May 2015

Peter Jelavich is professor for modern history at Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore, USA). In his essays and books, such as Berlin Cabaret (1993) and Berlin Alexanderplatz: Radio, Film, and the Death of Weimar Culture (2006) – he analyzes the reciprocity of elite and popular culture, the evolution of mass culture and media as well as the attempts by politicians at regulating culture in Germany.

The writer and publisher Daniela Seel lives and works in Berlin. She has international appearances and collaborates with a number of artists, such as the illustrator Andreas Töpfer, the musician PLANNINGTOROCK, the dancer David Bloom, and the poets Rick Reuther and Robert Stripling.

Daniela Seel:

Currently, I am working on finishing my second book of poems, What Do You Know About Prairie, Actually, which will come out in October. Over the last few years I have been researching "landscapes of imagination", and I am especially interested in the intersections of fiction and reality, in how what we perceive informs our imagination and, vice versa, how our imagination shapes what we will perceive, and what language might have to do with it. Some of the aspects I will be looking into while in California are the history and present of settlement and resources (water, gold, food, light, labor, etc.) and their various, conflicting narrations, the desert, and the National Parks system / movement with its ideas of wilderness. At Meet Our Fellows I will give a reading from my manuscript.

British Artist Anna McCarthy lives and works in Munich. She studied at the Glasgow School of Art and at the Akademie der Bildenden Künsten (Academy of Visual Arts) in Munich.

McCarthy transforms her artistic visions into paintings, drawings, installations, performances, music and film. She has exhibited in a number of international art institutions and musems, among them being Chisenhale Gallery, London, Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, Sunderland, Shedhalle Zuerich and at the Schaustelle Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich.

Anna McCarthy will be working on a number of new video works, including an L.A.-specific sequel to her BORED REBELS series, a short-film commission by the Fassbindertage in Munich, as well as writing and compiling the book HOW TO START A REVOLUTION which covers her multifaceted and longterm project of the same name. For the closing event on the 25th June she will present a new performance developed during her stay in the salon of the Villa Aurora.

Udo Moll's initial musical socialization process took place in the brass orchestra of the city of Uhingen. He studied empirical cultural sciences, musicology, romanistic and new German literature at the Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen.  Furthermore, he studied the jazz trumpet with Manfred Schoof  and composition with Johannes Fritsch at the Music Academy Cologne.

Udo Moll works as a freelance composer, trumpeter and in the field of electronic music.

Cyrill Lachauer grew up in the Inn Valley. He currently lives and works in Berlin and on the road. For a short time, Lachauer studied directing at the University for Television and Film Munich, before enrolling in the ethnologyprogramat Munich University. After earning his M.A. and conducting field work in Columbia, Ladakh/India, and Portugal, Lachauer studied visual arts at the University of Arts Berlin and graduated from a master class with Lothar Baumgarten in 2010. Cyrill Lachauer is the recipent of the 3sat Young Talent Award at the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, the Kunstfonds Foundation fellowship and the Konrad-Adenauer Foundation EHF fellowship (2010), among others. Lachauer co-founded Flipping the Coin Records and Books (2011) und Flipping the Coin Films (2014).

On May 13th, Cyrill Lachauer will present his multimedia work " Full Service". He developed the project from 2012 to 2014 in the United States and just recently  exhibited it in a solo show at Villa Stuck in Munich.

"Full Service" is based on Lachauer's notion of a narrative landscape and on the "Ghost Dance" ritual.

This Native American movement of resistance and revitalisation draws Lachauer into the back country of the American West between Las Vegas and Wounded Knee.

http://cyrilllachauer.net/

Mathilde Bonnefoy is a film editor, director and producer.

She started her career editing Tom Tykwer's RUN LOLA RUN with whom she went on to work on many films (HEAVEN, THE INTERNATIONAL,THREE, and more). She has also worked with Wim Wenders (THE SOUL OF A MAN), Angela Schanelec (ORLY), and others, including, most recently, Laura Poitras, on the Edward Snowden documentary CITIZENFOUR, as editor and producer.

She directed a music video for, and a feature length documentary about the german band RAMMSTEIN, several TV shows, as well as a medium length feature film which she also wrote (INSENSITIVE).

With her husband Dirk Wilutzky, she co-directed and co-produced a series of 30 short documentaries on the subject of sustainability and global justice for the Franco-German TV Channel ARTE.

She has won numerous awards for her work, among others an Academy Award®, a BAFTA, an Independent Spirit Award, two German film academy awards (LOLAs), an ACE award, Gotham, and more. At Villa Aurora she is working on the script for a feature length fiction film.

For more information please got to www.imdb.com

Please note that there will be a screening of Citizenfour on May 18th, 7 pm @ Goethe-Institute Los Angeles

Watch the trailer of Citizenfour here