-Alison and Jennifer Gibbons (‘The Silent Twins’). During her residency, Hilary will research how different means of reenactment can be devised to perform this complex entanglement of identities.

Upcoming Fellows

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Dance

Kathy Westwater

Choreographer — United States

Kathy Westwater has created experimental dances in NYC since 1996. Her most recent work, described by The New York Times as “revelatory,” premiered at Chocolate Factory Theater in 2023. In 2022 she premiered her first gallery exhibition, emerging from a durational inquiry of Fresh Kills Landfill, once the largest landfill in the world, at the Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art. Kathy is a recipient of the Solange MacArthur Award for New Choreography, the first woman to receive the prize. She lives in the Bronx with her husband and frequent artistic collaborator, architect Seung Jae Lee.

Kathy's “but this stupendous fragmentariness heightened” extends a 25+ year exploration of pain and the body. Taking inspiration from the writings of cultural theorist Byung-Chul Han, the project explores Han’s concept that without pain or disaster there could not be beauty. Premiering in February 2027 at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club in NYC, the work features music by Natasha Barrett, set by Seung Jae Lee, costumes by Claire Fleury/Curious Orange, and lighting by Roderick Murray. Kathy is joined by celebrated dancers Chia-Ying Kao, Paul Singh, and Christopher Williams.

Humanities Scholarship

Solange Ashby

Author and Assistant Professor of Egyptology and Nubian Studies, UCLA — United States

Solange Ashby is an Assistant Professor in the department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at UCLA where she teaches Egyptology and Nubian Studies. Expertise in ancient languages, including Egyptian hieroglyphs, Ethiopic, Biblical Hebrew and Greek, underpins her research into religious transformation in Northeast Africa. Two books include, Calling Out to Isis: The Enduring Nubian Presence at Philae (2020) and a co-edited volume, New Perspectives on Ancient Nubia (2024). She is currently working on a monograph about Nubian women as queens and priestesses in antiquity.

Women of the Sacred South: Female Power in Nubia and Egypt Nile Valley religion emerges out of the Sacred South with the prominent Egyptian goddess, Hathor, said to have traveled from Nubia to Egypt. Consequently, Nubian women are often associated with the goddess Hathor, Lady of music, dance, and childbirth. My book project employs an ancient myth as a framework to tell the story of five women of ancient Nubia whose lives spanned 2500 years. Chapter two focuses on a royal Kushite woman (Shepenwepet II) who served in the powerful temple role as God’s Wife of Amun during Egypt’s Twenty-Fifth dynasty (747-656 BCE).

Humanities Scholarship

Ramzi Fawaz

Author, Podcast Host, and Professor of English, University of Wisconsin, Madison — United States

Ramzi Fawaz is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and host of the podcast "Nerd from the Future". He is the author of two books, including The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics (2016) and Queer Forms (2022), both published by NYU Press. Fawaz is also contributing editor to Film Quarterly, where he authors the column “Imagination Unbound.”

At Bogliasco, Ramzi will work on his new book, Coexisting: Psychedelic Pathways to Embracing a Diverse World, where he argues that humanities education should be understood as a form of collective psychedelic therapy, which uses art, literature, and popular media instead of psychoactive drugs to induce positive psychological transformations in millions of college-age youth. He shows how recent US popular culture has formally modeled this therapeutic potential of the arts by drawing on hallucinatory visual and narrative techniques that productively expand the critical imagination of their viewers toward accounting for other perspectives. Consequently, Ramzi encourages readers to take seriously the humanistic consequences of psychedelic experience, including its potential to dramatically reframe how we understand and value human diversity.