Our longest-standing program, the International Summer Program unites a community of international artists for a creative intensive at our East End Campus each summer. The Summer Program provides a unique opportunity to work with established professionals in the international art world, forge an international community of artists from a broad range of experience levels and disciplines, and investigate what it means to be a “global artist.”
From 1992 through 2019, The Summer Program provided young and emerging artists with the opportunity to work with Artistic Director Robert Wilson and his collaborators during research and design workshops, staging rehearsals, and preparations for The Watermill Center’s Annual Summer Benefit & Auction. In 2022, after a two-year hiatus, The Summer Program was reimagined to engage a smaller community of artists, centered on providing the time and space for young and emerging artists to develop new works that push the boundaries of contemporary creative practice in a communal and experimental environment.
Artists-in-Residence receive access to an extensive collection of resources, including; 20,000 square feet of multi-purpose interiors and outdoor stages; a theater production archive; The Watermill Center Library; The Watermill Center Collection; and ten acres of landscaped grounds and sculpture gardens.
ELETTRA BOTTAZZI (she/her/hers)
Italy
Discipline: Performance Art, Academia
Elettra Bottazzi (1989) is an Italian independent curator, art historian, researcher, and archivist. Creative director of amaneï, a residency program in the Aeolian Islands of Salina connected with international institutions to promote and support artists’ work and develop interdisciplinary projects. For many years she has been a participant in The Watermill Center’s International Summer Program as a performer or artists coordinator and performed in Robert Wilson’s theater plays. As archivist of artist Giosetta Fioroni, she curated many exhibitions, including the retrospective at Museo del Novecento in Milan. Elettra writes for magazines and catalogs. She worked as artistic production coordinator for historical displays and on projects with artists and filmmakers (Peter Greenaway, Jan Fabre, and Robert Wilson) in various museums (Louvre, New York Armory, Fondazione Prada and Venice Biennale). She curates several exhibitions of emerging artists where her practice reflects on themes such as memory and identity through an interdisciplinary approach of anthropology, history, and linguistic studies concerning human feelings in visible and invisible worlds. She lives between Rome and Salina.
ROBSON CATALUNHA (he/him/his)
Brazil
Discipline: Multidisciplinary
Robson Catalunha is a multidisciplinary artist and master´s degree student in Performing Arts at the University of São Paulo. He studied at CPT, a training and development school, based on the methodology created by Antunes Filho – one of the most important Brazilian directors. In 2016, he was directed by Bob Wilson in “Garrincha – A Street Opera” and in 2017 and 2018 was one of the resident artists of The International Summer Program, at The Watermill Center. Most recently, he has been developing projects and partnerships with artists from different countries, having already performed in Stockholm (Sweden), New York (United States), Mindelo (Cape Verde, Africa), Zagreb (Museum of Contemporary Art – Croatia) and Whuzen (China). Currently, he has been researching the territory of VR (Virtual Reality) and crossing the boundaries between the theater, dance, installation, and performance, which resulted in the works: “The Hybrid” – nominated for the APCA Award 2021 in the category “new scenic formats”-, “Between” (2021) and “Traved (2021) – a lecture-performance in virtual reality”. He also was honored by the City Council of São Paulo for the work of excellence developed in the artistic and cultural area.
DENIZ CELEBIC (she/her/hers)
Bosnia, Herzegovina, Turkey
Discipline: Multidisciplinary
Deniz Celebic is a half Turkish and half Bosnian multidisciplinary artist who completed her undergraduate education at Boğaziçi University in Literature and went on to receive her Master’s degree in International Screenwriting and Production at Universita Cattolica de’l Sacro Cuore in Italy. Her performance art based theatre play and documentary project “”Moja Kuca””, received production support from the Ministry of Culture and Tourism of the Republic of Turkey and was accepted to the Talents Sarajevo program at the Sarajevo Film Festival in collaboration with Berlinale Talents. Her most recent play was staged at Scena MESS International Theater Festival in Sarajevo, and saw Celebic became one of the few writers selected for Istanbul City Theaters’ New Writers Project. Celebic regularly performs with her twin sister at prominent museums and venues in Turkey and abroad such as IKSV Salon, Galata Perform. At Kaimera Productions’s Lab in France, they developed new forms of live performance, particularly on works that are immersive and site-specific. Most recently, they performed at Musem of Crimes Against Humanity and Genocide in Sarajevo.
YELIZ CELEBIC (she/her/hers)
Bosnia, Herzegovina, Turkey
Discipline: Multidisciplinary
Half Bosnian and Turkish, Yeliz Celebic has worked for various multidisciplinary projects as a performer, writer, movement and experience designer. She received education which mainly focuses on Classical Ballet, Performative Staging and Acting and Performance Art at some private and public institutions such as State Conservatory of Istanbul and Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, The Contemporary Performing Arts Centre of Istanbul Municipality Theatre, Attis Theatre, Marina Abramovic Institute. Celebic attended international programs such as CEMEA Culture Lab Programme held in Avignon Festival, IPEDAM Ethnochoreology & Dance Anthropology Programme held in Norweigan University of Trondheim and Kaimera Live Performances Lab in France. After, she worked for Kerkis Teatro Antico In Scena in Milan. She has realized several site-specific, immersive performances such as in The Museum of Crimes against Humanity and Genocide in Sarajevo, Château de Belloy Saint-Léonard in France, Hamursuz Jewish Bakery in Istanbul and worked for Berlinale Talents awarded “Moja Kuca” Project with Deniz Celebic. Celebic holds a BA in History from Boğaziçi University and MA in Arts Management from Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore,Milan.
NINI DONGNIER (she/her/hers)
China, United States, Canada
Discipline: Interdisciplinary, Dance
NiNi Dongnier is a choreographer, interdisciplinary artist, and performer, born in Inner Mongolia, works in New York, Beijing, Vancouver. She holds an MFA focus on Choreography & Media Art from New York University. Dongnier creates dance, performance, moving image, soft sculpture, and choreographic coding experiments. Rooted in the northern trans-border nomadic culture, philosophies, and art, her art explores metaphysics of body, motion, and its relation to the compound spatiotemporal, ecological, and technological contexts that shaping realities in the moment. Conveying an interest in embodied memory, ritual, migration, landscape, and the structure and cultural entanglement behind them. Her recent works have been presented by Movement Research at Judson Church, The Watermill Center, La MaMa|CultureHub, NYLA, Mana Contemporary, MOCO: Movement & Computing, China National Theatre for the Performing Arts, A4 Art Museum, OCAT, Ming Contemporary Art Museum, Gaotai Gallery, Aranya Art Center, received commissions from Shanghai International Dance Center and Media Art Xploration. She is also an assistant professor in the School for the Contemporary Arts, Simon Fraser University.
LAURENT LE GALL (he/him/his)
France
Discipline: Dance
Laurent Le Gall is a professional contemporary dancer, based in Aix-en-Provence, France. At the age of seventeen, he went to study contemporary dance at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse de Paris, first under the direction of Daniel Agésilas, and then Clairemarie Osta. In 2013, Le Gall moved to New York City as a full scholarship recipient at the Peridance Capezio Center, thanks to Igal Perry, founder and director of the school. In 2014, back in Europe, he worked for renowned choreographers as Andonis Foniadakis, Laura Scozzi, Eugénie Andrin and Michel Kelemenis. Since 2017, he has been a permanent dancer at Ballet Preljocaj led by the famous choreographer Angelin Preljocaj. Between 2016 and 2018, he participated in The Watermill Center’s Annual Summer Benefit, where he performed works by Robert Wilson, Marianna Kavallieratos and John Margaritis.
CHRISTOPHER KNOWLES (he/him/his)
United States
Discipline: Multidisciplinary
Christopher Knowles (b. 1959) is an American multidisciplinary artist who works in poetry, painting, sound art, performance, and sculpture. Since the early 1970s, he has remixed visual and sonic material from popular culture to create vibrant new vocabularies that expand our understanding of information systems. His work pushes into the gaps between language, sound, and the visual image, creating a hybrid, reparative method of communication that blends the concrete and the abstract. Knowles’s work has been exhibited in many solo and group showings internationally, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Musée Galliera in Paris, the 2006 Whitney Biennial, and the Tate Modern, London. Beginning in the early 1970s, Knowles collaborated on the creation of a series of theater works staged by the Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds under the direction of Robert Wilson. He wrote the libretto for Wilson and Philip Glass’s 1976 opera Einstein on the Beach. A book of his typewriter poems, Typings 1974-1977 was published by Vehicle Editions in 1979. In 2015, the Institute for Contemporary Arts, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia presented a retrospective exhibition of his work titled Christopher Knowles: In a Word. His 2012-2015 solo performance The Sundance Kid is Beautiful with Christopher Knowles was presented at the Louvre Museum, the Whitebox Gallery in New York, and the ICA, Philadelphia. His poetry has been published in a variety of magazines and journals, including The New Yorker, The Village Voice, Interview, and Office magazines. Knowles’s two and three-dimensional works are held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, The Watermill Center, and numerous other institutional and private collections. He lives and works in New York City.
TAEYI LIM (she/her/hers)
Republic of Korea
Discipline: Dance
Taeyi Lim is a Korean multi-disciplinary artist who has been working as a choreographer, dancer, and performer. She received her Master’s of Choreography from the School of Dance at the Korea National University of Arts.
Lim’s work manifests her attempts to add intuitive views on phenomena through what she dubs ‘Ionian choreography’. Her current work has been developed and informed largely by dance/action theater technique.
Lim has worked closely with artists from various backgrounds. She was an Artist-in-Residence at The Watermill Center as part of the 2018 and 2019 International Summer Programs. Her work, “Roll My Dice” was presented during The Center’s 2019 Annual Summer Benefit. She is a dance instructor, delegated artist of Arts Council Korea, and member of the independent creator collective, Wombs.
NICCOLÒ MASINI (he/him/his)
Italy
Discipline: Multidisciplinary, Academia
Niccolò Masini is an artist, filmmaker and researcher whose work stands at the intersection of narrative and craft, but also poetry and anthropology. His work seeks to provide a vehicle for observing tangible and intangible migratory processes, mappings, and traces in relationship to borders and colonization, together with the economic and political forces that have imposed precarious labor conditions and attenuated other histories. Entwining moving-image, creative methodology, experimental ethnography and teaching, his research engages with the limits of the possible and the impossible by recognizing a starting point in the re-discovery of the indeterminate, the unknown, the unquantifiable. He holds a BFA in Animation and Illustration from the European Institute of Design – Milan (2011), a BFA in Audiovisual Arts at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy of Amsterdam (2015), and an MFA in art praxis and research at the DAI / Arnhem (2021). Winner of numerous prizes, competitions, grants and residencies, his work has been exhibited internationally and in 2018, he was awarded the Best Young Artist Of The Year (Painting & Sculpture) by the GAMMA competition and GM conference of Tokyo.
HOLLIE MILLER (she/her/hers)
United Kingdom
Discipline: Multidisciplinary, Dance
Hollie Miller is a performance artist with an interdisciplinary practice and background in contemporary dance. Select international performances include: MEM Experimental Festival Bilbao, Land Art Biennale Art Safiental, Revolve Performance Art Days (Sweden), London’s Biennale of International Performance Art & Noise, Apulia Land Art Festival and 100 Years DADA (Japan). Solo/ two person UK exhibitions include: San Mei Gallery, South Kiosk, UK Mexican Arts Society, Airspace Gallery, NewBridge Project and Baltic39 Gallery. Her short films have been shown at feminist film festivals internationally and in 2019 she won The Next Thing Moving Image Award at Bury Art Museum (UK). She has been artist in residence at: Hogchester Arts (UK), NAIRS Contemporary Art Centre (Switzerland), Serlachius Museum (Finland) and La Ira de Dios (Argentina). She holds an MA from Royal College of Art (2016) and a BPA from Northern School of Contemporary Dance (2010).
VILIM POLJANEC (he/him/his)
Croatia
Discipline: Dance
Vilim Poljanec is a Croatian contemporary dancer born in 1997 in Čakovec, Croatia. In the year 2020 he graduated from Salzburg Experimental Academy of Dance. Vilim furthered his training through summer intensive at Nederlands Dance Theater. In the year 2020 he had the opportunity to be part of staging process of Bob Wilson’s opera „Der Messias“ at Salzburger Festspiele. In the same year he reperformed solo work „Étude V“ by choreographer Pau Aran Gimeno (Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch). He has presented his own work at Zrinski ART Festival and Šibenik Dance Festival in Croatia. In 2021 he performed works by Wayne McGregor and Crystal Pite at the Venice Biennale. In 2022 he is associated with Metamorphosis Dance Company in Madrid, Spain, while also developing his own work.