Fellows in Residence

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.'

Upcoming Fellows

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Dance

Eva Chou

Professor in the Department of English, CUNY Baruch College — United States

Eva Chou has written on the great eighth-century poet Tu Fu (Cambridge University Press) and the seminal twentieth-century writer Lu Xun (Association for Asian Studies Publications). Now researching ballet in China, she has published many articles on the subject and frequently reviews dance performances. Her work has been supported by the Center for Ballet and the Arts at New York University, Library of Congress, Japan Foundation, H.F. Guggenheim Foundation, NEH, ACLS, and Radcliffe Institute; she has held visiting positions at University of Cambridge and Charles University, Prague.

While in residence Eva will be working on a history of the project to create ballets that are Chinese, a project that developed in parallel to, and sometimes in rivalry with, the classical ballet repertory received from Soviet advisors. Its most long-lived works are Our Red Army Girls and White-Haired Girl from the 1960s while recent notable works were premiered in 2022 for the Communist Party’s 100th anniversary. Their development is used to show how creative works negotiated the state’s cultural policies; their dance analyses reveal the compromises and solutions that, taken together, make for a complex record that will be continuing.

Dance

Kristopher Estes-Brown

Choreographer, Composer, and Theater Director — United States

Kristopher Estes-Brown is an American multidisciplinary artist who has worked as a choreographer, composer, and theater director. His choreography has been described as athletic and expressive with unique musicality, and eye-catching theatricality. Estes-Brown has created over 90 contemporary dance works as well as 8 full-length ballets. Estes-Brown’s music melds a big cinematic sound with dance theater sensibilities. His music has been featured in dance, theater, short films and digital media.

While in residency at Bogliasco, Kristopher Estes-Brown will be choreographing and composing When It Leaves. This work explores early life traumas and their physical manifestations throughout different stages of development. In 2026, When It Leaves will be produced into a dance theater production.

Film/Video

Henry Hills

Experimental Filmmaker — United States

HENRY HILLS has been making short, intensely rhythmic experimental films since 1975. A longtime resident of New York's East Village, he has maintained working relationships with the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poets, composer John Zorn, & choreographer Sally Silvers. From 2005-2018 he was Professor at FAMU, the Czech national film academy in Prague, and he currently lives in Vienna. He received a 2009 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship & has films in the permanent collection of Museum of Modern Art.

Hills will be both editing & shooting material for a short film using water imagery. While the frame will be filled with lovely abstract patterns, the focus of the progression will be on the periphery (eg., water from the Vaporetto in Venice with wooden foundation beams and reflections of the palazzos hovering in the corners, or from the East River water taxis with the Wall Street skyline creeping into the background). The film is about the transitory nature of earthly joy. Hills wants to be optimistic.