This year’s cohort of Institute fellows brings Columbia faculty and post-docs together with creative artists of global renown, including Cannes prize-winning animated filmmaker João Gonzalez and the Mexican writer Guadalupe Nettel.

The new Fellows are working on a range of topics, such as the symbiotic relationship between humans and bees, artificial intelligence in music composition, early modern ideas of race and classical revival, and the terrifying sublime in landscape photography.

The 2024-25 Visiting Institute for Ideas and Imagination Professor will be the award-winning translator and former Fellow, Yasmine Seale, who will be teaching graduate and undergraduate courses on the Morningside campus.

Kamal Aljafari
GERMANY/PALESTINE
2024/2025
The Museum of Days

A Palestinian filmmaker based in Berlin, Kamal Aljafari is known for his distinctive approach to cinema. He studied at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne and has held teaching positions at The New School in New York and the Deutsche Film-und Fernsehakademie in Berlin. He was awarded a Radcliffe Fellowship at Harvard University and was a fellow of the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France. His installation “The Camera of the Dispossessed” was shown at the 35th Bienal de São Paulo in 2023. Aljafari was also honored at IndieLisboa 2024 with a full retrospective of his work at the Portuguese Cinematheque. His most recent work, “A Fidai Film,” premiered this year at the Visions du Réel International Film Festival in Nyon. At the Institute, Aljafari will be working on “The Museum of Days,” an extension of his trilogy of films set in post 1948 Jaffa.

Jana Ndiaye Berankova
CZECH REPUBLIC/FRANCE
Columbia University
2024/2025

Building the Independence: Architecture, Urban Planning, and Political Thought in Senegal 1960–1989

Jana Ndiaye Berankova is an art and architecture theorist, philosopher, writer, and publisher. She studied art history and comparative literature at the École normale supérieure and the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (Paris, France) and architecture at Columbia University, where she completed her PhD dissertation on architecture theory and French philosophy. At the Institute, Berankova will be working on a project focusing on the theoretical discourse on architecture and urban planning between the 1960s and the end of 1980s in Senegal. Together with her husband, she founded a non-profit publishing house Suture Press focusing on carefully designed hardback books on continental philosophy, contemporary art, and architectural theory.

Hiba Bou Akar
LEBANON
Columbia University
2024/2025
Sedimentary Urbanization

Hiba Bou Akar teaches in the Urban Planning program at Columbia GSAPP. Her research focuses on planning in conflict and post-conflict cities, the question of urban security and violence, and the role of religious political organizations in the making of cities. Her For the War Yet to Come: Planning Beirut’s Frontiers (Stanford University Press, 2018) won the 2019 Nikki Keddie Book Award and the 2019 Anthony Leeds Prize. At the Institute, Bou Akar will be working on “Sedimentary Urbanization,” an ethnographic and archival book project investigating how low-income Lebanese families and Syrian refugees access affordable housing in Beirut’s peripheries.

Kate Daudy
UNITED KINGDOM
Abigail R. Cohen Fellow
2024/2025
Telling the Bees

Kate Daudy is a British conceptual artist internationally recognised for her public interventions and large-scale outdoor sculpture., who works across a wide variety of media.

Inventive, complex, and celebratory, Daudy’s projects involve collaborations with people in all fields: science, digital technology, mathematics, poetry, music, a perfume house, the ancient world, and farming. This has led to museum exhibitions, citywide takeovers in Palermo, Spain, Manchester, London and New York City. Her works, a lot of them ephemeral, are juxtaposed in locations ranging from Saint Paul’s Cathedral and the Glastonbury Music Festival bus stops and writings on the back of a sheep.

Throughout their long-standing collaboration, Daudy and Nobel Prize-winning physicist Kostya Novoselov have produced experimental work that has been exhibited throughout the world, and have written a book, Wonderchaos, which explores the concepts of randomness and chaos through art. Kate will be spending time at NASA’s Cape Canaveral in June 2025.

Her interest in the poet Federico Garcia Lorca led to an exhibition in Granada and a commission by the Lorca Centre that includes a concrete poetry project, in which Daudy will read poems to honey inside a weightless vacuum box.

Upcoming projects include a retrospective exhibition at the Sorbonne in February 2025 and screenings of her film work at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York City.

At the Institute, Daudy will be working on "Telling the Bees," a project exploring, through an historical study of humankind’s symbiotic relationship with his environment and with bees in particular, the way we communicate with one another. Through this, she will shed light on questions of faith, collective memory, and the consequences of our personal choices.

Zohar Elmakias
ISRAEL
Columbia University
2024/2025
Minefield, Temple

Zohar Elmakias is a writer, researcher, and translator. She has a BFA in Film Studies, an MA in Cultural Studies, and received her PhD in anthropology from Columbia in 2023. Her debut novel Terminal was published in Hebrew in 2020 and her essays, short stories, and articles have been published on various literary and academic platforms. At the Institute, Elmakias will be working on Minefield, Temple, a book project based on her doctoral dissertation. The book offers a hybrid form of literature, located at the juxtaposition of ethnography and autoethnography, theory, travelogue, and (science) fiction.

João Gonzalez
PORTUGAL
Director's Council Fellow
2024/2025
Nórua

João Gonzalez is an Oscar-nominated Portuguese director, animator, illustrator, and musician with a classical training in piano. His short film "Ice Merchants," which premiered in Cannes Film Festival in 2022 and was awarded the Critics Week Jury Prize for Best Short Film, was the first ever Portuguese film to receive an Oscar nomination, and is currently the most awarded Portuguese film of all time, having received more than 130 international awards. João has a great interest in combining his musical background with his artistic practice, as composer and occasional instrumentalist in all the films he makes. At the Institute, Gonzalez will be working on a film about regret, forgiveness, telephones, and communication, where no words are spoken.

Will Harris
UNITED KINGDOM
2024/2025
Family Scenario

Will Harris is the author of poetry books RENDANG (2020) and Brother Poem (2023). He has won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. He co-translated Habib Tengour’s Consolatio (Poetry Translation Centre) with Delaina Haslam in 2022, and helps facilitate the Southbank New Poets Collective with Vanessa Kisuule. At the Institute, Harris will be working on a project about the public care system, looking at its structuring tensions: race, class, and the family itself. It will draw on a diary kept over several months working in care homes in East London in the period immediately after the pandemic.

Daniel Levin Becker
UNITED STATES
2024/2025
Nina Yargekov's Double nationalité

Daniel Levin Becker is a writer, editor, and translator based in Paris. He has been a member of the literary collective Oulipo since 2009. He is the author of Many Subtle Channels: In Praise of Potential Literature (2012) and What’s Good: Notes on Rap and Language (2022) and the translator of books by authors including, most recently, Jakuta Alikavazovic, Éric Chevillard, and Laurent Mauvignier. At the Institute, Levin Becker will be working on an English translation of Nina Yargekov’s Double nationalité (2016), a long novel in which a young amnesiac with dual citizenship slowly pieces together her identity, both personally and geopolitically.

Lauren Robertson
UNITED STATES
Columbia University2024/2025
Reclaiming Rome

Lauren Robertson is Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where she works on early modern literature and culture. She is the author of Entertaining Uncertainty in the Early Modern Theater: Stage Spectacle and Audience Response (Cambridge 2023), and her articles appear in Shakespeare Studies, Renaissance Drama, Shakespeare Quarterly, English Literary Renaissance, and Theatre Journal. At the Institute, Robertson will be working on her next book project, “Reclaiming Rome.” Offering a new account of imitatio in the English Renaissance, she uncovers the shared aesthetics of early modern race-making and classical revival.

Mae Ngai
UNITED STATES
Columbia University
2024/2025
A Nation of Immigrants: A Short History of an Idea

Mae Ngai is Lung Family Professor of Asian American Studies and professor of history at Columbia. Major publications include Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (2004) and The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and Global Politics (2021). She writes commentary on immigration and Asian American issues for the New York Times, The Atlantic, and other publications. While at the Institute, Ngai will be working on A Nation of Immigrants: A Short History of an Idea, a book based on the Lawrence Stone lectures delivered at Princeton University. An intellectual and political history of the American liberal narrative of inclusion from the Cold War to 1980, it addresses major tropes such as "nation of immigrants," "American Dream," and "Land of Refuge," showing how they are products of history and not timeless national ideals.

Guadalupe Nettel
MEXICO
2024/2025
The Book of Anger

Guadalupe Nettel is a Mexican writer, author of award-winning novels and collections of short stories translated into more than twenty languages. In 2008 she received a PhD in Literature from the EHESS in Paris. Her work has been adapted into theater and film. At the Institute, Nettel will be working on a novel, The Book of Anger. In her family tree, Alicia has several famously angry ancestors. So much so that this trait has become one of the distinguishing features of the family. What exactly is anger? Where does this emotion come from that can lead us to hurt those we love most or to destroy, in a short period of time, what has cost us so much effort to build? These are some of the questions that Alicia asks to herself in her internal monologue.

George Lewis
UNITED STATES
Columbia University, Abigail R. Cohen Fellow
2024/2025
Finding the Sound of Freedom: Artificial Intelligence in Real-Time Musical Creativity

George Lewis is an American composer, musicologist, and trombonist. He is Professor of American Music at Columbia University and Artistic Director of the International Contemporary Ensemble, as well as a member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, and a member of the Akademie der Künste Berlin. At the Institute, Lewis will work on a 15-minute work for the Grossman Ensemble, a resident new music group at the University of Chicago, using a combination of instrumental with artificial intelligence techniques.

Tomas van Houtryve
BELGIUM
2024/2025
Terrifying Sublime: Synthetic Alpine Landscapes

Tomas van Houtryve is a photographer who uses a wide range of contemporary and early techniques, continually questioning and reinventing his approach to image-making. He spent a year documenting the efforts to save Notre Dame from ruin after the devastating fire of 2019. A selection of his honors includes the ICP Infinity Award, the Bayeux Prize for War Correspondents, the CatchLight Global Fellowship, a National Geographic Explorer's Grant, and the Roger Pic Award. He published Lines and Lineage in 2019. Represented by the Baudoin Lebon gallery in Paris, he is a member of VII Photo Agency since 2010. At the Institute, van Houtryve will be working on “Terrifying Sublime: Synthetic Alpine Landscapes,” employing photography and video to explore the reversal of our power relationship with nature since the notion of the sublime became a prominent concept in art and philosophy.

Lynn Xu
SHANGHAI
Columbia University, Abigail R. Cohen Fellow
2024/2025
Fusang

Born in Shanghai, Lynn Xu is a poet and Assistant Professor of Writing at the School of the Arts. She is the author of Debts & Lessons (2013) and And Those Ashen Heaps That Cantilevered Vase of Moonlight (2022), selected for the Poetry Center Book Award, and co-translator of Pee Poems by Yang Licai (aka Lao Yang). She has performed multidisciplinary works at 300 South Kelly Street, the Guggenheim Museum, the Renaissance Society, and Rising Tide Projects, and her work was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tucson. She coedits Canarium Books. At the Institute, Xu will be working on a book of poems about the many journeys to Fusang—the mythical place in Classical Chinese literature that then became, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a figure of fascination for the Western imagination.

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