May 2nd – June 11th, 2019 Fellows and Director’s Guests:
Rathin Barman, Fellow, (Visual Arts, India)
Urban architecture and architectural forms are primaryinterests of Barman’s recent practice. He has documented different layers of architectural progress that reflect the structural evolution of contemporary urban landscape while commenting on various socio-political issues. Barman’s
recent solo exhibition The Thinking Forest is Not a Metaphor unveils polycentric discourses of living in old
homes in north Kolkata.
Sonia Louise Davis, Fellow, (Visual Arts, USA)
Sonia Louise Davis engages improvisation across installation, writing, weaving and performance. Her work is informed by critical race and feminist theory, as well as her training as a jazz vocalist. She has performed at the Whitney Museum of American Art and published in Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory. Most recently she was a New York Community Trust Van Lier Fellow at the International Studio & Curatorial Program in Brooklyn. An alumna of the Whitney Independent Study Program, Sonia
lives and works in Harlem, New York City.
Carol Ann Duffy, Director’s Guest, (Writing, UK)
Carol Ann Duffy has been the UK Poet Laureate for the past 10 years. Her Collected Poems are published by Picador and her Collected Children’s Poems by Faber. Carol Ann has collaborated widely in theater, art, music and ballet. Her most recent collection is Sincerity (Picador 2018) and she is currently working on a series of new poems about English Cathedrals. She is Creative Director of The Writing School at
Manchester Metropolitan University.
Ryan Eckes, PEW Fellow, (Writing, USA)
Ryan Eckes is a poet from Philadelphia. His latest booksinclude General Motors (Split Lip Press, 2018), which is about labor and the influence of public and private transportation on city life, and fine
nothing (Albion Books, 2019). He is also the author of Valu-Plus and Old News (Furniture Press 2014, 2011) and the chapbook Patriotismo, translated by Carlos Soto-Román (Libros del Pez Espiral, Chile, 2016). Eckes has worked as an adjunct professor and labor organizer in education.
Ubah Cristina Ali Farah, Fellow, (Writing, Italy/Somalia)
Ubah Cristina Ali Farah is a Somali-Italian poet and novelist. She has published two novels, Madre piccola (Little Mother) and Il comandante del fiume (The Commander of the River). She holds a Ph.D. in African Studies and has presented her work worldwide. She is the recipient of the Lingua Madre and Vittorini Prizes and she participated in the University of Iowa’s IWP (2017) and in the MEET and Art Omi Residency (2018).Recently she worked on a rewriting of Antigone and on a libretto taken from found stories in Matera. She is now based in Brussels.
Josh Fineberg, Fellow, (Music, USA)
Joshua Fineberg’s works are widely performed in the US, Europe and Asia. He has won numerous prizes and scholarships and is published by Editions Max Eschig and Gérard Billaudot Editeur. He is the director of the electronic music studios at Boston University and the founding director of the Boston University Center for New Music. In 2011, he was named an Artist Fellow of the Massachusetts Cultural Council and in 2016 he was awarded a Chévalier de l’ordre des arts et lettres by France. He divides his time between Berlin and the United States.
Ivan Forde, Fellow, (Visual Arts, Guyana/USA)
Born in Guyana and based in New York, Forde uses a wide variety of photo-based and print-making processes, sound performance, and sculpture to retell stories from epic poetry casting himself as every
character. His non-linear interpretations of these tales open the possibility of new archetypes and alternative endings. Ivan has been included in recent group exhibitions and performances at The Studio Museum in Harlem and the Whitney Museum of Art. He is the recipient of prestigious awards including the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans.
Kim Ghattas, Fellow, (Writing, Lebanon/Netherlands)
Kim Ghattas is a journalist and author with a 20-year career covering the Middle East as well as American foreign policy. She has worked for the BBC and The Financial Times and was recently a fellow at Carnegie Endowment and Woodrow Wilson Center. She lives between Beirut and Washington D.C. and is working on her next book about the rivalry between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Raised in Beirut, she is the author of The New York Times bestseller The Secretary: A Journey with Hillary Clinton from Beirut to the Heart of American Power.
Yotam Haber, Fellow (Music, Israel/Netherlands/USA)
Holland-born Yotam Haber grew up in Israel, Nigeria, and Milwaukee. His music has been hailed by New Yorker critic Alex Ross as “deeply haunting,” by the Los Angeles Times as one of five classical musicians “2014 Faces To Watch,” and he was chosen as one of the “30 composers under 40” by Orpheus Chamber Orchestra’s Project 440. He is the recipient of a 2017 Koussevitzky Commission, a 2013 Fromm Music Foundation commission, a 2013 NYFA award, the 2007 Rome Prize and a 2005 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship.
Missy Mazzoli, Composers Now Fellow, (Music, USA)
Deemed “one of the more consistently inventive, surprising composers now working in New York” (The New York Times), Missy Mazzoli has had her music performed globally by the Kronos Quartet, LA Opera, eighth blackbird, Emanuel Ax, the LA Philharmonic and many others. In 2018 she became the first woman to receive a main stage commission from the Metropolitan Opera, and was nominated for a
Grammy award. She is currently the Mead Composer-in-residence at the Chicago Symphony, and from 2012-2015 was Composer-in-Residence with Opera Philadelphia.
Patrick Rosal, Fellow, (Writing, USA)
Patrick Rosal is a writer and interdisciplinary artist. He is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Brooklyn Antediluvian, which was a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Award and winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets. The recipient of fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Fulbright Research Program, he has performed at hundreds of venues spanning four continents. He is Associate Professor of
English at Rutgers University-Camden.
Bruce Smith, Fellow, (Writing, USA)
Bruce Smith is the author of seven books of poems, most recently, Spill. His previous book, Devotions, was a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the LA Times Book Award, and the winner of the William Carlos Williams Prize.
Steven Sanchez, Lorca Prizewinning Fellow, (Writing, USA)
Steven Sanchez is the author of Phantom Tongue (Sundress Publications, 2018), selected by Mark Doty as the winner of the Rochelle Ratner Memorial Award. He is also the author of two chapbooks: Photographs of Our Shadows (Agape Editions) and To my Body (Glass Poetry Press). He was named a CantoMundo Fellow and Lambda Literary Fellow. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in North American Review, Poet Lore, Nimrod, Muzzle, Crab Creek Review, and other publications.
Emily Skaja, Walt Whitman Fellow, (Writing, USA)
Emily Skaja’s first book, BRUTE, won the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets (Graywolf Press, April 2019). She holds an MFA in Poetry from Purdue University and a PhD in Creative
Writing and Literature from the University of Cincinnati, and she is the recipient of a 2019-2020 Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Emily’s poems have been published in Best
New Poets, Blackbird, Crazyhorse, FIELD, and Gulf Coast, among other journals. She is also the Poetry Co-Editor of Southern Indiana Review.
Dorit Weisman, Director’s Guest, (Writing, Israel)
Dorit Weisman lives in Jerusalem. An award-winning poet, she is also a novelist, translator, editor, film-maker and literary organizer. Recipient of the EASAL (European Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters), 2018, of the International Poetry Prize Alfonso Gatto 2016 (Italy) and the respected Yehuda-Amichai Prize for Poetry, 2003, she has published 10 volumes of poetry, two prose books, two translation books (the poems of Charles Bukowski) and she is the editor of an Anthology of Israeli Women Social Protest Poetry.