Civitella Ranieri 2019 Season Group 4: September 19 – October 31
Fellows and Director’s Guests
Wojtek Blecharz, Fellow, (Music, Poland) graduated with honors from Frederic Chopin Music Academy in Warsaw in 2006, and in 2015 he received a Ph. D. in music composition at the University of California San Diego. Since 2012, Blecharz has been curating the Instalakcje music festival at Warsaw’s Nowy Theater, featuring nonconcert music: sound and performance installations, sound sculptures, music videos and music theater. Blecharz has also directed both of his opera-installations Transcryptum (2013) commissioned by Grand Theater National Opera in Warsaw and Park-Opera (2016) commissioned by Theater Powszechny in Warsaw. His works were performed at Warsaw Autumn Festival, Salzburg Biennale, Museum of Modern Art in Tel Aviv, Bendigo International Festival of Exploratory Music (Australia), MATA Festival (New York), Mostly Mozart Festival (New York), Klangwerkstadt (Berlin) and others.
Jennifer Coates, Fellow, (Visual Arts, USA) is an artist who works with painting, drawing and video and is based in NYC. Most recently, she was awarded a Sharpe Walentas Studio Program Fellowship in 2018-2019. Her solo shows include Correspondences, 2018, Freight and Volume Gallery, NYC; All U Can Eat, 2017, Freight and Volume Gallery, and Carb Load, 2016, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA. She was a recipient of the Stewart/MacMillan Endowed Chair in painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art from 2015-2016.
Frank Dabell, Director’s Guest, (Art Historian, UK) is an Anglo-French art historian and translator raised in Rome. He teaches Classical and Renaissance art there, for Temple University and the University of Rome (Tor Vergata). Frank was educated at Shrewsbury School, Merton College, Oxford and the Courtauld Institute of Art, and is a former Fellow of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, for which he has acted as cicerone throughout Europe and North Africa. He is an authority on Piero della Francesca and is a member of the committee supervising the recent conservation of the artist’s Resurrection in Sansepolcro.
Jarrett Earnest, Director’s Guest, (Art Historian, USA) is a writer living in New York City. His book What it Means to Write about Art, a collection of thirty in-depth interviews with major critics, historians and writers, will be published this fall by David Zwirner books. He coedited the volumes TELL ME SOMETHING GOOD: Artist Interviews from the Brooklyn Rail (with Lucas Zwirner; David Zwirner Books, Fall 2017) and FOR BILL, ANYTHING: Words and Images for Bill Berkson (with Isabelle Sorrell; Pressed Wafer, 2015). His criticism and long-form interviews have appeared in the The Brooklyn Rail, The Village Voice, and many other publications.
Carla Guelfenbein, Fellow, (Writing, Chile) was born in Santiago, Chile. She studied biology at Essex University in the UK specializing in population genetics and she studied graphic design at St. Martin’s School of Art in London. Back in Chile she worked with the advertising agency BBDO. She has also been director and fashion editor at ELLE magazine. Now she is a full-time writer, creative writing teacher, and conference leader. She is the author of seven novels such as In the distance with you, which won the prestigious Alfaguara prize. Her work has been translated into 16 languages.
Nikola Madzirov, Fellow, (Writing, Macedonia) is a poet, essayist and translator and was born in Strumica, Republic of Macedonia, from a family of war refugees during the Balkan Wars. He was awarded for his work with the East European Hubert Burda Poetry Award; the most prestigious Macedonian poetry prize Miladinov Brothers and Xu Zhimo’s Silver Leaf award for European poetry at King’s College in Cambridge. He was granted several international fellowships: International Writing Program (IWP) at the University of Iowa; DAAD in Berlin and Marguerite Yourcenar in France.
Dora Malech, Director’s Guests, (Writing, USA) is the author of four books of poetry, most recently, Stet (Princeton University Press, 2018), and the forthcoming Flourish (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2020). Her poems have appeared in publications that include The New Yorker, Poetry, and The Best American Poetry. She is the recipient of honors that include an Amy Clampitt Residency Award, and a Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland, where she is an assistant professor in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.
Philip Miller, Fellow, (Music, UK/South Africa) is drawn to working from both public and personal archives (sound, photographic and text –based). These elements serve not only to inspire but also become part of his compositional practice. His ability to work across different musical genres and media, has led him to establish significant collaborations with choreographers, film-makers and visual artists, including his long- time collaborator, William Kentridge. His “sound” is often multi-layered using techniques of electronic sampling and sound collage. He is currently, an honorary fellow at The Archive and Public Culture Institute, University of Cape Town.
Margherita Moscardini, Fellow, (Visual Arts, Italy) investigates relationships between transformation processes of urban, social and natural orders belonging to specific geographies. Her practice favors process and long-term projects which engender large-scale interventions, drawings, writings, scale models, and video-documents. Margherita Moscardini obtained a BA, Academy Fine Arts Bologna, Italy (2006); she attended the XIV ACVA Fondazione Antonio Ratti, Como, with Yona Friedman (2008). In 2015 she was a research fellow at the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America, Columbia University.
Carrie Moyer, Fellow, (Visual Arts, USA) has exhibited throughout the US and Europe for over 25 years, including the 2017 Whitney Biennial. Previous museum shows include a traveling survey, Carrie Moyer: Pirate Jenny, originating at the Tang Museum (2013-14); and Interstellar, at the Worcester Art Museum (2012). Between 1991-2008, Moyer and photographer Sue Schaffner collaborated as Dyke Action Machine!, the renowned public art project. Awards include Guggenheim and Joan Mitchell Fellowships, Anonymous Was a Woman, and Creative Capital among others. Moyer teaches at Hunter College.
Portia Munson, Fellow, (Visual Arts, USA) approaches her work from an environmental and feminist perspective. Recent exhibitions include Pink Projects, Rockefeller Center, NYC 2019; Dime-Store Alchemy, FLAG Art Foundation, NYC 2018; Spectrum, Thomas Cole National Historic Site, Catskill, NY 2018; The Garden, PPOW Gallery, NYC 2017; and a permanent MTA installation in Brooklyn NY. Munson was awarded a Pollock-Krasner Grant 2019. She holds a BFA from Cooper Union and an MFA from Rutgers University, and studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture. Munson lives in Catskill NY.
Ana Margarita Mateo Palmer, Fellow, (Writing, Cuba) is a fiction writer and literary critic. Palmer teaches Latin American and Caribbean Literatures as a Senior Professor in the Department of Cuban Studies at Instituto de Estudios Superiores de Arte in Havana, Cuba. Her work has centered on Caribbean literatures and has greatly contributed to the establishment of a comparative Caribbean perspective transcending the linguistic boundaries that have marked approaches to the region. Among her most recent publications are: El viaje mítico: el Palacio del pavorreal (Ediciones Unión 2007), which obtained the Essay Award “Enrique José Varona” granted by the Union of Writers and Artisits of Cuba and the National Literary Critic Award; and Desde los blancos manicomios (Letras Cubanas 2008) which obtained the Alejo Carpentier Award for her novel and the National Literary Critic Award.
Sheila Pepe, Fellow, (Visual Arts, USA) is a cross-disciplinary artist who has exhibited work internationally since 1994. Hot Mess Formalism, Pepe’s most recent solo exhibition, organized by the Phoenix Art Museum, traveled from 2017 to 2019 to additional venues across the U.S. Its catalogue contains essays by J. Bryan-Wilson, E.Dunbar, L.Gangitano, and curator Gilbert Vicario. Vitamin T: Threads, Textiles in Contemporary Art, the revised Art and Queer Culture by C. Lord and R. Meyer, and J.Corso Esquivel’s Feminist Subjectivities in Fiber Art and Craft: Shadows of Affect, published in 2019, include Pepe’s work.
Johannes Schöllhorn, Fellow, (Music, Germany) studied composition with K. Huber, E. Nunes and M. Spahlinger, musical analysis with P. Förtig and also attended conducting courses with P. Eötvös. His music is performed by soloists, ensembles and orchestras all around the world and has a wide range of genres from chamber, vocal and orchestra music, as well as music for theatre. Johannes Schöllhorn has been teaching in Zürich (CH), Hannover and Cologne and is currently Professor for Composition in Freiburg. He has also given many composition courses and masterclasses in Europe, Asia and South America.
Marc Wiegand, Fellow, (Visual Arts, USA) has a dual career as an international lawyer and visual artist. He lives and works in San Antonio, Texas and says that “[his] work has evolved from representing the effects of light to painting with light itself.” Wiegand creates ‘light boxes’ that are based on translucent light “which is both intensely rich and evanescent.” Light boxes “make” color that changes as the viewer changes perspective. As a result, the compositions are inherently unstable – mimicking the instability of perception and memory, the dual phenomena on which his work is based.
See their profiles here.