The Joseph Brodsky Memorial Fellowship Fund Announces 2018 Fellowship Recipients – Joseph Brodsky
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The Joseph Brodsky Memorial Fellowship Fund Announces 2018 Fellowship Recipients

The Joseph Brodsky Memorial Fellowship Fund is pleased to announce that its 2018 fellowships have been awarded to Alexander Skidan in poetry, and to Vladimir Logutov in the visual arts. Through the Brodsky Fund’s partnerships with the American Academy in Rome and the Emily Harvey Foundation in Venice, Mr. Skidan will spend the fall of 2018 in Rome and Venice, while Mr. Logutov will be in residence at the American Academy in Rome for three months in early 2019. The Fellowships will allow these two talented artists to study classical and contemporary Italian culture, develop their own projects, and interact with artists and scholars from other parts of the world.

Vladimir Logutov (born in Samara, 1980) is an artist living and working in Moscow. He studied at Samara Art College (painting) and Samara Pedagogical University (pedagogics and fine art). He works in video, sculpture, painting and drawing and is a co-founder of Laboratory art group. He has had solo exhibitions in the Russian cities of Moscow, Perm, Nizhny Novgorod, Krasnoyarsk, Samara, Voronezh as well as in Stuttgart (Germany) and Birmingham (England). He participated in video-art festivals at the Venice Biennale in 2011 and 2013, and at the Gaungzhou Triennial in 2014. Mr. Logutov was twice nominated for the Kandinsky prize and has been nominated for the Black Square prize. He is the recipient of the Innovation Prize 2018 (Artist of the Year). His works are in museum collections, including The Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Stella Art Foundation (Moscow), FRAC Bretagne Museum (Brest, France) and others, as well as in private collections.

Alexandr Skidan (born in Leningrad, 1965) is a poet, critic, essayist, and translator. He attended The Free University (1989–1992), while working as a stoker in a boiler house (1985–2002). His poetry collections include Delirium (1993), In the Re-Reading (1998), Red Shifting (2005), Dissolution (2010) and, most recently, Membra disjecta (2015). He is also an author of four books of essays, Critical Mass (1995), The Resistance to/of Poetry (2001), Sum of Poetics (2013) and Theses Toward Politicization of Art and Other Texts (2014). He has translated contemporary American poetry and fiction into Russiаn, as well as theoretical works by Paul de Man, J. Hillis Miller, Jean-Luc Nancy, Paolo Virno, and Gerald Raunig. In 1998 he received the Turgenev Award for short prose. He is the recipient of the Andrey Bely Prize in poetry for the collection Red Shifting (2006) and of the Award “Most” (“Bridge”) for the best critical text on poetry (2006). His poetry has been translated into many languages and published in anthologies. In 2008 his book Red Shifting was published in the USA by Ugly Duckling Presse. He is a member of Chto Delat’? working group and is a co-editor of the New Literary Observer magazine. He lives in Saint-Petersburg.

Born in Leningrad in 1940, poet and essayist Joseph Brodsky immigrated to the United States in 1972, becoming a citizen in 1977. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1987 for "all-embracing authorship, imbued with clarity of thought and poetic intensity.” He wrote in both Russian and English. Of himself, Brodsky said, "I'm Jewish; a Russian poet, an English essayist – and, of course, an American citizen.”

Joseph Brodsky visited Rome many times as a guest, fellow, and board member of the American Academy in Rome. In 1995, shortly before his death, he proposed to the Mayor of Rome the creation of a Russian Academy in Rome, modeled on the American Academy.The Joseph BrodskyFellowship Fund came into existence after Brodsky’s death in 1996, as a way of honoring that vision. Its mission is to support Russian writers and visual artists by offering them the opportunity to live and work as part of a stimulating international cultural community, most often at the American Academy in Rome. To date, the Fund has awarded more than forty fellowships to poets and visual artists.

The Joseph Brodsky Fellowship Fund is a nonprofit organization supported entirely by individual donors and independent foundations, to whom it is deeply grateful.