June 13th – July 23rd, 2019 Fellows and Director’s Guests:
Cyrus Dunham, Director’s Guest, (Writing, USA)
Cyrus Dunham is a writer and organizer living in Los Angeles. His writing on trans politics and prison abolition has appeared in the The New Yorker, The Village Voice, and New York Magazine. Their first book, A Year Without a Name, is forthcoming from Little, Brown in Fall, 2019.
Ali Cobby Eckermann, Fellow, (Writing, Australia)
Eckermann’s first collection Little Bit Long Time was written in the desert and launched her literary career in 2009. Her verse novel Ruby Moonlight won the Kenneth Slessor Prize in 2013, in 2014 she was awarded the Tungkunungka Pintyanthi Fellowship for her memoir Too Afraid To Cry. Her latest collection Inside Mother is taught in schools throughout Australia. Ali travels widely to showcase Aboriginal poetry, and is an alumna of the International Writing Program at University of Iowa and received a Windham-Campbell Award from Yale University in 2017.
Alejandro Haiek, Architecture Fellow, (Architecture, Venezuela/Chile)
Alejandro Haiek is the co-founder of LAB.PRO.FAB, a laboratory that collaborates on community-led initiatives in the barrios of Caracas. His bottom-up approach reactivates underused urban spaces and crosses technical expertise with local intelligence to build productive spaces in low-income areas.
Texu Kim, Fellow, (Music, South Korea/USA)
Kim writes music inspired by everyday experiences; music about modern (South) Korea, reflecting its multicultural nature; and music that is humorous yet sophisticated. His music has been performed by Ensemble Intercontemporain, Ensemble Modern, Alarm Will Sound, Minnesota Orchestra, National Orchestra of Korea, Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra. Texu is an assistant professor at Syracuse University and served as the Composer-in-Residence of the Korean Symphony Orchestra in 2014-18.
Sky Macklay, Fellow, (Music, USA)
The music of Chicago-based composer and oboist Sky Macklay is conceptual yet expressive, exploring extreme contrasts, audible processes, humor, and the physicality of sound. She has been commissioned by Chamber Music America, the Fromm Foundation, and the Barlow Endowment. Her recent projects include an opera set in a uterus and two installations of harmonica-playing inflatable sculptures. Sky completed her D.M.A. at Columbia University and is Assistant Professor at Valparaiso University. Her music is published by C. F. Peters.
Darragh McKeon, Fellow, (Writing, Ireland)
Darragh McKeon grew up in the midlands of Ireland and spent most of his twenties as a theatre director. He has worked in many reputable venues such as The Royal Court (London) and Steppenwolf (Chicago) and many disreputable ones such as a derelict bakery, a metro carriage and a slaughterhouse. His debut novel All That is Solid Melts Into Air (2014) was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and was named by Lire Magazine in France the International Debut of the Year.
Myra Melford, Fellow, (Music, USA)
Myra Melford is an award-winning pianist, composer, bandleader and professor based in the San Francisco Bay Area. The Other Side of Air, the most recent release by her quintet Snowy Egret, was named one of the best jazz recordings of 2018 by The New York Times, and was one of NPR’s 50 Best Albums in 2018. She recently collaborated with the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, premiering a commissioned work, Homogenous Infiltration, that allowed her to showcase her deep and enduring passion for improvisation and new music.
Alexis Okeowo, PEN Fellow, (Writing, USA)
Alexis Okeowo is the author of A Moonless, Starless Sky: Ordinary Women and Men Fighting Extremism in Africa, which received the 2018 PEN Open Book Award, and a staff writer at The New Yorker. Her work has been anthologized in The Best American Sports Writing (2017) and The Best American Travel Writing (2017), and she has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Russell Sage Foundation, New America, and the Alicia Patterson Foundation.
Dickens Otieno, Fellow, (Visual Arts, Kenya)
Dickens George Otieno’s practice is driven by the search to find meaning and worth in things that seem otherwise useless. Otieno weaves large sculptural tapestries and clothes made from discarded aluminum cans collected from local kiosks near his home and studio in Nairobi. He sees clothing as important tool that not only covers the body but also carries political, social, religious and economic statement about a person through the different designs of color, material and patterns which reflects the time and world today. He works in Nairobi and has exhibited extensively.
Gerard Passannante, Director’s Guest, (Writing, USA)
Passannante teaches Renaissance literature at the University of Maryland and is the author of The Lucretian Renaissance: Philology and the Afterlife of Tradition, winner of the ACLA’s Harry Levin Prize, and, Catastrophizing: Materialism and the Making of Disaster. His work has been supported by the American Academy in Rome, the National Humanities Center, the Bogliasco Foundation, and the NYPL’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. He was recently awarded fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and the Guggenheim Foundation.
Santiago Forero Ramirez, Fellow (Visual Arts, Colombia)
Santiago Forero is a visual artist and professor of photography. His work explores ideas about the body, identity, and scale in relation to familiar media images. He received his MFA in Studio Art from the University of Texas at Austin and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2010. His work has been exhibited in galleries and museums in the US and Colombia. He has participated in festivals like Les Rencontres d’Arles and Unseen Amsterdam. He is currently Assistant Professor in the Department of Art at Universidad de los Andes.
Jennifer Rochlin, NEA Fellow, (Visual Arts, USA)
Jennifer Rochlin lives in Los Angeles, California. She received a MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1999, participated in an exchange at the Universität der Künste, Berlin, Germany in 1998. One-person exhibitions of her work have been presented at venues such as Geary Contemporary, New York, New York (2019), Lefebrvre & Fils, Paris France (2018); The Pit, Los Angeles, CA (2018), and Black Dragon Society, Los Angeles, CA (2007).
Steven Sanchez, Lorca 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). 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.
Jay Schwartz, Fellow, (Music, USA)
Jay Schwartz was born in 1965 in San Diego, California, and immigrated in 1989 to Germany. His works are played by major symphony orchestras and ensembles in Europe and the US. He received the Rome Prize from the German Ministry of Culture and was an artist in residence at the German Academy Villa Massimo in Rome in 2017/2018.
David Carroll Simon, Director’s Guest, (Writing, USA)
David Carroll Simon is assistant professor of English at the University of Maryland. He teaches and writes about the cultural and intellectual history of early modern Europe. His first book, Light without Heat: The Observational Mood from Bacon to Milton (Cornell University Press, 2018), argues for the importance of careless inattention and open-ended receptivity to the literary and philosophical experiments of England’s scientific revolution. He is now at work on a new project about cruel laughter, the history of misogyny, and the emergence of Enlightenment.
Rosie Stockton, Director’s Guest, (Writing, USA)
Rosie Stockton is a poet and scholar based in Detroit, Michigan. They recently received their M.A. in Creative Writing at Eastern Michigan University and edited BathHouse Journal and Weekday Journal. Their writing has been published by Publication Studio, Monster House Press, BigBig Wednesday, Flint Magazine, and A Plume Journal. They currently facilitate a poetry workshop at the Women’s Huron Valley Correctional Facility, Michigan. They are beginning a doctoral program in Gender Studies at UCLA this fall.Â
Alexandra Teaque, Fellow, (Writing, USA)
Alexandra Teague is the author of Or What We’ll Call Desire (Persea, 2019), and two prior books of poetry—The Wise and Foolish Builders and Mortal Geography, winner of Persea’s 2009 Lexi Rudnitsky Prize and the 2010 California Book Award Gold Medal in Poetry—as well as the novel The Principles Behind Flotation. She is also co-editor of Bullets into Bells: Poets & Citizens Respond to Gun Violence. A former Stegner Fellow and National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, Alexandra is a professor at University of Idaho and currently on sabbatical in Wales.
Nina Young, Fellow, (Music, USA)
Recipient of the 2015-16 Rome Prize, composer and sound artist Nina C. Young has received recognition from the Koussevitzky Foundation, American Academy of Arts and Letters, Copland Foundation, Fromm Foundation, Montalvo Arts Center, and BMI. Recent commissions include projects supported by the NY Phil, Carnegie Hall, a violin concerto for Jennifer Koh and the Philadelphia Orchestra, and a multimedia work for the American Brass Quintet and EMPAC’s wavefield synthesis system. Young is Co-Director of NYC’s Ensemble Échappé, and an incoming Asst. Professor at USC’s Thornton School of Music.