August 8th – September 17th, 2019 Fellows and Director’s Guests:

Hamra Abbas, Fellow, (Visual Arts, Kuwait/Pakistan)

Hamra Abbas’s artistic practice draws from a myriad of sources and takes on a diversity of forms and media. Her investigative approach produces a diverse and holistic body of work addressing notions of cultural history, sexuality, violence, ornamentation, devotion and faith. She is the recipient of the Jury prize at Sharjah Biennial 9 I 2009, the Abraaj Capital Art Prize in 2011 and was shortlisted for the Jameel Prize in 2009. Her most recent exhibitions have been at Lahore Art Gallery, Pakistan, 2018; Canvas gallery, Karachi, Pakistan, 2017; Lawrie Shabibi, Dubai, UAE, 2016; and at PILOT, Istanbul, Turkey, 2015.

Kurt Andersen, Director’s Guest, (Writing, USA)

Kurt Andersen is the author of many critically acclaimed bestselling books, including four novels and, most recently, Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History.  He has also written for television and the theater. In addition, he’s host and co-creator of Studio 360, the Peabody Award-winning weekly public radio show, and contributes regularly to The New York Times and Vanity Fair. Previously, he was a columnist for The New Yorker, architecture and design critic for Time, editor-in-chief and columnist for New York magazineand co-founded Spy magazine. He graduated from Harvard College and lives in Brooklyn.

M’Barek Bouhchichi, Fellow, (Visual Arts, Morocco)

Born in Akka, Morocco, M’Barek lives and works in Tahanaout where he teaches art. Using painting, sculpture, drawing and video, Bouhchichi develops his work through a tentative language grounded on the exploration of the limits between our internal discourse and its extension towards the outer world, the actual and the other. He places his works at the crossroad between the aesthetic and the social, exploring associated fields as possibilities for self-definition. Some of his recent exhibitions include Les mains noires (Kulte, Rabat, Morocco, 2016), Documents bilingues (MUCEM, Marseille, France, 2017) and Between walls (Le 18, Marrakech, Morocco, 2017).

Peter Fahey, Fellow, (Music, Ireland)

Peter Fahey’s music has been performed at venues such as Carnegie Hall and the National Concert Hall in Dublin by some of the leading interpreters of new music including the American Composers Orchestra, the Aspen Contemporary Ensemble, Continuum, Crash Ensemble, Ensemble Musiques Nouvelles, ensemble recherche, Ensemble SurPlus and Talea Ensemble. Born and raised in Ireland, he went on to study at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, England; at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York; and as an exchange scholar at Columbia University, New York.

Masha Gessen, Director’s Guest, (Writing, USA)

Masha Gessen is a journalist and the author of ten books of nonfiction, most recently The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, which won the 2017 National Book Award for Nonfiction. Gessen is also the author of the national bestseller The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin. A staff writer at The New Yorker and a national fellow with New America Foundation, Gessen teaches at Amherst College.

Hallgrímur Helgason, Fellow, (Writing, Iceland)

Hallgrímur Helgason is an Icelandic artist and writer. Since 1990, he has published 10 novels. His best-known works are 101 Reykjavik (also a film), The Hitman’s Guide to Housecleaning and Woman at 1000 Degrees. His works have been translated into 14 languages. He has been nominated three times to the Nordic Literature Prize and has won the Icelandic Literature Prize twice, in 2001 for The Author of Iceland and in 2017 for his latest, Sixty Kilos of Sunshine.

Anne Kreamer, Director’s Guest, (Writing, USA)

Anne Kreamer is the author of It’s Always Personal: Navigating Emotion in the New WorkplaceGoing Gray: What I Learned About Beauty, Sex, Work, Motherhood, Authenticity and Everything Else That Really Matters, and Risk/Reward: Why Intelligent Leaps and Daring Choices Are the Best Career Moves You Can Make. Kreamer has also worked as a columnist for Fast Company and Martha Stewart Living. Previously, she was Executive Vice President and Worldwide Creative Director for the television channels Nickelodeon and Nick at Nite and part of the team that launched SPY magazine.

Anne LaBerge, Fellow, (Music, USA)

Composer/performer Anne LaBerge has been led by her passion for the extremes in both composed and improvised music, to the fringes of storytelling and sound art. Her compositions and performances bring together a ferocious virtuosity, a penchant for microtonal textures and her unique array of percussive flute effects, all combined with interactive electronic processing and text. She performs regulary as a soloist with the ensemble MAZE. Based in The Netherlands, she is a founding artist of Splendor Amsterdam and is Managing Director of the Volsap Foundation.

Chang-Rae Lee, Director’s Guest, (Writing, Korea/USA)

Chang-Rae Lee is the author of the novels Native SpeakerA Gesture LifeAloftThe Surrendered (winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and a Pulitzer Prize Finalist) and On Such A Full Sea, which was a Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His awards and citations include the Dos Passos Prize in Literature, the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, the American Book Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Literary Award, the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award and the NAIBA Book Award for Fiction. He is the Ward W. and Priscilla B. Woods Professor of English at Stanford University. 

Isabel Mundry, Fellow, (Music, Germany)

Born in Schlüchtern and raised in West Berlin, Mundry studied musical composition in Berlin and Frankfurt, and then in Paris; first with a scholarship from the Cité des Arts and later at IRCAM. She has been a professor of composition at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Frankfurt and a Wissenschaftskolleg Fellow in Berlin. Isabel currently is a professor of composition at the University of Arts, Zürich, as well as at the University of Music and Performing Arts, Munich.

Nicholas Calvin Mwakatobe, Fellow, (Visual Arts, Tanzania)

Nicholas Calvin Mwakatobe is a visual artist based in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. His work is inspired by everyday life in his region, especially as it relates to questions of cultural collective memory and how that plays a part in shaping our contemporary identity. He focuses on ways in which we remember our pasts and define ourselves through how we dress, and through food, music and customs. His storytelling through photography and film are heavily shaped by this matrix of memory and identity.

Gregory Pardlo, Fellow, (Writing, USA)

Gregory Pardlo’s ​collection​ Digest won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. His other honors​ include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts in translation; his first collection Totem was selected by Brenda Hillman for the APR/Honickman Prize in 2007. He is Poetry Editor of Virginia Quarterly Review and teaches in the graduate Creative Writing Program at Rutgers University-Camden.

Brittany Perham, Fellow, (Writing, USA)

Brittany Perham is the author of Double Portrait, which received the Barnard Women Poets Prize and was a Finalist for the Northern California Book Award; The Curiosities and, with Kim Addonizio, the collaborative chapbook The Night Could Go in Either Direction. She has received the Elizabeth Matchett Stover Memorial Award given by Southwest Review, the Magliocco Prize for Poetry given by the Bellevue Literary Review and a fellowship from the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity. She is a Jones Lecturer in the Creative Writing Program at Stanford University.

Rakesh Satyal, Fellow, (Writing, USA)

Rakesh Satyal is the author of the novels Blue Boy and No One Can Pronounce My Name. Blue Boy won a Lambda Award and the Prose/Poetry Award from the Association of Asian-American Studies and was a finalist for a Publishing Triangle Award. It is currently being developed as a feature film by the actor and comic Nik Dodani. Satyal has been a recipient of a Fellowship in Fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts and currently sits on the board of Lambda Literary. He also works in book publishing for more than 15 years and sings a popular cabaret show in New York City.

Jennifer Scappettone, CIMA Fellow, (Writing, USA)

Scappettone works at the crossroads of scholarship, translation, and transmedia literary arts. Her books include Killing the Moonlight: Modernism in Venice and the poetry collections From Dame Quickly and The Republic of Exit 43. Her volume Locomotrix: Selected Poetry and Prose of Amelia Rosselli won the Academy of American Poets’s Raiziss/De Palchi Prize. She has exhibited her visual and performance poetry internationally. Her work has been supported by the Bogliasco Foundation, Djerassi, Stanford Humanities Center, and the American Academy in Rome. She teaches at the University of Chicago.

Jennifer Shyu, Fellow, (Music, USA)

Guggenheim Fellow, Doris Duke Artist, Fulbright Scholar, multilingual composer/singer/instrumentalist/dancer, Jen Shyu is “one of the most creative vocalists in contemporary improvised music” (The Nation). Born in Peoria, IL to Taiwanese and East Timorese immigrants and the 1st female vocalist bandleader on Pi Recordings, she has produced seven albums and has performed at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center and The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her Song of Silver Geese was among NY Times’ “Best Albums of 2017.”

Hsia Yü, Fellow, (Writing, Taiwan)

Hsia Yü studied film and drama at the National Taiwan Academy of the Arts. Hsia Yü is the author of several volumes of poetry, most recently Pink Noise (2007). A founding editor of the Taiwanese avant-garde literary zine, Xianzai Shi (Poetry now), she currently resides in Taipei where she works as a lyricist and translator.