New Brodsky Fellows: A. Belyakov & A. Filippov

PRESS RELEASE Sepetmber, 4, 2012 The Joseph Brodsky Memorial Fellowship Fund is pleased to announce the 2012 fellowships in poetry and the visual arts. The fellowship in poetry has been awarded to Alexander Belyakov and the fellowship in the visual arts has been awarded to Andrey Filippov. The fellowships will enable Mr. Belyakov and Mr. Filippov to spend the fall of 2012 in Rome, studying classical and contemporary Italian culture, developing their own projects, and interacting with artists and scholars from other parts of the world. The Brodsky Fund partners with the American Academy in Rome to house the fellows and provide them with a dynamic and nourishing intellectual community. Alexander Belyakov was born in 1962 and graduated from Yaroslavl University Department of Mathematics in 1984. Belyakov worked as a software engineer, journalist, editor and as a head of the regional administration press office. He began publishing poems in 1988 and his first collection, Comfortlessness Ark, appeared in 1992. Belyakov is now the author of five poetry collections and numerous publications in major literary magazines in Russia, including Znamya, Druzhba narodov, Vozdukh, and others. Belyakov also translates poetry from English and his own poems have been translated into other languages, including Italian. Andrey Filippov was born in 1959 in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsk, Russia, and graduated from the Moscow Art Theater School. He helped establish Russian conceptual art in the 1980s and 90s and, in 1987, became a member of Club of Avantgardists. In 2009, together with Yuri Albert and Victor Skersis, he founded the art group Сupid. He has had numerous solo exhibitions at galleries and museums in Moscow, including the Stella Art Gallery, E.K. ArtBureau, Proekt Fabrika, and the Multimedia Art Museum. He has also had solo exhibitions in Germany and Greece. His work has been featured in group shows in Russia, Germany, Greece, Spain, Italy, and France. Filippov lives and works in Moscow. The Joseph Brodsky Memorial Fellowships are supported by the Mikhail Prokhorov Foundation, a private charity launched in 2004 by the businessman Mikhail Prokhorov. The Foundation’s priority is the support and development of new cultural institutions and initiatives in Russia, as well the promotion of Russian culture in the global intellectual community. Support for the fellowship in visual arts was also provided by the Trust for Mutual Understanding. Established in 1984, the Trust supports cultural and environmental exchanges conducted in partnership with institutions and individuals in Russia and Central and Eastern Europe. Additional support comes for generous individual donors in the United States and abroad. Joseph Brodsky was a Nobel Laureate in Literature and a distinguished poet and essayist in his native Russia, as well as his second home in the West. The Joseph Brodsky Memorial Fellowship Fund provides Russian artists and writers with periods of work and study in Italy. The Fund had its origins in 1995, when Joseph Brodsky conferred with the mayor of Rome about creating a "Russian Academy in Rome," where Russian artists and writers could revive the once vibrant Russian tradition of artistic pilgrimage to Italy. The Fund was officially established in 1996, soon after Brodsky’s death, by a group of his friends dedicated realizing his vision. In 2000, the Fund began sending poetry fellows to Rome and, in 2002, fellowships for visual artists were added. To date, the Fund has supported fellowships for more than twenty poets and visual artists. The Joseph Brodsky Memorial Fellowship Fund is a nonprofit organization supported by individual donors and independent foundations. We are most grateful to our donors for giving Mr. Brodsky's vision this continuing life. To learn more about the Brodsky Fund, or to receive information about events in New York, please follow our activities on Facebook). Dmitry Kaminker's Improbable Creation Achieves Unanticipated Heights When Joseph Brodsky Memorial Fellow Dmitry Kaminker arrived at the AAR in September 2011 from St. Petersburg, he often introduced himself at dinner as a Russian sculptor who hadn’t brought any tools or materials along with him and who planned to spend his three-month long fellowship enjoying his first vacation in 40 years. So much for initial intentions. By mid October, his “Rome Sustainable Tower Project” had become the community’s conversation piece and a powerfully vivid example of the Academy’s potential to inspire beyond and across fields... Read the rest of the article >>> PRESS RELEASE June, 20, 2011 We are very pleased to announce the 2011 Joseph Brodsky Memorial Fellowship Fund poetry and art fellowships. The new poetry fellow will be poet Dmitry Vedenyapin. The new art fellow will be Dmitry Kaminker. Dmitry Vedenyapin was born October, 14, 1958, in Moscow. He graduated from Moscow State Pedagogical Institute of Foreign Languages. His works were published only outside the USSR during the Soviet era, but since 1987 his poetry was have been published in numerous magazines including “Oktyabr”, « Novy mir», “Znamya”, “Novaya Yunost”, “Postscriptum”, and many others. Vedenyapin is the author of four poetry collections. He won the Big Moscow Score Poetry Prize in 2010 for the book “Mezhdu shkafom I nebom” (“Between the wardrobe and the sky”). His poems have been translated into English. The other important part of Vedenyapin’s work is translation. He is widely recognized as a translator of both poetry and fiction from English (Michael Cunningham, Bruce Chatwin, Arthur Miller, etc.), French and German. Dmitry Kaminker was born in 1949 in Leningrad. From 1969 until 1973 he studied at the Mukhina Art College in the Architectural and Decorative Sculpture Department. Dmitry Kaminker is the creative leader of the “Shuvalovo-Ozerki” group of artists and a founding member of the KruKaKo sculptural international alliance. From 1980 he is a member of the Russian Union of Artists. In 1994-1999 he served as a committee member for the Presidential National Art Prize. In 1993 he was N.Punin Prize-winner of Art Critics of Saint-Petersburg. In 2005 he won Diaghilev Art Prize (St. Petersburg) and also became a laureate of the International Art Festival “Master-class” St. Petersburg in 2007. Now he is a permanent participant of project "Artist's village", St. Petersburg, Russia. Dmitry Kaminker is an acknowledged master, the bearer of deep cultural traditions. He uses classical method of three-dimensional thinking together with new awareness of the form. Both fellows will serve a two months fellowship in Rome and Venice during the fall of the year 2011. Both fellowships are made possible by generous gifts from Mr. Mikhail Prokhorov, chairman of “Polyus Gold” Company and President of ONEXIM Group and Trust for Mutual Understanding. Joseph Brodsky Memorial Fellowship Fund is also pleased to announce the publication of an anthology of the works of former Brodsky Fund fellows this spring (“New Literary Review” Publishing House, Moscow), edited by Claudia Scandura of the University of Rome. Joseph Brodsky was a Nobel laureate in literature and a distinguished poet in his native Russia as well as his second home in the West. In the fall of 1995 he made an appeal to the mayor of Rome that a Russian Academy in Rome be established, to allow Russian artists, writers, and scholars periods of work and study in Italy. He urged that seventy years of isolation under communist rule had broken a much older tradition of cultural exchange between Russia and her European neighbors; he wished to revive this tradition with the creation of an independent academy devoted to literature, culture, and scholarship. As he wrote to the mayor, "Italy was a revelation to the Russians; now it can become the source of their renaissance." When he died in 1996 his vision was taken up by a group of his friends, who set up foundations in the US and Italy to realize it. The Joseph Brodsky Memorial Fellowship Fund is funded by private donation and independent foundations. We are most grateful to our donors for giving Mr. Brodsky's vision this continuing life. For more information, please contact: Ann Kjellberg, New York (212) 645 3346