The Civita Institute is excited to announce our newest fellows! For our 2020 application cycle, we received an incredibly diverse group of applications from across the United States. The four fellows—thoughtfully selected by a jury comprised of five deeply experienced Seattle-based creative professionals—all proposed developing unique layers of research to add to the extensive collection of work generated throughout the more than 30 years of the Civita Institute's fellowship program. We invite you to read more about them and their projects below.

Thank you to our diligent jury that included Board Member Anita H. Lehmann, a registered architect, artist, illustrator, and educator; incoming Board Member Cathy Dempsey, a project manager with over 30 years of experience in the development world; Dr. Dennis Ryan
University of Washington professor in architecture, planning and urban design, and past visiting professor at the UW Rome CenterVikram Sami, AIA, director for building performance at Olson Kundig; and 2019 fellow Janet Neuhauser, a professional photographer, artist, and educator.

Thank you also to Mark Drexler and the Drexler Family and Partners in Design for their support of our two sponsored fellowships. 

2020 FELLOWS

BeAnne Hull, Civita Institute Advanced Career Fellowship

BeAnne is a graphic designer and educator who likes to paint her food, especially if it includes fresh vegetables or luscious fruits! She was a Design Department faculty member for 20 years at Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle and still runs art workshops and loves getting students of all ages excited about creating visual art.

BeAnne will be amplifying her passion for all things food-related by engaging in a serious study of the history, production, distribution, consumption and sharing of food in the region of Civita di Bangioregio. Regional cuisine has always been critical to cultural cohesion. As a designer, educator, artist and foodie with a love for colors, shapes, textures, smells, tastes and every other aspect of the essential experience of eating, BeAnne proposes to create illustrated story lines on the specificity of food in this unique location.

Il Giardino di Tony - Beanne Hull


 

Anthony Angelilli, Astra Zarina Early Career Fellowship

Anthony Angelilli currently works and resides in Youngstown, Ohio. A native of blue-collar working-class people, Anthony was exposed early to different work strategies while installing tile floors and brick patios. These processes influenced his approach to making art, as he experiments with raw materials and paint to acquire specific textures, colors, and lines. He is also fascinated by the way information is retrieved, and how visual, and verbal language constantly changes.

Anthony proposes to make a series of intimate paintings and drawings using found raw materials and paint. In particular, he will study and question how memory is retrieved and erased through humanity's indexical mark with technology, and in correlation to Civita di Bagnoregio’s complex layers of geology, architecture, and construction.

The Limits of Power III - Anthony Angelilli


 

Angela Prosper, Drexler Family Diversity Fellowship

Angela's background is in photography, design, and editorial writing, and she recently started her own design company, Rainy Day Prosper. Her love of photography inspired her to volunteer at the Photographic Center Northwest for the last eight years, both as a digital lab monitor and assisting with their annual auctions and events. She is also passionate about supporting minority-run small and micro businesses in Washington.

Angela’s proposal, Lost in Translation: The Power of Sustainable Food and the Potential Extinction of Cultural Heritage, is a genesis project that seeks to illuminate what it means to eat sustainably and how traditional ethnic foods and recipes are at risk of disappearing from our cultural heritage. Part cookbook, part culinary love letter, and part cautionary tale, Lost in Translation will be a collection of local food traditions. Through immersive culinary experiences, interviews, recipe documentation, gardening, and photographic storytelling, she will study how sustainable food production contributes to the community of Civita and its producers, farmers, restaurants, and families that have lived in the region for hundreds of years, and explore what the potential extinction of this cultural heritage in sustainable food practices might mean for future generations in Civita.

Lost in Translation - Angela Prosper


 

Angela Brooks and Lawrence Scarpa, Partners in Design Climate Action Fellowship

Angela Brooks, FAIA, LEEDTM Accredited Professional, BD+C, ENV SP and principal at BROOKS + SCARPA, is a recognized leader in the field of environmental and social-equity design. She believes that it is not enough to create great buildings and has worked to create complete neighborhoods. With Lawrence Scarpa, she co-founded a non-profit called Livable Places to promote good policy, density and livable communities, lectures extensively on these topics and was 2018 Chair of the National AIA’s Committee on the Environment (COTE), developing programs and advocating for policy changes at the Federal level-promoting design that achieves high levels of performance.

Lawrence Scarpa is an architect based in Los Angeles, California, whose firm BROOKS + SCARPA has received more than 50 major design awards, including the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum Award in Architecture and the 2010 AIA Architecture Firm Award. Considered a pioneer and leader in the field of sustainable design, he often using conventional materials in unexpected ways, and views each project as an opportunity to rethink the way things normally get done—with material, form, construction, even financing. Currently on the faculty at the University of Southern California, he has taught and lectured at the university level for more than two decades.

Angela and Lawrence’s fellowship will investigate qualities that have enriched hill towns in the region and Civita di Bagnoregio’s timeless culture: local climate, integration of building and site, regional materials and vernacular technologies. They will identify, study and document a handful of significant and common historic structures/places that are model examples of how passive design strategies lead to design excellence and enrich cultural and civic identity. Much can be learned from the historic adaptive reuse of buildings and places in the diverse climatic regions of Italy and the built environment’s contribution to a sense of place for these communities. Culling principles of design that can be translated from the hill towns of Italy to the metropolis of Los Angeles will contribute to an understanding of what makes places special and loved by people.

Video: Purpose + Place


 

Harlan Hambright, 2021 Civita Institute Creative Retreatant

Harlan Hambright, Civita Di Bagnoregio

Harlan Hambright, Civita Di Bagnoregio

Micaela Skoknic, 2018 Civita Institute Northeast Chapter Fellow

Civita Preservation Alternatives - Micaela Skoknic


 

Taehyung Kim, 2018 Civita Institute Dennis Tate Fellow

Haptic Reading of Civita - Taehyung Kim