Selection Panel
Participants of the April residency programme are selected by the international Selection Panel and April team. Applications for the 2026 competition will be evaluated by writer Akvilina Cicėnaitė, curator and writer Raimundas Malašauskas, curator, editor, and critic Yana Foqué, and poet and playwright Vaiva Grainytė.
AKVILINA CICĖNAITĖ (1979, Vilnius) is a writer, essayist, translator, literary researcher, and author of nine books for children, young adults, and adults. She obtained her PhD in Religious Studies at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, later moving to Sydney before returning to Vilnius, where she is now a doctoral student at Vilnius University and the Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore. She also leads creative writing sessions for young writers and serves on literary jury committees.
Cicėnaitė has received numerous awards, and her texts have been translated into several languages. Five of her books have been nominated for the Book of the Year awards. Her novel Anglų kalbos žodynas (A Dictionary of the English Language) received the Jurga Ivanauskaitė Prize and was selected as Book of the Year in the adult prose category in 2022, as well as Best Lithuanian Fiction Book of 2022 in the 15min.lt Book of the Year competition. Her novel Niujorko respublika (The New York Republic) won the IBBY prize for the Best Work of Realistic Prose and was included among the 100 most significant Lithuanian books for children and teenagers. Both books were included in the LLTI’s list of the twelve most creative books.
Cicėnaitė’s articles and essays in Lithuanian and English have appeared in cultural publications such as Literatūra ir menas, Šiaurės Atėnai, Vilnius Review, 7 meno dienos, Metai, and others. She has translated fifteen books from English, including novels by Bernardine Evaristo, Abdulrazak Gurnah, and Hernan Diaz. Her research focuses on contemporary Lithuanian literature and the formation of writers’ identities in the 21st century. In her recent essays, she explores connections between text and body, literature and art, and the shifting vantage points of the researcher and the researched.
YANA FOQUÉ (1986, BE) is a curator, editor, writer, mom, and an ‘okay’ cook. Before her permanent move to the Baltics, she served as Executive Director and Chief Curator of Kunstverein Amsterdam (2019–2025). Recent projects include the first major European retrospective of queer punk icon G.B. Jones; the first monograph on the institutional-critical practice of Christopher D’Arcangelo (co-edited with Isabelle Sully and co-published with Artists Space); and co-editing Suzon, a 20-year collection of writings by Raimundas Malašauskas. Her latest editorial work, developed over five years together with Riet Wijnen and Suzy Halajian, appears in a forthcoming book on Lebanese artist Saloua Raouda Choucair. Her writing has appeared in Frieze, Metropolis M, and elsewhere.
Foqué thinks a lot about frameworks: how collaboration, authorship, and the social, political, and historical scaffolding around them matter – sometimes more than the objects in the room. Increasingly, she conceives her practice around the idea that the creative strategies required to ‘keep the lights on’ are part of the work itself. This approach mirrors the thinking of many artists she works with, who are committed to framing their work outside conventional formats. As a result, she is currently researching how side-hustles, side-jobs, and everyday improvisations shape both individuals and institutions – a project that will result in a series of essays, an exhibition, and a symposium.
She misses cycling over the canals of Amsterdam, but not the smell. She regrets not moving to New York in her 20s, but realises that probably wouldn’t have worked out. She’s grateful for her surroundings and the people in them.
VAIVA GRAINYTĖ is an interdisciplinary writer whose textual tonality ranges from poetry and literary projects to radio plays, collaborative contemporary art and theatre initiatives. Her practice is based on connections and juxtapositions of inner and outer realities, shape-shifting genres, cross-breeding irony and melancholy to paradoxical effect.
She is currently the guest editor of Spirit as a Journal (Feb 2026). Her recent site-specific play Fragments, created in collaboration with the Lithuanian National Drama Theatre, explores the phenomenon of war (Nov 2025). Her radio play Twenty four was nominated for the Golden Stage Cross Award (2024).
Grainytė is the co-author of the opera-performance Sun & Sea, listed among Frieze magazine’s Best Works of the 21st Century (2025) and winner of the Golden Lion at the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019. Along with her earlier internationally acclaimed collaborative opera, Have a Good Day! (2013), the work continues to tour across the globe.
She has published the bilingual novel Roses & Potatoes (2022, LT/EN), the poetry collection Gorilla’s Archives (2019), and the essay collection Beijing Diaries (2012), all recognised by local critics. Her essays have appeared internationally in e-flux, *as a Journal, MAMbo, and OBIEG, among others. Her writing has been translated into fifteen languages.
She is an avid student of the Jungian approach to Tarot, a forest walker, and an affectionate cat mom. She has also obtained a sheperdess license (Kabeliai, 2023).
RAIMUNDAS MALAŠAUSKAS grew up in Vilnius hoping to become a chef on a trans-oceanic ship, but instead turned to art history and theory at the Vilnius Academy of Arts. After a decade as a curator at the Contemporary Art Centre in Vilnius (1995–2006), he has lived and worked itinerantly – from Bangkok and Cairo to Brussels, Mexico City, Paris and San Francisco – using writing as both a curatorial method and a way of navigating daily life. His projects Oo, Hypnotic Show, and Mars Returns have taken root in popular imagination, and most recently, he orchestrated a plotless musical in New York, Send in The Clowns. His book Suzon: Selected Writings 2002–2024 received the Long Form award at the 3rd Art Criticism Awards in Lithuania for ‘revealing the enduring magical agency of artworks’.
After reading Suzon, I thought of the word unmoored. This book was so unmoored, I thought. I imagined Suzon stepping out from behind the bar, out of Manet’s painting. Suzon was boarding a ship that was about to be unmoored. Had the loss of her job at the bar unmoored her? They clung to the purple moors behind and around their dwelling, Suzon read in another book. The ship set sail to Granada. Suzon was unmoored in genre and place, and in the way the sentences ran away from each other, I wrote to the author of Suzon. The spreads of this double-book are broken and revolved, and the unmooring relates to this lack of a stable horizon, I wrote. There are leaps, evasions, and exiles: this striving not to be attached becomes a motif in the book, and the motif makes the book heavy; it is its mooring, I wrote. I was on a ship, sailing toward the house of my parents. – Jaakko Pallasvuo
