Upcoming Fellowship Recipients
Fall 2025
Fall 2025 - group 2
Dance
jaamil olawale kosoko
Choreographer, Author, and Performance Artist — United States
jaamil olawale kosoko is a multi-spirited Nigerian American choreographer, author, performance artist, and curator. jaamil’s interdisciplinary practice merges performance, video, sculpture, and poetry, exploring queer Black theory, emergence, and critical rest-care strategies. jaamil’s works — including The (chrysalis) Archives, Black Body Amnesia, Chameleon, Séancers, and Bessie Award-nominated #negrophobia — have toured to venues including EMPAC, Fusebox Festival, The Guggenheim Museum, ICA at VCU, Montréal Arts Interculturels, Museum of Arts and Design, New York Live Arts, and Wexner Center for the Arts, among others.
Shrouded//the End of Dances is an immersive performance installation and living sculpture that invites audiences to engage physically by moving through the space and mirroring the actions of the three metamorphosing performers onstage. In this work, the corporeal and the ephemeral coalesce as bodies draped in rich brown silks form a shifting veil, concealing and revealing complex new modes of witnessing the living archive of the body. Scattered across the space, these sculptures act as conduits for hidden bodily truths, prompting viewers to reflect on how their own physical forms archive emotions, memories, and the intricacies of human existence. Through choreography, materiality, and audience participation, the work expands traditional notions of time, presence, performance, and embodied storytelling.
Film/Video
Eva Weber
Filmmaker — Germany/United Kingdom
Eva Weber is an acclaimed filmmaker known for MERKEL (“A revealing portrait” – IndieWire), THE SOLITARY LIFE OF CRANES (“One of the most absorbing documentaries of the year” – Observer), and BLACK OUT (“Eye-opening” – Hollywood Reporter). Her fiction short FIELD STUDY was nominated for a European Film Award. A recipient of the Sundance Global Filmmaking Award and Sundance Lab Fellow, her award-winning work has screened at 100+ festivals, including Sundance, Telluride, SXSW, and IDFA.
GHOST WIVES tells the true story of Song Tiantang, a 53-year-old man who murdered six women to sell their bodies for ghost weddings —a traditional Chinese ritual of marrying the dead. Though banned under Mao, these ceremonies have resurged in rural areas like Shanxi, where mining deaths have fueled a black market for ghost brides. At its core, GHOST WIVES is a haunting reflection on the commodification of women and the forgotten lives at the margins of modern China.
Humanities Scholarship
Brian Hatcher
(History) — Professor of Theology, Tufts University — United States
Brian A. Hatcher, Packard Professor of Theology, Tufts University, is a scholar of religion and colonialism in South Asia whose monographs include Eclecticism and Modern Hindu Discourse (1999), Bourgeois Hinduism (2008), and Hinduism Before Reform (2020). He has also translated Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar’s Hindu Widow Marriage (2011) and Against High-Caste Polygamy (2023). He is currently researching the failure of colonial-era reformers to confront the problem of caste injustice in Bengal.
For his latest book project, Losing Caste, Hatcher asks how it is that India’s most celebrated agents of progressive change could be aware of caste as a social problem and yet lose sight of the issue when it came to their own reformist projects. Focusing on 19th and early 20th century Bengal, Hatcher seeks to offer an alternative history of the long nineteenth century, revealing how emancipatory theological and social initiatives remained bound by, or blind to, the strictures and exclusions of caste society.
Humanities Scholarship
Lochlann Jain
(Public Humanities) Author and Professor of Anthropology, Stanford University — Canada/United States
As a professor at Stanford for the last 23 years, Lochlann Ross Jain has been fascinated by the ways that different disciplines, particularly medicine and law but also including fiction, art, history, and science, organize systems of legibility, rendering forms of violence visible and invisible in different ways at different moments. Jain has studied this question in three books, Injury (Princeton UP), Malignant (UC Press), and Things that Art (UToronto Press). Jain’s work has won multiple awards and been supported by Guggenheim, NEH, NSF, Wenner Gren and others. Jain has presented scholarly and artwork worldwide.
Jain's research project, The Lung is a Fish and a Bird: A Cultural History of Drowning, offers the first book-length work analyzing how drowning must be understood as a complex phenomenon made sensical only in the context of the range of two and half centuries of medical, historical, colonial, news-media, art, legal, and literature archives. At the Bogliasco Center, they will analyze current debates about the meanings attributed to migrants in light of the non-obvious, yet critical history of drowning that elucidates in the book’s earlier sections.
Literature
Eric Puchner
Author — United States
Eric Puchner is the author of four books, including the new novel Dream State, an Oprah’s Book Club pick and a New York Times bestseller, and the novel Model Home, a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. His stories and personal essays have appeared in GQ, Granta, McSweeney’s, Tin House, and The Best American Short Stories . He has received an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is an associate professor in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.
Puchner's novel (working title: The Burial Tree) is a literary Western set in the 1880s that centers around a boy named Jethro, who, in the company of his alcoholic father—a Union war hero fallen from grace—goes on an epic journey in search of his missing mother. It’s about how his religious faith, and the faith he has in his country, is shaken to its core. Puchner hopes to investigate the origins of our violent, gun-besotted culture and the collective hallucination of the American Dream.
Music
Sebastian Currier
Composer — United States – Edward T. Cone Fellow in Music
Grawemeyer Award–winning composer Sebastian Currier is known for writing "music with a distinctive voice" (New York Times) that is "lyrical, colorful, firmly rooted in tradition, but absolutely new" (Washington Post). His works have been performed by acclaimed artists and orchestras around the world, including Anne-Sophie Mutter, Kronos Quartet, Berlin Philharmonic, New York Philharmonic, and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. He has received a Rome Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Berlin Prize.
While at Bogliasco, I will work on a piece for violin solo, string ensemble, electronic samples, and video. Entitled THE SEASONS, it is created in collaboration with video artist Pawel Wojtasik and examines seasonal change in this time of acute climate anxiety. It is written for the violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter and will be premiered in the fall of 2027.
Theater
Matt Romein
Artist, Coder, and Performer — United States
Matt Romein is an artist, coder, and performer based in Brooklyn NY. His work consists of live performance, computer graphics, and multi-media installation. His video design and performance work has been shown at Soho Rep, The Kitchen, Under The Radar, and more. His art installation work has been shown at Sundance and IDFA. He has had residencies with Mercury Store, Pioneer Works, Yaddo, and more. He is a NYFA/NYSCA 2023 Artist Fellow, a 2024 MacDowell Fellow, and a Studio Member at Onassis ONX.
MILKMAN ZERO is a theater performance combining text-based video games, human-computer interaction, and psychological horror. The audience watches as a performer plays a video game about delivering milk, only to discover they're witnessing a carefully orchestrated descent into cosmic dread examining AI, labor, and systematic violence.
Visual Arts
Kirsten Stolle
Visual Artist — United States
Using collage, text-based images, textiles, and installation, Kirsten Stolle examines the global influence of agrichemical companies on our food system. The recipient of Pollock-Krasner Grant, her work has been shown at the Central Museum of Textiles, Poland; NOME, Berlin; North Carolina Museum of Art; Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art; San Jose Museum of Art; and Minneapolis Institute of Art. Her work has been published in The Atlantic, Harper’s Magazine, Poetry, and Photograph.
Stolle will develop Farming the Future, a collage and textile project that critically examines the impact of digital technologies on our food system. I’ll explore how agrichemical corporations leverage proprietary AI, advanced drones, satellites, and machine learning to reshape global farming practices. Rooted in my extensive research into chemical companies, Farming the Future hopes to offer an alternative entry point for engaging with the complex concerns and rapid evolution of these technologies.