The Joseph Brodsky Memorial Fellowship Fund Announces 2019 Fellowship Recipients

The Joseph Brodsky Memorial Fellowship Fund is pleased to announce that its 2019 fellowships have been awarded to Ivan Akhmetiyev in poetry, and to Alexandra Mitlyanskaya in the visual arts. Through the Brodsky Fund’s partnerships with the American Academy in Rome and the Emily Harvey Foundation in Venice, Mr. Akhmetiyev will divide his 3-month residency between Rome and Venice, while Ms. Mitlyanskaya will be in residence  at the American Academy in Rome for three months during 2018-19. 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.

Ivan Akhmetiev is a native of Moscow and continues to live there. He is the author of five poetry collections. His work has been translated into 13 languages and has been published in Romania, Serbia and France. Since the 1990s, he has been engaged in publishing classics of  Soviet unofficial literature, including the work of E. Kropivnitsky, G. Obolduev, Y. Satunovsky, M. Sokovnin, P. Ulitin, and S. Chudakov, in Poetry of the second half of the twentieth century (2002) and Russian verses 1950-2000 (2010). Mr. Akhmetiev is curator of the network "Anthologies of Informal Poetry” and in 2013 was awarded the Andrei Bely Prize in the category “services to Russian literature.”

Alexandra Mitlyanskaya is a video artist and painter. Born in Moscow, she studied at the Moscow Institute of Graphic Arts and in 1995 received a grant to study at the Berlin (Germany) Academy of Arts. She has been a visiting artist in the United States at Tufts University, Boston; Harvard University, Cambridge; and the Parsons School of Design in New York City. In 2011 she was a prize-winner at the “Now&After” video festival. She was nominated for the Kandinsky Prize in 2017. Her work is represented in the permanent collections of The Hermitage Museum; The Tretyakov Gallery; The Russian Museum, St. Petersburg; the Moscow Museum of Modern Art; The National Centre for Contemporary Arts; The National Centre of Photography ROSPHOTO, St. Petersburg,;The Saratov Art Museum; and many regional art museums in Russia; the Otten Kunstraum (Austria); and the Wooyang Museum of Contemporary art, Korea. Ms. Mityanskaya lives in Moscow.

The Joseph Brodsky Fellowship Fund came into existence after the Nobel Prize-winning poet’s death in 1996, as a way of honoring his vision for fostering creativity within the international community. The Fund’s mission is to support Russian writers and visual artists by offering them the opportunity to live and work as part of a dynamic and stimulating international cultural environment, 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, 501(c)3 tax-exempt organization organization supported entirely by individual donors and independent foundations, to whom it is deeply grateful.

 

Contact: Elena Vitenberg, elenavitenberg@gmail.com, Russian Programs Manager