2026 Residency Fellow
Luciano Chessa
| We are happy to introduce our 2026 Lou Harrison House Residency Fellow, Luciano Chessa, Italian born composer and audiovisual/performance artist. As our 2026 Fellow Luciano will be curating a portion of the season in addition to creating his own performances beginning on Thursday, January 15 with UN-SLIT featuring his atmospheric solo piano and ocarina works tuned to the desert’s undisturbed sound. The evening also includes a collaboration with experimental filmmaker, Rick Bahto, where un-slit regular 8mm film meet vibrations and light, grain and music, unfolding as a shared projected presence. Luciano Chessa’s work has been praised for its immersive, meditative, and conceptually rigorous engagement with sound, movement, and materiality. His art includes assemblage, graphic scoring, painting, opera, sculpture and more. Recent activity includes ‘A Heavenly Act’, an opera-installation commissioned by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; ‘Piombo’, a work for 2bows cello written for Frances-Marie Uitti and commissioned by NYC’s MAGAZZINO Italian Art, and ‘Cena oltranzista nel castelletto al lago’, a 60-hours opera-installation on fasting commissioned by the Festival TRANSART and MUSEION, Bolzano’s Museum of Modern Art. A recording of his solo piano music, Lands End, was released on the Austrian label Col Legno in 2025. Between 2023 and 2024, Chessa was artist in residence at Monaco’s Direction des Affaires Culturelles, where he developed Monaco Mobile, presented at artmonte-carlo, and Monaco Veloce, a performance produced by the Théâtre Princesse Grace in collaboration with leading cultural institutions of Monaco. Beyond his practice as an artist, Chessa is also a leading historian and theorist of twentieth-century Italian art, with a particular focus on Futurism and experimental music. He is the author of Luigi Russolo Futurist. Noise, Visual Arts, and the Occult (2012), the first scholarly monograph to examine Russolo’s decisive shift from painting to the development of the Art of Noise. In 2009, Chessa founded the Orchestra of Futurist Noise Intoners (OFNI), an ensemble dedicated to the reconstruction, performance, and contemporary activation of Russolo’s original noise instruments. The project was acclaimed by The New York Times as one of the best art events of the year and has since been presented internationally at major institutions and festivals, including Rockefeller Center, REDCAT, the New World Center, the ArtScience Museum in Singapore, Radial System / Maerzmusik-Berliner Festspiele, and Lisbon’s Municipal Theater. Through OFNI, Chessa has collaborated with influential musicians and composers such as Joan La Barbara, Mike Patton, Ellen Fullman, Blixa Bargeld, and Pauline Oliveros. In 2014 he presented three events at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum as part of the exhibit ‘Italian Futurism, 1909-1944: Reconstructing the Universe’. Chessa’s work has been written about in Artforum, Flash Art, Art in America, and Frieze, and has been featured in the Italian issue of Marie Claire and Vogue Italia. His work is found in private and museum collections in the United States and Europe. He has been interviewed by the BBC, featured in documentaries produced by RAI World and Vietnamese State Television, and has released recordings on labels including Sub Rosa, Stradivarius, Hat Hut, and Sanatorium of Sound. His compositions and editions are published by Rai Trade, Carrara, and Neue Musik Verlag, among others. |
Upcoming Events:
Past Events:
Previous residency fellows include:
2025 – Dr. Gary Blackwood
2024 – Gyan Riley, Musician / Composer
2022/2023 – Kennedy Verrett, Musician / Composer