Fellows

Ann Carlson – Independent Artist and Adjunct Professor at UCLA, Dept of World Arts, Culture and Dance – United States

Project in collaboration with Mary Ellen Strom

Ann Carlson is an interdisciplinary artist whose work involves solo performances, large-scale site-specific projects, ensemble-stage-based dances, and performance video. Her awards include a Creative Capital Award, a Doris Duke Award for Performing Artists, two American Masters awards, a USA Artist Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, and a Fellowship from the Foundation for Contemporary Art. She also has had numerous awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and was the first recipient of the CalArts/Alpert Award in dance.

SINK OR SING is a series of public performances sited at locations vulnerable to coastal flooding, The central strategy features a local choir, perched on a platform on a body of water, performing a movement/vocal work while slowly sinking beneath the surface then re-emerging transformed. SINK OR SING seeks to embrace, reflect, and bear witness to the process of a communities’ coming to grips with the challenges and hopes of living on our ever-changing earth.

Louis Cherry – Architect and Principal at Louis Cherry Architecture – United States

Project in collaboration with Marsha Gordon

Louis Cherry is an architect, artist, filmmaker, and musician. He is a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects and recipient of many art and architecture awards. Louis co-directed three award-winning short documentaries, Nesting (2020), All the Possibilities… (2019), and Ren-dered Small (2017). Louis leads the architecture firm Louis Cherry Architecture in Raleigh, NC, designing residential and diverse community-based environments.

This Beautiful Vision, The Artistry of Alexander Bogardy will be a non-narrative short documentary film celebrating the unique style and colorful life of Hungarian-born outsider artist Alexander Bogardy. The visual elements of This Beautiful Vision will be drawn entirely from Bogardy’s paintings (produced from the mid 1950s thorough the mid 1980s) and notebooks, and the audio will derive from archival recordings in which he discusses his passions and creative work.

Marsha Gordon – Professor of Film Studies at North Carolina State University – United States

Project in collaboration with Louis Cherry

Marsha Gordon is a Professor of Film Studies at North Carolina State University, a past Fellow at the National Humanities Center, and a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar. She is the author of numerous books and articles, and co-director of three award-winning short documentaries, Nesting (2020), All the Possibilities… (2019), and Rendered Small (2017). Her latest book is Becoming the Ex-Wife: The Unconventional Life & Forgotten Writings of Ursula Parrott (2023).

This Beautiful Vision, The Artistry of Alexander Bogardy will be a non-narrative short documentary film celebrating the unique style and colorful life of Hungarian-born outsider artist Alexander Bogardy. The visual elements of This Beautiful Vision will be drawn entirely from Bogardy’s paintings (produced from the mid 1950s thorough the mid 1980s) and notebooks, and the audio will derive from archival recordings in which he discusses his passions and creative work.

Stephanie Malia Hom (History) – Writer and Associate Professor of Transnational Italian Studies at the University of California – United States

Stephanie Malia Hom is an Associate Professor of Transnational Italian Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She writes and lectures on modern Italy and the Mediterranean, mobility studies, colonialism and imperialism, migration and detention, and tourism history and practice. She is the author of Empire's Mobius Strip: Historical Echoes in Italy's Crisis of Migration and Detention (2019) and The Beautiful Country: Tourism and the Impossible State of Destination Italy (2015).

Stephanie Malia Hom will be working on a book project tracing the unexplored relationship between slavery and colonialism in Italy. Focusing on Genoa, it investigates large-scale operations of slave ransom and redemption across the Mediterranean, and asks how this control over movement served as a precedent for the civilizing mission of Italy’s imperialist enterprise. It explores how operations of salvation—rescuing slaves, civilizing natives—connect slavery and colonialism vis-à-vis mobility.

Hila Amit – Writer and Hebrew Director at the International Hebrew school, Berlin – Israel/Germany

Hila Amit’s work appeared in Emrys Journal, The Washington Square Review, The Sycamore Review, Granta, and elsewhere. Her short stories collection, Moving on From Bliss (2016), was awarded the Israeli Ministry of Culture Prize for a debut. Her non-fiction book, A Queer Way Out (Albany: SUNY, 2018), was awarded the 2019 AMEWS Book Award. Her novel The Town Below was published in Hebrew in September 2022. She has received fellowships from MacDowell and the Vermont Studio Center, as well as another residency at the Ragdale Foundation.

Hila Amit will be working on a collection of short stories entrenched within a realm where her homeland, Israel, and her mother tongue, Hebrew, have vanished from existence. Within this dystopian backdrop, Amit navigates themes of migration, estrangement, relationships, mental health, and queer kinship. Amit meticulously situates her protagonists across diverse locations and times, enabling them to reflect on their Israeli heritage while forging new paths toward their future.

Susan Choi – Novelist and Professor of The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University – United States – Arthur F. and Alice E. Adams Charitable Foundation Bogliasco Special Fellow in Literature

Susan Choi is the author of five novels, including Trust Exercise, which received the 2019 National Book Award for Fiction. She has also been the recipient of the Asian-American Literary Award for fiction, the PEN/W.G. Sebald Award, a Lamba Literary award, the 2021 Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. She serves as a trustee of PEN America.

Susan Choi's project will explore the life and legacy of her paternal grandfather, Ch’oe Chaeso, a Korean public intellectual of the 1930s and 40s. His prominence coincided with the period of Japanese colonial oppression of Korea, and his downfall, when Japanese dominion came to an end, left him a cultural pariah. Yet he has remained visible in Korea’s 20th century intellectual history, not despite but because of his reputation as a collaborator.

Martin Wistinghausen – Composer and singer – Germany

Martin Wistinghausen studied singing, German literature, and composing in Cologne, Mannheim, Düsseldorf, and Salzburg. He has been awarded many prizes and scholarships as both a singer and composer. He is an experienced performer in the field of Lied and Contemporary music. His compositions have been heard in many festivals and broadcasts in Europe (SWR, Deutschlandradio Kultur, Espace 2) and have been performed by noted ensembles, such as Chorwerk Ruhr and Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart.

Martin Wistinghausen will compose a new Haiku cycle for his bass voice and shruti box (a typeof Indian hand organ). Lyrical passages in various languages and from different cultures and eras will serve as a textual basis. Furthermore, he would like to start work on two new pieces scheduled to be premiered in early 2025: a piece for mixed choir a cappella, and a short "Lied" cycle based on texts by Else Lasker-Schüler (1869-1945).

Molly Rice – Playwright and musician – United States

Molly Rice is a playwright/musician who creates big, aspirational community collaborations and small, strange musicals. Her works include The Birth of Paper, a transcontinental theater work connecting Pittsburgh, PA and Beirut, Lebanon; Khuraki, a theatrical/ culinary experience created with Afghan refugees; Angelmakers: Songs for Female Serial Killers, a true-crime musical; and The Saints Tour, a site-specific enchantment. She is the Founder/Co-Artistic Director of RealTime Arts and has a MFA from Brown University.

Molly Rice will be researching and ideating There is a blue that only children see, a theatrical/musical work informed by collaboration with Ukrainian art therapists and the children they are serving. At Bogliasco, Rice will study Ukrainian history, imagery of blue birds in folklore across global cultures and eras, and Mauriece Maeterlinck’s symbolist classic The Blue Bird, alongside the children’s artwork, in an examination of happiness and hope–and the elusiveness of both.

Meera George – Visual Artist – India – Helen Frankenthaler Bogliasco Special Fellow in Visual Arts

Born in Chennai, India, Meera George widely exhibits and performs internationally. Strongly autobiographical, Meera’s performances are also sensitive to cultural and feminist issues. Her mixed media works, however, comment on the impermanence of existence and the looming climate challenge. She is the recipient of nine international grants and residencies, including Fukuoka Asian Art Museum Japan, La Napoule Art Foundation France, and Fremantle Arts Centre Australia. Meera currently lives and works in Pune, India.

During her time at the Bogliasco, Meera George will carry out research in the areas of marine biology and conservation related to the coast of Genoa, working closely with the Genoa Marine Centre. Through her mixed media and digital art works, Meera will be investigating the cellular structures of endangered plant & coral species of the Mediterranean. Her works hope to build a bridge between science, conservation, ecology, and art in order to draw attention to the state of our seas today.

Mary Ellen Strom – Artist and Professor of Media Arts at Tufts University, Boston – United States

Project in collaboration with Ann Carlson

Mary Ellen Strom is a U.S.-based artist known for temporary public artworks and video/performance installations. Born in Butte, Montana, a hard rock mining town in the Rocky Mountain West, her research-based artwork is influenced by the culture and environment of this complex region. Strom’s artworks about place study the impacts of settler colonialism, extraction, and human-induced climate change. Projects are researched and produced in collaboration with Indigenous scholars, scientists, historians, environmentalists, and policymakers and have been exhibited on farms, cattle ranches, public pools, rivers, trains, grain terminals, and horse arenas in galleries and museums. She co-founded the public art organization Mountain Time Arts in Southwestern, MT, and is a Professor of Media Arts at Tufts University, Boston.

SINK OR SING is a series of public performances sited at locations vulnerable to coastal flooding, The central strategy features a local choir, perched on a platform on a body of water, performing a movement/vocal work while slowly sinking beneath the surface then re-emerging transformed. SINK OR SING seeks to embrace, reflect, and bear witness to the process of a communities’ coming to grips with the challenges and hopes of living on our ever-changing earth.