Grzegorz Kwiatkowski Continues as Artist-in-Residence in 2026

The Fortunoff Video Archive is proud to announce that Grzegorz Kwiatkowski will continue his Artist-in-Residence in 2026, extending the work he began with the Archive in 2025.

Kwiatkowski, a distinguished Polish poet, musician, academic, and human rights activist, has earned international recognition for work that confronts violence, genocide, memory, and the persistence of hatred in the present. During the first year of his residency, Kwiatkowski wrote a series of poems based on testimonies from the Fortunoff Archive. In 2026, he continues to develop a major new body of work rooted in testimony from the Fortunoff Video Archive. What began during his residency in 2025 now evolves in expanded form as an interdisciplinary project bringing together poetry, sound, voice, music, moving image, and performance.

A central part of this next phase is Kwiatkowski’s collaboration with Aleksander Makowski, the Archive’s 2026–2027 Laurel Fox Vlock Fellow. Together, they are developing the musical, visual, conceptual, and performative dimensions of the Fortunoff-based poetry project, bringing together testimony, poetry, sound, and film.

During the second year of his residency, Kwiatkowski will also continue to work closely with Peter Constantine on the final English-language manuscript of the Fortunoff poems. Constantine is one of the most distinguished literary translators working today, a Guggenheim Fellow and recipient of major honors including the PEN Translation Prize and the National Translation Award.

Kwiatkowski will also continue to present his poetry project at universities and cultural venues in the United States and abroad. These events help bring the Fortunoff Archive into conversation with students, scholars, and a wider public audience.

Kwiatkowski and Makowski aim to complete the film and performance project in 2026 and debut the project in Gdańsk, Poland, in 2027, at the Museum of the Second World War. In this way, the Fortunoff poetry project will expand beyond the written word and extend the Archive’s mission into new artistic, intellectual, and international contexts.