Introducing the FLAD/AiR 351 grant recipients for 2022: Yomna Osman and Ian Soroka

Yomna Osman (Egypt, 1990) is an independent curator, writer, and researcher. Yomna believes that transnational artistic dialogue is vital to decoloniality and decolonial sensemaking. Through a multidisciplinary discourse built mostly on non-western fiction, philosophy, and urban networks, her practice lives in the crevices between appearance and disappearance. She has curated exhibitions, performances, and screenings at various institutions including Círculo de Bellas Artes, Madrid; The Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco; Fondation Fiminco, Paris, among others. She has held various curatorial positions at KADIST, San Francisco; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; ArteEast, New York, among others. Yomna holds a dual BA from the American University in Cairo in International and Public Law and History; and a dual MA from the California College of Arts in Curatorial Practice and Visual Criticism.

We look forward to welcoming Yomna to our Cascais headquarters for a residency of 4 months, starting in September.

Ian Soroka (New York City, 1987) is a filmmaker and artist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. His work weaves between landscape, embedded histories, memory politics and social relations to nature. Combining diaristic forms of the avant-garde with a commitment to the documentary, his work reveals landscape as a site of contemporary political struggle—as a social space under constant reconfiguration, erasure and re-inscription. He studied cinema and philosophy at the University of Colorado in Boulder, in Prague at FAMU, and earned an M.S. in Art, Culture and Technology at MIT School of Architecture and Planning. His recent film GREETINGS FROM FREE FORESTS (Lep pozdrav iz svobodnih gozdov) was awarded the Grand Prix of the International Competition at its premiere at Doclisboa in 2018. Ian is a MacDowell Colony Fellow, a Princess Grace Foundation award recipient, and a Fulbright Fellow to Slovenia, where he was a guest researcher at the Slovenian National Film Archive and Cinematheque. His work has been awarded internationally and has screened in festival, gallery and museum contexts including: Art of The Real at Film Society of Lincoln Center, The Doc’s Kingdom Film Seminar, Rencontres Internationales (Paris, Berlin, Madrid), Dokufest Kosovo, DOXA Vancouver, Beldocs Belgrade, Open City London, DokFest Munich, and Kinoteka Ljubljana.

We wish to thank all applicants for their interest in this open call, to the selection committee members (Nathalie Anglès, Isabel Carlos and Sébastien Pluot) and to FLAD (Luso-American Development Foundation) for making this opportunity possible.

We look forward to welcoming Yomna to our Cascais headquarters for a residency of 4 months.