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.

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.

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.

Rich Benjamin

(Public Humanities) — Author and Cultural Anthropologist — United States

RICH BENJAMIN is the author of Talk to Me: Lessons from a Family Forged by History (Pantheon Books, 2025), a family memoir that doubles as a portrait of America. The book debuted to acclaim, including on NPR's "Fresh Air with Terry Gross" and MSNBC’s “The Beat with Ari Melber". In his first book, Searching for Whitopia: An Improbable Journey to the Heart of White America, Benjamin embarked on a two-year, 26,909-mile, journey, immersing himself into the fastest-growing, whitest communities in America. The book was selected for an Editor’s Choice award from the American Library Association. Benjamin’s writing appears in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and elsewhere, and he’s interviewed often in the international and US media, including on NPR, MSNBC, and PBS.

Rich Benjamin is working on a project examining how demographic change and white racial status threat are impacting US culture, politics, and policymaking.

Jennie Ikuta

(Philosophy) Author and Associate Professor, Political Theory, University of Missouri-Columbia — United States

Jennie Ikuta is an Associate Professor of Political Theory at the University of Missouri-Columbia. Her research focuses on the history of 19th and 20th century thought, with an emphasis on the role of moral psychology in politics. She is the author of Contesting Conformity (Oxford UP, 2020) and her work has been supported by the National Humanities Center, the W.E.B. Du Bois Center, and Magdalen College at Oxford. For 2025-26, she is a Racial Justice Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School.

At Bogliasco, Jennie is completing a second book project, White Losses: Moral Psychology and the Demands of Racial Justice (under advance contract, Oxford UP). This project employs the thought of Ida B. Wells, W.E.B. Du Bois, and James Baldwin—in conjunction with analyses of popular forms of American liberalism and contemporary political theory—to theorize the psychological transformations required by members of historically dominant groups for the sake of a more egalitarian society.

Zein El-Amine

Poet and Writer — Lebanon/United States

Zein El-Amine is a Lebanese American published poet and writer. His poems have appeared in Plume, Wild River Review, Folio, Beltway Quarterly, and many other literary journals and anthologies. El-Amine was awarded the Megaphone Prize for his collection of short stories titled “Is This How You Eat a Watermelon.” El-Amine’s short stories have appeared in Lit Hub and Electric Literature, among others. El-Amine lives in Washington, DC, and teaches at American and Georgetown universities.

During his residency, El-Amine hopes to finalize the first draft of a novel he has worked on for the past year and a half. The goal is to have a readable manuscript to send to a literary agent that has shown interest in the novel. The main task will be stringing together the various chapters of the first draft and finalizing their chronology. The novel is set in Saudi Arabia, and centers around the “compound fever” brought on by the social dysfunction of expat compounds during the oil rush.

Žibuoklė Martinaitytė

Composer — Lithuania/United States

The works of New York-based Lithuanian composer Žibuoklė Martinaitytė, winner of the 2022 Lithuanian National Prize in Arts and Culture and the 2020 Guggenheim Fellowship, have been lauded as as “breathtaking…profoundly moving” by the San Francisco Classical Voice, while The Wire praises her for “complex structures of perception and rich textures of experience”. Her music often revolves around the notion of beauty, which she calls a guiding principle and an aesthetic measure for sonic quality.

Opera "UPSIDE DOWN" commissioned by the Lithuanian National Opera and Ballet Theater for the autumn of 2026 is a creative collaboration between legendary theater director Robert Wilson and composer Žibuoklė Martinaitytė. The main subject of the work is migration which is presented as a journey through time, through states of mind and exploration of the Other: leaving the world we know behind to experience an exciting new world and thus turning our expectations upside down.

Carey Perloff

Director, Playwright, and Educator — United States

CAREY PERLOFF is a director, playwright, producer and educator with long tenures as Artistic Director at American Conservatory Theater and Classic Stage Company. A Stanford graduate (Classics and Comparative Literature) and Fulbright Fellow (Oxford), Perloff has directed dozens of classical plays across America and Canada and is currently developing The Oedipus Cycle with John Douglas Thompson. As a playwright: Vienna, Vienna, Vienna; Edgardo or White Fire; If God Were Blue (Bogliasco 2018); Kinship; Higher; The Fit. As an author: Beautiful Chaos: A Life in the Theater and Pinter and Stoppard: A Director’s View.

To tackle the Oedipus plays onstage, one has to simultaneously tackle one’s own history, predilections and beliefs. Rehearsing Oedipus will be both a portrait of a director at work and a deeply personal account of my multi-year investigation and staging of Oedipus Tyrannos and Oedipus at Colonus, as I chart the process of analyzing, conceptualizing, casting, designing and rehearsing a new version of these frighteningly relevant plays while living through the Covid crisis, the racial reckoning and an ongoing global chaos.

Luma Jasim

Visual Artist — Iraq/United States

Luma Jasim is an Iraqi-American interdisciplinary artist and performer. Drawing on past experiences, she explores the relationship between personal narrative and today’s political discourse. She uses the personal to address the political and engage viewers’ curiosity and thought. Jasim earned a master’s from Parsons School of Design, The New School. Her work has been recognized with the MAP Fund Fellowship (2021), Alexa Rose Fellowship (2021), Yaddo Residency (2018), MASS MoCA Residency (2017), and the AAF/Seebacher Prize (2017). Her work has been shown nationally and internationally.

Luma Jasim will create drawings and animations as key visuals for a feature-length documentary she has been developing for three years. Using Procreate and stop-motion with charcoal on paper, the work will enhance the film’s storytelling. The documentary explores her personal experiences before, during, and after the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, culminating in her journey as a refugee. She aims to create an evocative fusion of visual art and narrative.

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. As an educator and community organizer, jaamil has served on grant panels including MAP Fund, NYFA, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and continue to curate projects in live performance domestically and internationally. 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 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. An ensemble of three dancers navigates this environment, embodying states of metamorphosis. Their fluid, interdimensional movements expand traditional notions of time, allowing new configurations of being to emerge in response to the weight and texture of the materials that envelop them. Through choreography, materiality, and audience participation, the work expands traditional notions of time, presence, performance, and embodied storytelling.

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.

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.

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.

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.