Upcoming Fellowship Recipients
Spring 2026
Spring 2026 - group 4
Dance
Matty Davis
Choreographer — United States
Matty Davis is an artist engaged in embodied explorations of the tension between fragility and fortitude. His work uses choreography as an instrument to activate high-stakes relationships concerning some of the most important aspects of our lives: trust, risk, responsibility… His performances have been described as “balancing ecstatically on the edge of life and death” (Jesse Zaritt). Matty's work has been presented by High Line Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Palais de Tokyo, among many others. He currently teaches at Columbia University.
While at Bogliasco, Matty Davis will be working on a new project that involves a “performance arranged for print”—a new form that he has been trailblazing since 2021—as well as a related live work. These interconnected works involve and hinge on mathematical form that blurs inner and outer surfaces: the Möbius strip. Ultimately, Matty aims to explore the pursuit of human ideals and what can happen both inside and outside us as bodies in the face and pursuit of our highest aims.
Film/Video
Sierra Pettengill
Filmmaker — United States
Sierra Pettengill is a filmmaker from Brooklyn whose heavily archival-focused work focuses on the warped narratives of American history. Her films have screened at MoMA, Lincoln Center, the Sundance and Locarno Film Festivals, on the Criterion Channel, and in festivals and venues around the world. She is a Guggenheim Fellow, a Sundance Art of Nonfiction Fellow, and is a board member of the cinema nonprofit, Screen Slate. Her most recent film was RIOTSVILLE, USA, released by Magnolia Pictures.
Sierra Pettengill will be researching and developing a hybrid film project structured around Emile Zola's Les Rougon-Macquart novels.
History
Sebastián Carassai
Author and Professor of History — Argentina/Italy
Sebastián Carassai is a historian, a professor at the Universidad de Buenos Aires, a member of the Center for Intellectual History at the Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, and a researcher at CONICET. He is the author of the books The Argentine Silent Majority: Middle Classes, Politics, Violence, and Memory in the Seventies (Duke University Press); Lo que no sabemos de Malvinas: Las islas, su gente y nosotros antes de la guerra (Siglo XXI); and, together with Kevin Coleman, Coups d’État in Cold War Latin America, 1964–1982 (Cambridge University Press).
Sebastián's project explores the intellectual history of the concept of populism in Latin America, tracing how its meanings have evolved from the 1940s to the present. It examines how the idea of populism has been redefined in relation to authoritarianism, democracy, development, and social change. Understanding the history of the relationship between populism and Latin America offers a unique perspective for addressing contemporary global challenges, both within and beyond South America
Literature
Dong Li
Author and Poet — China/Germany
Dong Li is a multilingual author who translates from Chinese, English, French, and German. He has translated books by the American authors Victoria Chang, Forrest Gander, Eliot Weinberger; the Chinese poets SONG Lin, YE Hui, ZHU Zhu; the German-French author Anne Weber. His own debut poetry collection, The Orange Tree (University of Chicago Press, 2023), was the inaugural winner of the Phoenix Emerging Poet Book Prize and a finalist for the Poetry Society of America’s Four Quartets Prize.
At the Bogliasco Center, Dong will revise and re-envision his manuscript The Bench. It focuses on his mother’s coming-of-age stories and how she survived her own family’s negligence during great socio-political upheavals in China. This is a book of hard familial love, survival, and memory. He will also translate it himself into German and Chinese, in the hope of revising the original and drawing obscure links between American, Chinese, and German literary traditions.
Literature - Scholarship
Jennie Kassanoff
Author and Professor of History and English — United States
Jennie Kassanoff is the Adolph S. and Effie Ochs Professor of American Studies and History and a Professor of English at Barnard College, Columbia University where she teaches American Studies and nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature. Originally from Dallas, Texas, her essays on voting rights, gerrymandering, race and disability have appeared in PMLA, American Literature, J19, and American Literary History, among other books and journals. She is the author of Edith Wharton and the Politics of Race (Cambridge UP, 2004) and is currently completing a new book entitled Voter Writes: A Literary History of the Voting Rights Act.
Voter Writes examines the electoral imaginary that has shaped American politics. In a discursive account covering two centuries, the book argues that literary accounts of the ballot, placed in dialogue with court opinions, local journalism, visual culture, and congressional testimony, reveal the narratives of gender, race, invisibility and embodiment that underwrite voter restriction. With particular attention to the unfinished business of the Fifteenth Amendment (1870), which briefly gave Black men the right to vote after the Civil War, the book sees the imperative to preserve the “purity of the ballot box” as a metaphor that has historically bound U.S. electoral practices to a set of racialized and gendered fantasies of privacy, invisibility, disembodiment, and sentimental intent. In surfacing and critiquing these fantasies, Voter Writes seeks to envision a sustainable anti-purity politics that can flourish amid historical contingency, lived ambiguity and entangled solidarity – components of an imperfect but needful practice of democratic pluralism.
Music
Christina Wheeler
Composer, Musician, and Multimedia Artist — United States/Germany
Christina Wheeler is a composer, musician, and multimedia artist whose practice explores electronics and technology, blending composed and improvised music from voice, autoharp, Theremini, QChord, mbira, glass armonica, and kora. Christina has worked with David Byrne, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Laraaji, Art Ensemble of Chicago, Nicole Mitchell, Chris Abrahams, Dudù Kouate. Commissions include Radialsystem, HKW, Bang on a Can, Märzmusik, CTM Festivals. Releases include That Was Then, This Is Now, and Songs of S + D.
The Magical Garden is a five-part performance/generative installation project presented in publicly accessible gardens, which explores the crossover between “magic” as derived from ancestral Fang tribe culture, familial Afro-Diasporal gris-gris, and the unexpected, transportive effect of generative technology, as expressed through spatialized audio, video, and LED lights. Five psychedelic animals trapped in a mythical garden join to find freedom in this fantasy allegory for all-ages audiences.
Theater
Igor Golyak
Founding Artistic Director, Arlekin Players Theatre — Ukraine/United States
Igor Golyak is a theater director who has collaborated with Mikhail Baryshnikov, Jessica Hecht, Chulpan Khamatova, T.R. Knight, and Bill Irwin, earning recognition from The New York Times as "among the most inventive directors working in the United States." Winner of 4 Lucille Lortel Awards and 7+ Elliot Norton Awards, his work was named Best Theater of 2024 by The Wall Street Journal. Featured on Good Morning America, he pioneered virtual theater during the pandemic, reaching 55+ countries and earning BroadwayWorld's Best Director of Streamed Production. A Ukrainian refugee who founded Arlekin Players Theatre 16 years ago, Igor has reached 35,000+ people globally. "Igor's fearless exploration demonstrated that even during lockdown there was artistic possibility," says Baryshnikov.
Director Igor Golyak will develop a radical new adaptation of "The Threepenny Opera", reimagining Brecht and Weill’s classic through a contemporary lens. This project will fuse bold staging with new arrangements by Steven Bernstein, creating a contemporary sonic world that is urgent and alive. Igor will focus on dramaturgy, staging concepts, and the integration of digital elements, exploring human behavior in today’s world
Visual Arts
Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter
Visual Artist — United States — Anonymous Was A Woman Special Fellow
Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter is an award-winning interdisciplinary artist, writer, pedagogue, and cultural worker based in Philadelphia PA. As a visionary thought leader creating socially conscious music, film, performance, and visual art, her practice embodies resilience, care, and community-centeredness while working at the intersections of reproductive justice, black feminist thought and transformative change. She is a 2021 Frieze Impact Prize winner and 2024 Anonymous was a woman awardee.
Drawing heavily on the methodologies of the Black radical tradition, critical fabulation and Afrofuturist theory, Mary’s writing, research, materials process and experimentation during her Bogliasco residency will seek to reframe narratives of trauma by developing large scale immersive installations for critical reflection and grief work. Thus, pushing the boundaries between how we engage with archival violence, public memory and art making while also creating concrete pathways towards communal healing and repair.