Recent Fellows

Felecia Davis – Associate Professor, the Stuckeman Center for Design and Computation at Pennsylvania State University – USA

Felecia Davis’ work in computational textiles questions how we live and re-imagines how we might use textiles in our daily lives and in architecture. Davis is an Associate Professor at Pennsylvania State University and is the director of SOFTLAB@PSU. Her design work in architecture connecting art, science, and engineering was featured by PBS in the Women in Science Profiles series and received the 2022 National Design Award from the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Museum for Digital Design.

Tuning In is an artistic textile and drawing work that captures and uses electromagnetic waves to act as antennas to speak to the enmeshing of the physical and cyber that shape spaces today. The work will focus on using natural and biodegradable yarns in combination with metal yarns to make antennas and antenna sample fabrics and drawings. The sample fabrics and drawings will be shown as part of the Made in PA exhibition that will open at the Palmer Museum at Penn State University in 2024.

Joseph Heathcott – Professor of Urban Studies and Design at The New School in New York – United States

Joseph Heathcott is Professor and Chair of Urban and Environmental Studies at The New School, where he teaches in Parsons School of Design and the School for Public Engagement. His work has appeared in a wide range of venues, from scholarly books and articles to exhibits and juried art shows. He has held visiting positions at the London School of Economics, Princeton School of Architecture, Sciences Po, and the CUNY Graduate Center.

Joseph Heathcott will be working on a book tentatively titled Worlding Heritage: Historic Urban Landscapes and the Conservation Imaginary. The book examines the ideological and political contours of heritage conservation through a series of case studies. At the root of this project are fundamental questions about the nature of heritage, the meanings that we make of our legated buildings and landscapes, and what versions of the past we will save in order to project them into the future.

Sigal Bergman – Choreographer, dancer, and Alexander Technique teacher – United States/Israel

Sigal Bergman is a choreographer, dancer, and Alexander Technique teacher based in Tel Aviv, Israel. She was educated in Israel, Holland, and NYC in various physical and psychophysical techniques, including Release Technique, Contact Improvisation, Tai Ji (Yang), Yoga (Iyengar), and Alexander Technique. Her recent choreographic work includes Revert to Manual #2 (2022), Red Bitter (2020), Revert to Manual (2018), and Pale Fire (2016), all works that mix speech and movement. Her choreographies were supported by multiple grants from Mifal HaPais, the Israeli Council for Culture and Arts, the Rabinowitz Foundation for the Arts, and by many residencies.

For an upcoming dance trio to be performed in 2024, Sigal Bergman will be creating movement sequences that reflect on transforming chaos into strength. Drawing from images of political upheaval and violence as well as Renaissance paintings depicting physical struggle and torment, she is studying the ways in which forceful energy can be turned into feminine power, personal order, and beauty.

Moriah Evans – Choreographer – United States

Moriah Evans positions choreography as a speculative and social process. Recent works include Remains Persist (Performance Space New York,’22), REPOSE (Beach Sessions,‘21), Be My Muse (Pace Live,‘21), Configure (The Kitchen,‘18), and Figuring (SculptureCenter,‘18). She was Editor-in-Chief of Movement Research Performance Journal (‘13-’20), Tanzkongress Curatorial Advisor (‘17-’19), and Dance & Process Curator (The Kitchen, ‘16-’23). She is a ‘22 Guggenheim Fellow and ‘23-’24 Hodder Fellow at Princeton University.

[____procession____] proposes that hyper-personal drives can become codified movement processes, “queering” the formal qualities of choreography so that it’s no longer a system of significatory coordinates, but rather a system of undoing. Interweaving the communicative power of a body and the political power of movement, [____procession____] ruptures the social rubrics that reduce a person to what they appear to be, revealing a more vital question: what can we be together?

Daria Faïn – Choreographer, co-director of the Prosodic Body – France/United States

Daria Faïn is a New York choreographer and director originally from the Mediterranean. Her work fuses her European cultural background with three decades of practice in Asian philosophies of the body, American dance training, and theater. Faïn has developed a unique movement and performance approach from this diverse background. She studied the classical Indian dance form Bharatha Natyam for five years in Paris with Amala Devi and in Madras, India, with Swarnamuckie (State dancer of Tamil Nadu, 1982). In India, she also studied the co-relationship between this classical form of dance and temple architecture.

While in residence, Daria intends to complete assembling a book. During the pandemic, she created a major multi-media collaborative project called patch the sky with four colored stones, which propelled a necessity to write and was the book’s inception. The book format serves as a perfect container to gather the multi-facets of her work. It includes essays on the bodymind experience, applying Taoist and Buddhist practices at the service of her creative process, choreographic scores, journal entries, photographs, drawings, and correspondence.

Sandra Parker – Choreographer and interdisciplinary artist – Australia

Sandra Parker is a choreographer and interdisciplinary artist based in Melbourne, Australia. Recent work includes the development of a new project, Safehold, through the inaugural The Australian Ballet residency, and Yield to Resistance (a 4-hour performance installation), the result of a 2019 residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris. Sandra has presented her work across Australia, Asia, Europe, and the US.

At Bogliasco, Sandra Parker plans to develop a new work, SAFEHOLD, an ensemble full-length dance and sound work investigating notions of safety, control, trust, and co-dependence. The project will examine what we deem is 'safe' for all on a human, bodily level. The residency will focus on choreographic composition in conjunction with the development of sound material.

József Trefeli – Choreographer – Switzerland – Fondation Gianni Biaggi De Blasys Special Fellow

József Trefeli is an Australian born of Hungarian origins and naturalized Swiss in 2017. József graduated from the University of Melbourne VCA with a BA in Dance in 1992. After working with many Australian choreographers, József embarked on a journey to explore dance around the world before settling in Switzerland, where he has since been based. József has achieved critical acclaim and multiple awards for his many and varied dance performances and numerous choreographic works that have toured the globe.

József Trefeli will be researching film methods to reveal layers of intimacy and fragility of the dancing body.  Contemporary dance for film allows us to enter the sphere of personal space and obtain an intimate proximity to the expressive body. The moving/dancing camera provides specific points of view unavailable in live performance. This research will allow him to develop new practices to put towards stage and screen work and also provide a Bogliascan inspiration for the storyboard of his next dance film. 

Netta Yerushalmy – Choreographer and Guest Faculty at NYU – Israel/United States – Van Cleef & Arpels Bogliasco Special Fellow in Dance, Bogliasco and Baryshnikov Arts Joint Fellow

Netta Yerushalmy’s research-based dance-making is propelled by a passion for, and trust in, the body as a site of ineluctable knowledge - aesthetic, visceral, emotional, and political. She’s been recognized with numerous prestigious honors such as a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Princeton Arts Fellowship, an award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. She grew up in Galilee, Israel, and received her BFA in Dance from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, where she is currently on faculty.

At Bogliasco, Netta Yerushalmy will be conducting research for her part Mid Life (working title), a live multi-art-form installation, straight from the hearts, minds, and bodies of a collective of creative women in their midlife. Created and performed by Alla Kovgan, Paula Matthusen, Katherine Profeta, Tuçe Yasak, and Netta Yerushalmy, the project takes female middle-age/ing, entangled with art making, as its fleshy nexus point.

Abigail Child – Filmmaker, poet, writer, and Professor Emerita, SMFA at Tufts University – United States

Abigail Child has been at the forefront of experimental writing and media since the 1980s, having completed over 50 film/video works and written six books. An acknowledged pioneer in montage, Child addresses the interplay between sound and image to create, in the words of LA Weekly, “…a political filmmaking that’s attentive to form.” Winner of a Rome Prize, Radcliffe, Guggenheim & Fulbright Fellowships, and a participant in two Whitney Biennials (89/97), Child has had numerous retrospectives worldwide.

Child will be completing UNREALISM: Cinema & Poetics in the Digital Age focusing on a set of issues crucial to art-making in the 21st century: modernist forms of montage, appropriation, sampling & how they are transformed within the aesthetics & politics of a post-internet era. The essays explore contemporary cinema from the viewpoint of a practicing filmmaker/poet whose first-hand observations & critical analyses span over two decades of transformations in materials, spectatorship & distribution.

Eric Dyer – Artist and filmmaker, Professor of Animation & Interactive Media, University of Maryland Baltimore County – United States

Eric Dyer is a leading practitioner in the animated arts avant-garde. He has been honored as a Fulbright Fellow, Sundance New Frontier Artist, Creative Capital Grantee, and Guggenheim Fellow. Exhibition venues include the National Gallery of Art (Washington, DC), Ars Electronica (Austria), Tabakalera (Spain), ARoS Museum of Modern Art (Denmark), and the Cairo and Venice Biennales. Dyer’s TED talk has been viewed over 1.1 million times. He teaches animation at UMBC (USA).

Dyer plans to further develop his visual turntablism art practice in which he spins disks of animated sequences live. He will also experiment with creating new sequential images in the studio and in the field: including searching nearby towns for found-sequences in architecture and objects, photographing his discoveries, and capturing interesting subjects-in-motion on video.

Lucrecia Frassetto – Audiovisual maker and animator – Argentina

Lucrecia Frassetto is an audiovisual maker and animator. She studied Cinematography and New Media at the Patagonian University Institute of Arts and received a Master's in Creative Writing at Tres de Febrero University, Buenos Aires. She works in digital animation in documentaries, movies, series, stop motion, and show lighting. She has taught audiovisual language and photography workshops for teachers, teenagers, and children for the Kine Cultural and Educational Foundation, financed by AECID and BID. She is a member of the research groups Palimpsestos (UNTREF) coordinated by María Negroni, and Las raras, an Argentine poetry magazine from the 90s (UNTREF) coordinated by Jorge Monteleone.

Lucrecia Frassetto’s project is a documentary based on stories recounted by her grandfather Nino (92), an Italian immigrant who moved to Argentina in 1949. Settled in Río Negro, he would stay up at night drawing and thinking about mechanisms and future inventions, even as his “everyday self” dealt with daily reality. Lucrecia makes animations; her grandfather makes machines. How do reality and fiction help us cope with the migratory process? Without stories, who are we? What part remains, and what part disappears?

Alexandra Halkin – Documentary filmmaker, producer, film distributor, and Director of Americas Media Initiative – United States

In 1998, Alexandra Halkin founded the Chiapas Media Project, an award-winning bi-national organization that trained over 200 indigenous men and women in video production in Southern Mexico. In 2004, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship and in 2007 was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship. In 2010, she founded the non-profit Americas Media Initiative which works with Cuban filmmakers living in Cuba. In 2021, she co-founded the Center for the Preservation of Community Audiovisual Archives in Chiapas, Mexico.

Alexandra Halkin is developing a feature documentary. The majority of the film will be crafted from the 1400 video tapes in the Center for Community Audiovisual Archives (CEPAAC) in Chiapas, Mexico. CEPAAC holds dozens of videos made by the Zapatista indigenous communities beginning in 1998. The film will contrast the archival footage against the infiltration of corporate social media in remote Zapatista territory, asking the crucial question: can the Zapatistas' political and cultural vision survive?

Liu Hsiao-Hui – Artist and curator – Taiwan

Liu Hsiao-Hui was born in Taipei, Taiwan, and graduated from the Department of Mass Communication at Chinese Culture University. After graduating, she moved to Hualien and established an art studio where she taught art for twenty years. She has also been engaged in photography and the art of landscape film. Liu has been working as a PR and curator in Good Underground Art Space since 2020.

Liu Hsiao-Hui will be collecting experiences from fellow artists in different fields, conducting interviews with people in Bogliasco, and recording the sound of the environment. She plans to invite artists and locals to participate in two workshops, which will eventually produce a video artwork that she will screen at the Study Center.

An van. Dienderen – Filmmaker – Belgium

An van. Dienderen is a filmmaker who graduated in audiovisual arts (Sint-Lukas, Brussels), obtained a Ph.D. in Comparative Cultural Sciences (Ghent University), and was a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley. She made several documentaries screened worldwide, which were awarded with (inter)national prizes. She publishes and lectures internationally on documentary, film, and visual/performative anthropology. She is affiliated as a tenured professor and senior researcher at KASK & CONSERVATORIUM School of Arts Ghent.

An van. Dienderen will work on the documentary KOPIRAET, following the trail to Vanuatu of Lengnangulong, a stone ‘collected’ in Vanuatu and now exhibited in the Louvre. Together with anthropologist Hugo DeBlock, who is adopted by Chief Johnson, they ask for the help of Hugo’s inner circle in Vanuatu. KOPIRAET explores the meaning of ownership and copyright, in the challenging context of its asymmetrical relationships. How do images by Western filmmakers cycle back to the source community?

Robert Clines (History) – Associate Professor of History and International Studies at Western Carolina University – United States

Robert Clines (he/him) is an Associate Professor of History at Western Carolina University. His first book, A Jewish Jesuit in the Eastern Mediterranean, was published in 2019. His essays and public pieces have appeared in postmedieval, Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome, and The Washington Post. He has received research support from the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, The American Academy in Rome, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the US-Italy Fulbright Commission.

Robert Clines will be working on a book that explores how racecraft informed Italian humanists’ relationship with the textual and physical remains of antiquity, and how Italian Renaissance humanism never was a respite from racial difference, contestation, and conflict. Instead, humanism is defined through race. Further, this book will give us a richer view of the historicity of race in Europe as well as the ties between the classical tradition and European nationalism and imperialism.

Emily Allegra Dreyfus (Visual Arts-Scholarship) – Cultural historian of Cinema and Media and Postdoctoral Researcher at the Film University Babelsberg – United States/United Kingdom/Germany

Emily Allegra Dreyfus is a cultural historian of Cinema and Media and a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Film University Babelsberg. Her 2020 PhD (University of Chicago) considered the political and aesthetic dimensions of music in Nazi-era cinema. Integrating analytical approaches from Film, Literary Studies and Musicology, her work addresses the aesthetics of feeling in visual culture, the unfolding of music and images in time, and the cultural and historical contingencies of emotional self-understanding. Beyond academia, Emily is an active freelance musician.

Emily Dreyfus will be preparing a book manuscript entitled Dissonance in the Dark: Music in Nazi Cinema. The monograph explores the complex interplay of sound, image, and ideology in the largely forgotten field of German mass culture from 1933-1945. It argues that the obsessive return to musical subjects and the question of sensitivity in mainstream cinema under Hitler defies binaries of propaganda vs. escapist entertainment, instead revealing deep internal conflicts in everyday Fascist society around gender, sexuality, class, and race.

Vanessa Northington Gamble (History)– Professor of Medical Humanities, Professor of Health Policy and American Studies, Professor of Medicine, The George Washington University – United States – Virginia Howard Fellow

Vanessa Northington Gamble is University Professor of Medical Humanities, Professor of Medicine, and Professor of Health Policy and American Studies at the George Washington University. She is internationally recognized as a pioneering and influential researcher on the history of race and racism in American medicine and public health. A physician, scholar, and activist, her honors include membership in the National Academy of Medicine and on the National Council on the Humanities.

Vanessa’s project is the biography Pioneering Health Equity: The Life and Medical Career of Dr. Virginia M. Alexander. Alexander (1899-1949) was an African-American physician-activist who crafted a career that combined medicine, research, and activism and emerged as a leading pioneer of racial justice and health equity. This book goes beyond chronicling the life of an individual black woman physician. It uses her biography to illuminate the impact of medical racism on the lives of African Americans.

Perri Klass – Professor of Journalism and Pediatrics at New York University – United States – Olivetta Fellowship

Perri Klass is Professor of Journalism and Pediatrics at New York University, where she directs the undergraduate minor in medical humanities. Her most recent book, The Best Medicine: How Science and Public Health Gave Children a Future is an account of how victories over infant and child mortality have changed the world. She writes about children’s issues, health, literacy, travel, and knitting, ranging from The New York Times and The Washington Post to the New England Journal of Medicine.

She will be working on a novel which explores aspects of the experience of women physicians in America at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century (that is, before the all-female medical schools disappeared), but which is set in Italian and Swiss beauty spots in a world of expatriate travelers, and also on a group of linked short stories with a contemporary setting.

David J. Levin (Literature-Scholarship) – Alice H. & Stanley G. Harris Jr. Distinguished Service Professor of Germanic Studies, Cinema & Media Studies, Theater & Performance Studies - University of Chicago – United States/Germany

David J. Levin is the Alice H. and Stanley G. Harris Distinguished Service Professor of Germanic Studies, Cinema and Media Studies, and Theater and Performance Studies at the University of Chicago. His work focuses on the aesthetics and politics of performance in opera, theater, and cinema. In addition to his scholarship and teaching, he has worked extensively as a dramaturg and collaborator for opera, theater, and dance productions in Germany and the United States.

David J. Levin is preparing a book that maps the contemporary landscape of opera production. He argues that opera production today is exiting a phase of Regieoper (or “director’s opera”), in which star directors reinterpret canonical operas by placing them in updated settings and adding subtextual elements that challenge the piece’s manifest political and social values. But what comes “after Regie” and how can we describe the conceptual and practical implications?

Christia Mercer (Philosophy) – Historian of Philosophy – United States

Christia Mercer is the Gustave M. Berne Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University, general editor of Oxford Philosophical Concepts, co-editor of Oxford New Histories of Philosophy, and director of Just Ideas, an educational program in a maximum security prison in Brooklyn, New York.

Christia Mercer will polish a manuscript on the understudied philosopher, Anne Conway (1631-1679) whose only work, Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophies, was published posthumously in 1690. The main goal of Anne Conway: The Philosophy of Radical Equality, is to reveal that Conway’s thought is metaphysically, theologically, and politically more radical than previously imagined.

Ernest Julius Mitchell (Literature-Scholarship) – Assistant Professor of English and Humanities at Yale University, United States– Natalie and Richard Jacoff Special Fellow in Literature Scholarship

Ernest Mitchell studies literature, philosophy, and religion — how they converge, shape one another, and fashion our sense of being modern. Methodological insights from black studies guide him in this research. His literary focus is the Harlem Renaissance, viewed expansively as integral to transatlantic modernism. Ernest’s philosophical writing centers on aesthetics and phenomenology, mainly on German thinkers from Kant to Benjamin. His interest in religion ranges from the ancient Mediterranean to the contemporary Caribbean.

Irina Podgorny (History) – Historian of science, permanent research fellow at CONICET – Argentina

Irina Podgorny of the Argentine Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas (CONICET) works on the history of natural history collections in Argentina and Europe, contributing to making visible the Latin American production of knowledge and its transnational entanglements with the wider world. In addition to her academic research, she collaborates with Argentine cultural weeklies and Latin American artists. Current work includes the History of Paleontology, historic extinctions and animal remedies.

Irina Pogorny is currently working on “The cultures of artificial history”, an exploration of the human configurations of what is perceived as the natural world. The book wants to confront the idea of pristine nature in places such as Oceania, South America, and the Mediterranean regions, including chapters on cacti and agaves in the Riviera; on singing mermaids in the Andes; on llamas, alpacas, and camels in Australia; on Eucalyptus in the Argentine Pampas; and reindeers on South Georgia.

Sally Shuttleworth (Literature-Scholarship)– Senior Research Fellow, Faculty of English, University of Oxford – United Kingdom

Professor Sally Shuttleworth is Senior Research Fellow at the University of Oxford and works on the inter-relations of medicine, science and culture. Her books include The Mind of the Child (2010) and Anxious Times (2019). She recently ran two large research projects, Diseases of Modern Life: Nineteenth-Century Perspectives (ERC) and Constructing Scientific Communities: Citizen Science in the 19th and 21st Centuries (AHRC). She is currently writing a book on travel for health.

English Health Colonies on the Riviera, 1860-1930 examines nineteenth-century cultures of health-seeking, and the creation of self-styled English ‘colonies’ in resorts on the French and Italian Rivieras. Drawing on personal letters and diaries, medical texts and literary works, it explores the intersecting medical and literary cultures of the resorts, and the lives of English invalids living in medical exile, from Robert Louis Stevenson and Aubrey Beardsley to Katherine Mansfield.

Lyndsey Stonebridge (Public Humanities) – Scholar, Professor of Humanities and Human Rights at the University of Birmingham – Ireland/United Kingdom

Lyndsey Stonebridge is a Professor of Humanities and Human Rights at the University of Birmingham and a Fellow of the British Academy. Her books include Placeless People: Writing, Rights, and Refugees;The Judicial Imagination: Writing after Nuremberg, and the essay collection Writing and Righting: Literature in the Age of Human Rights. We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience will be published in January 2024. A regular media commentator and broadcaster, she lives in London and France.

In How Shall I Be Old? Lyndsey Stonebridge experiments with philosophy and life-writing to inquire into the late lives of modern women. During her residency, she will be working on an opening chapter, featuring a debate that very nearly took place between Hannah Arendt and Simone de Beauvoir. Later in life, both women turned to Cicero’s Cato Maior de Senectute (Cato the Elder on Age) but drew strikingly different conclusions from the stoic’s affirmation of the wisdom of old age. The ambition is to find a literary form that can open up their quarrel, and its significance, to the present.


Carolyn White (Archaeology) – Professor of Anthropology at the University of Nevada, Reno – United States

Carolyn White is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Nevada, Reno, where she holds the Mamie Kleberg Chair in Historic Preservation. Her research and teaching focuses on the intersection of art and archaeology, the archaeology of ephemeral spaces, the materiality of individual lives, and active site archaeology. Her most recent books are The Archaeology of Burning Man (University of New Mexico Press) and Distant Voices: On Steven Seidenberg’s Architecture of Silence (Contrasto Press).

Artist Steven Seidenberg and archaeologist Carolyn White collaborate to image and interpret domestic spaces in occupied buildings, temporary encampments, and other liminal housing in contemporary Italy. Through fine art photography and archaeo/anthropological practices, they explore the ways through which migrants, disenfranchised Italians, and other marginalized populations carve stable homes from abandoned spaces, despite government policies increasingly hostile to their presence and needs.

Marilia Marchetti – Full Professor of French literature – Italy

Marilia Marchetti is a Full Professor of French Literature. Her scholarly activity includes studies on the 18th and 19th centuries, contemporary themes, the poetics and rhetoric of irony, and the Francophone world. She has collaborated with the Middle Eastern Studies Department of Duke University, among many others. She has served on the Arab World Commission on Franco-Arab Literature. In 2016, she was awarded the title of Officier des Palmes Académiques by the President of the French Republic François Hollande for her contribution to the dissemination of French culture in the world.

Marilia Marchetti intends to finish a graphic novel entitled Towns. Each chapter evokes a different city through the story of a person who inhabits it and who represents that city in Marilia's eyes. Each chapter is accompanied by one or more photos of a detail of the place. They are not photos one would expect but they rather show one or more unpublished details, which look like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. The whole novel has a cohesion that will become clear as the reading progresses.

Andy Chen – Poet and Assistant Director of Diversity, Equity, Inclusivity & Engagement at John Burroughs School – United States – John Burroughs Bogliasco Special Fellow

Andy Chen was born and raised in the pretty part of New Jersey. The recipient of a Kundiman fellowship and a Pushcart Prize, he holds an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis. His poems appear in Ploughshares, New England Review, The Offing, and elsewhere, and his reviews appear in Hong Kong Review of Books, Hyphen, and Colorado Review. He teaches at John Burroughs School in St. Louis.

Andy Chen will be working on a collection of poems exploring the intersection of identity and lived experience. The poems engage a range of concerns, including desire, family, masculinity, racism, and basketball. These concerns exist in the poems alongside an exploration of the Asian American experience and the mythologies that make up the wider American experience. The collection will include a series of poems in conversation with the Filial Exemplars, a Confucian text on filial piety.

Ainur Karim – Playwright, scriptwriter – Kazakhstan

Ainur Karim is a playwright and screenwriter born in Almaty, Kazakhstan. She studied law and has worked in the field of human rights, implementing projects on education and social services for socially vulnerable groups. Her plays revolve around the lives of Kazakhstan women, their undervalued work, and the clash between traditional culture and modern globalization. In 2022, Karim was an honorary fellow in writing at the Iowa International Writing Program (USA). The same year, Chins Up! Shoulders Back! was a finalist for the Pen America Women in Translation Reading Series 2022. Karim works as a screenwriter for YouTube and TV series, translator, and yoga teacher. She currently lives in Thailand.

During her residency, Ainur plans to work on the second part of her novel with a working title The Girl from Stan. In the first part, Who will bury you?, we meet her heroine, who is trying to substitute an unborn son for her parents. In the second part, the heroine finds herself in the big city of independent Kazakhstan during the oil boom of the 2000s, overcoming gender and origin stereotypes, struggling with her family’s expectations of her as a daughter, and maintaining her own personal boundaries.

Zachary Leader – Emeritus Professor of English Literature, University of Roehampton, London – United Kingdom/United States

Zachary Leader is an Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Roehampton in London and the author of a dozen books on English Romantic Poetry and contemporary fiction, including biographies of the English novelist Kingsley Amis and the American novelist Saul Bellow. He is currently at work on a book about Richard Ellmann and the making of his biography of James Joyce.

Elaine Vilar Madruga – Poet, playwright, and novelist – Cuba – Bogliasco and Ludwig Foundation Special Fellow

Elaine Vilar Madruga is a poet, playwright, and novelist considered one of today’s foremost literary voices in Cuba and the Caribbean. She also works as a creative writing instructor, editor, multidisciplinary artist, and literary coach. She has received over one hundred national and international prizes. She is the author of over fifty books, and her work has been published in the U.S., Canada, the Dominican Republic, Spain, Chile, France, Panama, Denmark, Brazil, and Mexico.

The Female Skin is a magical realism novel that revolves around the irrational nature of religious thoughts. The inhabitants of an aged town, hidden between mountains, see miracles in every corner. They have been waiting for decades for the advent of a Messiah. This is the only path they have found to feel purpose in a world that has left them behind. The birth of the awaited Messiah in the body of a girl will bring echoes of war in a town ruled by men who are not ready for a revolution of women.

Sigrid Nunez – Writer – United States

Sigrid Nunez has published eight novels, including A Feather on the Breath of God, The Friend, and, most recently, What Are You Going Through. Her new novel, The Vulnerables, will be published in November 2023. Nunez is also the author of Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag. The Friend, a New York Times bestseller, won the 2018 National Book Award and was a 2020 International Dublin Literary Award finalist. Her work has been translated into more than thirty languages.

Sigrid Nunez has two projects planned for her residency at Bogliasco. She will be working on several stories as she puts together what will be her first collection of short fiction. She also intends to begin work on a tenth novel.

Elena Penga – Writer/Playwright/Teacher, Advisor at the Graduate Program for Creative Writing Hellenic Open University – Greece – Van Cleef & Arpels Bogliasco Special Fellow in Poetry

Elena Penga is one of Greece’s most dynamic and most produced playwrights. She also writes fiction and directs for the stage. She received the Greek Academy of Letters award for her book Tight Belts and Other Skin. Her work is in Best European Fiction 2017. She has published three books of short fiction, one novel, and nine books of plays. Her work has been translated and published in English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Swedish, Dutch, and Bengali. She teaches at the Hellenic Open University.

Elena will work on her fifth book of prose, an epistolary novella, composed of fictional letters written by various characters to a fictional recipient. Each chapter will introduce a different character. A letter will be juxtaposed with a scene from the life of the sender or the recipient. The physicality that is missing from the written conversations will be explored in the scenes contrasting the letters. The book will unfold as drama, focusing on the significance of place, connection, and intimacy.  

Chris Price – Poet and essayist – United Kingdom/New Zealand

Chris Price is a poet and essayist from Aotearoa New Zealand whose work ranges across themes including music, science, and biography. She convenes the MA Workshop in Poetry and Creative Nonfiction at the International Institute of Modern Letters, Te Herenga Waka - Victoria University of Wellington. Her three poetry collections include Husk (Best First Book of Poetry, 2002 New Zealand Book Awards), The Blind Singer (2009), and Beside Herself (2016), a collection of riddling poems which plays with character, language, and the way they interrelate.

At Bogliasco Chris Price will be working on poems and prose towards her sixth book (working title Speed Freaks). This project includes micro-essays — or perhaps prose poems — on language and craft, as well as two persona-driven sonnet sequences: one traversing across the end of the world as we know it and the other improvising on the rise of AI. Chris will also finesse a final draft of The Lost Romantic, a biographical excursion in search of the 19th-century poet, anatomist and suicide Thomas Lovell Beddoes.

Maurice Riordan – Poet, translator, editor, and Emeritus Professor of Poetry – Ireland/United Kingdom

Maurice Riordan’s poetry collections from Faber are A Word from the Loki, Floods, The Holy Land, The Water Stealer and Shoulder Tap. He edited The Finest Music, a selection of early Irish poetry in translation. Other books include A Quark for Mister Mark: 101 Poems about Science and, with Jocelyn Bell Burnell, Dark Matter: Poems of Space. He taught at Imperial College and Goldsmiths College, and is Emeritus Professor at Sheffield Hallam. He lives in London and teaches for the Faber Academy.

Maurice Riordan will be working on Rope, a work in prose that is loosely modelled on Ben Jonson’s Timber. It intertwines miscellaneous strands of physics, philosophy, psychoanalysis, aesthetics, and other topics, with memoir. It is in the form of a triptych, and Riordan is currently at work on the ‘centre panel’, which is memoir.

Patricia Alessandrini – Composer, Sound Artist, and Assistant Professor of Composition at Stanford University – United States

Patricia Alessandrini is a composer and sound artist. Her interactive, intermedial compositions have been presented in the Americas, Asia, Australia, and over 15 European countries. She studied at the Conservatorio di Bologna, Conservatoire de Strasbourg and IRCAM, and holds PhDs from Princeton University and the Sonic Arts Research Centre (SARC). She teaches at Stanford University/CCRMA, and performs research on immersion, interaction, creative AI and instrument design for inclusive performance.

Patricia Alessandrini will be working on a theatrical, collaborative intermedial work for coloratura virtuoso Marisol Montalvo and Donatienne Michel-Dansac and ensemble, based on a libretto by novelist Alexandra Kleeman. Drawing on her previous physical computing experience, Patricia will create soft robotics systems with musical and visual interest for this duodrama. Marisol and Donatienne will contribute to its core feminist-futurist themes: an interplanetary dialogue between two women, informed by cyberfeminist theory.

Lembit Beecher – Composer and animator – United States

Estonian-American composer and animator Lembit Beecher writes “hauntingly lovely and deeply personal” music (San Francisco Chronicle) that stems from a fascination with the ways memories, histories, and stories permeate our contemporary lives. Recent premieres include Tell Me Again for cellist Karen Ouzounian and the Orlando Philharmonic, Sky on Swings, an opera tracing the relationship of two women diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, and string quartets for the Juilliard, Aizuri, and Lydian quartets.

Lembit Beecher will develop a series of pieces for cello and electronics for cellist Karen Ouzounian. Exploring multi-generational legacies of migration, the pieces will combine recorded interviews and a custom-built, surround-sound speaker array in which small speaker cones will be embedded into family heirlooms from Lembit and Karen’s families and placed throughout the audience.

Alec Hall – Composer – United States – Edward T. Cone Special Fellowship in Music

Born in Toronto in 1985, Alec Hall lives and works in New York City as an independent composer. His music is centered on the nature of acoustic materials in the post-Avant-Garde musical landscape. His work has been supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, the Fromm Foundation, Arts Council Norway, the New York State Council on the Arts, New Music USA, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and Das Land Steiermark. Alec holds a DMA from Columbia University and an MA from UC San Diego.

The Life to Come is a new opera based on the short story written by E.M. Forster in 1922. Described by the author as containing “a great deal of sorrow and passion that I have myself experienced,” it was unable to be published until after his death in 1970 because of its explicit themes. Writing for a sinfonietta-sized Talea Ensemble, the opera recasts Forster’s story as a tale about colonial violence, queerness, and the birth of love, in Forster’s words, “for good or evil.”

Wieland Hoban – Composer – United Kingdom/Germany– William Thomas McKinley Bogliasco Fellow

Wieland Hoban is both a composer and a translator working in the fields of art music, philosophy, and literature (translated authors include Adorno, Sloterdijk, and Celan). He studied composition at the Frankfurt Academy of Music and Performing Arts, and his music has been performed all over Europe. Throughout his career, he has also been involved in the musical discourse as an author, lecturer, and teacher, for example in his long-standing work at the Darmstadt International Summer Course.

Hoban will be working on the music theatre piece Riddley Walker, based on Russell Hoban’s 1980 post-apocalyptic novel of the same name, using the script of the author’s unpublished stage adaptation. A modernist aesthetic will be combined with a rugged, non-classical approach to vocal writing in conjunction with the use of non-classical instruments and objects, striving to do justice both to the brokenness of the depicted world and the idiosyncratic wordplay of the book’s unique dialect.

Amelia Huff – Multidisciplinary artist, thinker, and educator – United States – Aaron Copland Bogliasco Special Fellow in Music

Amelia Huff is a multidisciplinary artist, thinker, and educator with a goal of mastering sound to express, articulate, and codify knowledge, empowering others to express themselves more freely through sound.

Amelia Huff will work on her practical and expository music treatise, Overtone Intonation, which advances new forms of intonation theory and surrounding philosophy on pure intonation. Accompanying the written work, visual and auditory resources will be developed to support a multimedia music theory resource. With this project, Amelia will illuminate new depths of the harmonic series while simplifying pure intonation to equip curious artists with a pathway into microtonality.

Jeremy Thurlow – Composer – United Kingdom

Jeremy Thurlow is a composer. Henri Dutilleux described his music as ‘seductive, innovative, full of freshness.’ He was awarded the George Butterworth Prize (UK). Inspired by the natural world and by the sharp, sensitive gaze of Woolf, Bonnefoy, Keats, Burnside, Miró, he has worked with the Fitzwilliam and Kreutzer Quartets, Schubert Ensemble, Sequitur (New York), Norrbottens Kammarorkester, BBC Philharmonic and BBC Singers. He is a Fellow of Robinson College, University of Cambridge.

Jeremy will be working on a full-length opera, scored for seven solo voices, chorus, an ensemble of Western and Middle-Eastern instruments and electronics. Based on Dina Nayeri's thought-provoking book The Ungrateful Refugee , with a libretto by Poppy Burton-Morgan, it explores the dreams, hopes, and memories of five real-life individuals thrown together as they struggle to build a new future.

Walter Byongsok Chon – Dramaturg, critic, translator, educator, scholar, and Associate Professor of Dramaturgy at Ithaca College – South Korea/United States

Walter Byongsok Chon is a dramaturg, critic, translator, educator, and scholar from South Korea. He is an Associate Professor of Dramaturgy at Ithaca College in the US and is currently a Visiting Professor at the Korean National University of Arts. His work has been played at the Yale Repertory Theatre, Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center, and the New York Musical Festival. He is the co-author of Dramaturgy: The Basics (Routledge, 2023, with Anne M. Hamilton). He received the 2022 Daesan Foundation Translation Grant and received his D.F.A. from the Yale School of Drama.

This project in collaboration with Anne Hamilton is an English Theatrical Translation of Korean Plays by Myung-Wha Kim - Walter Byongsok Chon will translate four plays (THE WIND’S DESIRE, THE BIRDS DON’T CROSS THE CROSSWALK, OEDIPUS: THE FATE OF THE STORY, and THE SOUND OF THE MOON). Anne Hamilton is the English translation consultant. The English translations of Ms. Kim's plays across several genres explore Korean history, culture, and sentiments, enhancing intercultural theatrical exchange.

David Cote – Librettist, playwright, and theater critic – United States

David Cote is a librettist, playwright, and theater critic based in New York City. His current projects include an opera with Scott Davenport Richards about the life and activism of Paul Robeson; a chamber opera with Laura Kaminsky about music therapy and memory; and a one-act with Stefan Weisman for mezzo-soprano Hai-Ting Chinn about Greenland’s melting ice sheet. Previous work includes Blind Injustice (Cincinnati Opera), Three Way (Nashville Opera, BAM) and The Scarlet Ibis (Prototype).

David will revise the libretto of a multimedia opera, Meltdown, in which a glaciologist’s lecture on ice loss morphs into a personal and scientific experience of grief and resolve. The work will be composed by Stefan Weisman for mezzo-soprano Hai-Ting Chinn. He will also begin a new period drama about the 150-year popularity of a bowdlerized “happy ending” King Lear, and a heroic London actress who fights to restore the original.

Steph Del Rosso – Playwright, fiction writer, screenwriter, and educator – United States

Steph Del Rosso is a playwright, fiction writer, screenwriter, and educator. Her work has been produced or developed at Second Stage Theater, The Public, La Jolla Playhouse, the Kennedy Center, JACK, and others. She is a Core Writer at the Playwrights' Center, a New Georges Audrey Resident, and a winner of the Steinberg Playwright Award and the Mississippi Review Prize in Fiction. Residencies include: MacDowell (upcoming), The Headlands Center for the Arts, Willapa Bay, and SPACE on Ryder Farm.

Steph Del Rosso will work on Rank and File, a new play that weaves together the Triangle shirtwaist factory fire in 1911, the Bread and Roses strike in 1912, and a unionizing effort in contemporary New York. Rejecting the Girl Boss myth in favor of stories of collective power, the play will focus on the multi-ethnic coalition of women workers who led the 20th century labor movement, while drawing on the author's own organizing experiences and the deep friendships born from them.

Anne Hamilton – Playwright and Founder of Hamilton Dramaturgy – United States

Anne Hamilton is a playwright and the Founder of Hamilton Dramaturgy, an international consultancy. Dramaturgy includes Andrei Serban, Michael Mayer, Lynn Nottage, NYMF, Niegel Smith, Classic Stage Company, and Tina Andrews. She was the co-author of Dramaturgy: The Basics (Routledge, 2023, with Walter Byongsok Chon) and the co-recipient of the 2022 Daesan Foundation Translation Grant. She is the Company Author of Winterlight Productions, a 1998 Bogliasco Fellow, and received her M.F.A. from Columbia University School of the Arts.

This project in collaboration with Walter Byongsok Chon is an English Theatrical Translation of Korean Plays by Myung-Wha Kim - Walter Byongsok Chon will translate four plays (THE WIND’S DESIRE, THE BIRDS DON’T CROSS THE CROSSWALK, OEDIPUS: THE FATE OF THE STORY, and THE SOUND OF THE MOON). Anne Hamilton is the English translation consultant. The English translations of Ms. Kim's plays across several genres explore Korean history, culture, and sentiments, enhancing intercultural theatrical exchange.

Wendall Harrington – Professor at Yale School of Drama – United States

An award-winning designer of projected media for performance for Broadway, Opera, Dance and concerts since the late 70’s, Wendall is the head of the Projection Design Concentration at the Yale School of Drama.

Tentatively entitled Good Looking, Wendall Harrington's project is a written and illustrated text exploring the evolution of modern projection design, its historical roots, and observations of the aesthetic demands of work that is both collaborative and individual.

Gina Athena Ulysse – Artist and scholar, Professor of Feminist Studies at University of California, Santa Cruz – United States

Gina Athena Ulysse is a Haitian-American artist-scholar and Professor of Feminist Studies at the University of California Santa Cruz. Her publications include the award-winning Because When God is Too Busy: Haiti, me & THE WORLD (2017) and copious articles, essays and creative works in journals and anthologies. In 2020, she participated in the Biennale of Sydney, Australia. Over the years, she has performed at The British Museum, Gorki Theatre, LaMaMa, Marcus Garvey Liberty Hall, and other venues.

Gina Athena Ulysse is working on a performance, VooDooDoll: An Alter(ed)native in Something Other than Fiction. Using rasanblaj – the gathering of ideas, things, people, and spirits – the work juxtaposes sonic, lyrical, and visual elements to riff on geopolitical history, personal narrative, and statistics laced with popular songs and ancestral chants. This meditation places Haiti at the avant-garde as a universal pivot to ruminate on the past in the present while deflecting dystopic futurities. 

Abigail DeVille – Artist – United States – Anonymous Was A Woman Bogliasco Special Fellow

Abigail DeVille's sculptures and installations often focus on themes of the history of racist violence, gentrification, and lost regional history. Her most recent solo exhibitions include In the Fullness of Time, The Heart Speaks Truths Too Deep for Utterance, but a Star Remembers, JTT NYC (2023); Original Night at Eric Firestone Gallery (2022-23); and Bronx Heavens, Bronx Museum of the Arts (2022-23). DeVille’s awards include a 2022 Anonymous Was a Woman Award, a 2022 Nancy Graves Foundation grant, a 2018 United States Artists Fellowship, and a 2017-2018 Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome.

Nada Abu Taleb – Visual Artist – Yemen

Artist Protection Fund Fellow, Nada Abu Taleb is a Yemeni visual artist and architect who has been making work for 13 years. Nada began her journey from within—to discover the worlds and paths that led her to who she is today. Inspired by Carl Jung’s archetype of the “shadow,” Nada’s artistic practice reflects her inner journey toward uncovering layers of personality through recognizing and admitting the existence of the dark “shadow.” A crucial existence that must be acknowledged, excepted, and integrated to create an authentic version of oneself.

Nada continues her Artist Protection Fund Fellowship, which began at AARome, in residence at Bogliasco. She has participated in local and international exhibitions, including two solo exhibitions in Sana’a, Yemen. During her time at Bogliasco, Nada hopes to grow her creative practice and learn more about the world around her—and how it reflects her own journey—through the experiences that unfold on the way.

Liu Cheng-hsiang – Artist and Director of Shawn Liu Studio – Taiwan

With "connection" as a core, Liu Cheng-hsiang delves into new media art, photography, and technology, probing artificial-natural interplay while contemplating existence. By merging nature's generative logic, he explores human-machine synergy and AI creativity via algorithms. He founded "Shawn Liu Studio" '16, which offers cultural consulting. His global residencies since '21 (Hong Kong, France, Iceland) and exhibitions showcase the possibility of technology's influence on the human experience.

During his residency in Bogliasco, Liu Cheng-hsiang aims to capture the essence of Genoa's modern architecture and cultural richness. Utilizing generative art algorithms, he seeks to merge images to produce textures that harmoniously blend futuristic concepts with present-day experiences. Experimenting with coding and generative art techniques, he transforms images into generative drawings, thereby pushing the boundaries of visual expression.

Sonya Clark – Artist and Professor of Art at Amherst College – United States

Sonya Clark creates installations and objects rooted in craft’s legacy. She employs the language of textiles politics of hair, and the power of text to celebrate Blackness while interrogating historical imbalances. She is a full professor at Amherst College in Massachusetts. She has received awards from many organizations including United States Artists, Pollock-Krasner, Art Prize, and Anonymous Was a Woman. Her work has been exhibited in over 500 venues worldwide.

Flipped Script, an expansive art project, uses Twist, Clark's coily curled typeface created to challenge the Roman alphabet’s dominance in over 70% of the world’s languages as a colonial tool. Imbued with the power of mark making and named by poet Rita Dove, Twist mimics the curl pattern of African hair. It reforms the Roman alphabet like Black Vernacular English bends language. It seeks in movement of wrists and fingers, a re-embodied script to engage political expression, literature, and visual art.

Ivelisse Jiménez – Visual Artist – Puerto Rico

Ivelisse Jiménez's installations and assemblages present visual propositions regarding change and constructing meaning in dialogue with the inhabited space. Her work has been exhibited at the Museo del Barrio Biennale NYC, Bronx Museum NY, Prague Biennale, Cuenca Biennale, ARCO project rooms in Spain, and Museo de Puerto Rico, San Juan, among others. Awards include The Joan Mitchell Award for Painters and Sculptors and The Adolf Gottlieb Foundation Grant. She has a BA in Humanities from the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras, and an MFA in Studio Arts from NYU. After living and working in New York for 20 years, she now has her residence and studio in Puerto Rico.

During her residency, Ivelisse will work toward her next solo show which will take place in New York next fall. She will compose her pieces from fragments done at different moments in time and then assemble them, taking into consideration the space where they stand. The pictorial events she wants to examine link space, time, and form, intensifying our attention, connecting to the body, and in this way observing the artifice of construction in language and the processes by which we create meaning.

Steven Seidenberg – Artist and writer – United States

Photographer, poet, and philosopher Steven Seidenberg’s collections of photographs include The Architecture of Silence (Contrasto, 2023) and Pipevalve: Berlin (Lodima Press, 2017). He is the author of numerous collections of lyric, philosophical prose and poetry, most recently Anon (Omnidawn, 2022), plain sight (Roof Books, 2020), and Situ (Black Sun Lit, 2018). He has had solo exhibitions of his work in Japan, Italy, Germany, Mexico, and the United States, and his books have appeared in Swedish, Italian, and Portuguese translations.

Artist Steven Seidenberg and archaeologist Carolyn White collaborate to image and interpret domestic spaces in occupied buildings, temporary encampments, and other liminal housing in contemporary Italy. Through fine art photography and archaeo/anthropological practices, they explore the ways through which migrants, disenfranchised Italians, and other marginalized populations carve stable homes from abandoned spaces, despite government policies increasingly hostile to their presence and needs.

Yvonne Weber – Visual Artist – Switzerland

Yvonne Weber, born in 1977 in Egliswil near Zurich, lives and works in Ascona and Berlin. She studied process and product design in the class of Interactive Systems at the University of the Arts Berlin (UdK) and then developed generative systems and interfaces for the return of the digital to the immediate reality. She has participated in European festivals such as ARS Electronica and received several scholarships, including that of “Swiss artists in-labs”.

With the proliferation of the LCD screen, we are surrounded by light images, additionally confronted with unprecedented disembodiment through the progressive spread of digital applications. During her residency, Yvonne Weber would like to explore, in this sensual, historical place, in stone reality, the interaction between immateriality and the body. Working in a dark room with a light source, polarized light, and plastic film, she will document the series of experiments in video.