2023 Grant Awards

In its sixth year, The Sachs Program for Arts Innovation awarded $265,000 in funding to 45 ambitious and creative projects across the arts and humanities.

The projects and practitioners supported span creative practice and include such themes and ideas as motherhood, comics, poetry, painting, Jewish queer culture, Caribbean visual arts, ecological futures, climate change, animation, music technology, experimental chamber music and film, street life, human rights, creative writing, and youth engagement with food culture, fashion, music, and social media.

Funding categories include Artist Residency Grants, Community Partnership Grants, Curricular Grants, First-Year Seminar Grants (awarded in collaboration with the College of Arts and Sciences), Independent Creative Production Grants, Project Grants, and Student Grants.

Not included in this list are our Rolling Grants: grants of up to $2,000 offered on a rolling basis to faculty, staff, departments, programs, and centers to support arts activities that fall outside of our annual grant cycle.

We Express Us Through Arts Program
- Akhenaton S. Mikell, MS, Penn Community Scholar, Imani Star Development, and Research & Equity in Academic Community Partnerships for Health (REACH)
- Center for Public Health Initiatives (CPHI), Imani Star Development, Research & Equity in Academic Community Partnerships for Health (REACH)
Unraveling Hidden Stories: Chinese American Families
- Alan Zhang
- College of Arts & Sciences, Department of English
Exactly the Same But Completely Different — Comics About Parenting
- Alli Katz
- Kelly Writers House
Lighting the Way
- Angel (Qi) Wu
- College of Arts & Sciences, Undergraduate Program in Fine Arts and Design, Wharton School
Embodied Plastic Entanglements (working title)
- Ani Liu
- Undergraduate Program in Fine Arts and Design, Weitzman School of Design (PennDesign)
What Happened To Classical Myths?
- Ann Kuttner
- College of Arts & Sciences, History of Art Department
Mozart to Mitski and Bach to Beyonce
- Anna Weesner
- College of Arts & Sciences, Department of Music
Religion, Identity and the Self
- Anthea Butler and Justin Mcdaniel
- College of Arts & Sciences, Department of Religious Studies
Studying Sex
- Beans Velocci
- College of Arts & Sciences, Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies
Meantime Activation Toolkit
- Brian Phillips
- Graduate Department of Architecture, Weitzman School of Design (PennDesign)
On Belonging: Music, Displacement, and Well-Being
- Carol Mueller
- College of Arts & Sciences, Department of Music
(Un)Learning Revolution, a Residency with Tessa Mars
- Cecilia González Godino and Corine Labridy
- Department of Spanish and Portuguese, Program in French and Francophone Studies, School of Arts & Sciences
American Pasts in American Places
- Emma Hart
- College of Arts & Sciences, Department of History, McNeil Center
Portrait of the Artist
- Gwendolyn Shaw
- College of Arts & Sciences, History of Art Department
Palestine Writes Literature Festival: Indigenous Stories of a Fabled Homeland
- Huda Fakhreddine and Palestine Writes
- Cinema and Media Studies Program, Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations (NELC), Kelly Writers House, Middle East Center, Palestine Writes, School of Arts & Sciences, Wolf Humanities Center
Portraiture
- Ivan Drpic
- College of Arts & Sciences, History of Art Department
[speaking in a foreign language]
- James Diaz and Julia Suh
- Department of Music, School of Arts & Sciences
Skin Hunger
- Jamie Diamond
- Undergraduate Program in Fine Arts and Design, Weitzman School of Design (PennDesign)
Black Jazz Experimentalisms in the United States
- Jasmine Henry
- College of Arts & Sciences, Department of Music
BARTOK’S MONSTER
- Jay Kirk and the Daedalus Quartet
- Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing, Department of English, Department of Music, Penn Live Arts, School of Arts & Sciences
Why College? Historical and Contemporary Perspectives
- Jonathan Zimmerman
- College of Arts & Sciences, Department of History
Penn Climate Animation and Research Studio
- Joshua Mosley and Simon Richter
- Department of Francophone, Italian and Germanic Studies, Graduate Fine Arts Department, School of Arts & Sciences, Weitzman School of Design (PennDesign)
Making Italian Art Media Accessible for Language Classrooms
- Julia Heim
- Department of Francophone, Italian and Germanic Studies, School of Arts & Sciences
Grids
- Julia Ongchoco
- College of Arts & Sciences, Mindcore, Program in Cognitive Science
Lessons in Love and Struggle: the story of Karen and Omar Ali
- Julie Flandreau
- College of Arts & Sciences, Department of Religious Studies, Program for Comparative Literature and Literary Theory
In the Workshop: Collaborative Multisensory Ethnography of Musical Instrument Making
- Juliet Glazer and Giovanni Cestino
- Department of Music, School of Arts & Sciences
Gay Sex, Excess, and Work– All Lights On/All Lights Off
- Kevin Mulvey
- Graduate Fine Arts Department, Weitzman School of Design (PennDesign)
HERitage
- Khayla Saunders
- Historic Preservation, Weitzman School of Design (PennDesign)
Behind the Iron Curtain
- Kristen Ghodsee
- College of Arts & Sciences, Department of Anthropology
Obstinate document
- lexi welch
- Graduate Fine Arts Department, Weitzman School of Design (PennDesign)
What I want you to know
- Marta Rodriguez Maleck
- Graduate Fine Arts Department, Weitzman School of Design (PennDesign)
grounds (chapter1)
- Maxime Cavajani
- Graduate Fine Arts Department, Weitzman School of Design (PennDesign)
The Woodlands Magazine
- Meg Gladieux and Mira Sydow
- College of Arts & Sciences, Department of English, Kelly Writers House, Penn Urban Studies, Program in French and Francophone Studies
Morning in Olam Haba
- Miriam Saperstein
- Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies
Trans Oral History Project – Artist Collection
- Nat Rivkin and The Trans Oral History Project
- Department of English, Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, School of Arts & Sciences, The Center for Research in Feminist, Queer, and Transgender Studies
Beautiful Trouble
- Natacha Diels
- Department of Music, Penn Live Arts, School of Arts & Sciences
Multispecies Relations Across Diasporic Landscapes
- Nicole Cheng
- Landscape Architecture, Weitzman School of Design (PennDesign)
Of Horses, Bows and Fermented Milk: the Turkish Empire in 15 Objects
- Oscar Aguirre Mandujano
- College of Arts & Sciences, Department of History, Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations (NELC)
Your Food Story: Storytelling through the Photography of Community Landscapes
- Penn Museum, The Barbara and Edward Netter Center for Community Partnerships, and Sayre High School
- Agatston Urban Nutrition Initiative (AUNI), Center for the Analysis of Archaeological Material-CAAM, Penn Museum, The Netter Center, William L. Sayre High School
Quake Magazine
- Quake Magazine
- College of Arts & Sciences, Penn Women's Center (PWC)
Contemporary Italy: Black Italy
- Rossella Di Rosa
- College of Arts & Sciences, Department of Francophone, Italian and Germanic Studies
It could lead to dancing: where basketball was Jewish
- Rudy Gerson
- Center for Expermental Ethnography, Graduate Fine Arts Department, Weitzman School of Design (PennDesign)
Envisioning Climate: Afrofuturist Chronicles, a Residency with Vanessa Keith
- Simon Kim, Mark Yim and Camillo Jose Taylor
- Graduate Department of Architecture, Immersive Kinematics, School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (Penn Engineering), Weitzman School of Design (PennDesign)
Memories of a Forest City: Ecological Encounters and Affect in Islamabad
- Tayeba Batool
- Department of Anthropology, School of Arts & Sciences
…be, not allowed, but embraced
- The Black Cultural Studies Collective (Amber Rose Johnson and taylor manigoult)
- Black Cultural Studies Collective, School of Arts & Sciences, Weitzman School of Design (PennDesign)

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