2025 Grant Awards

The Sachs Program for Arts Innovation awarded 42 grants across seven categories in the 2024–2025 academic year.

1 Artist Residency Grant
4 Community Partnerships Grants
3 Curricular Support Grants
6 Independent Creative Production Grants
6 Project Support Grants
15 Student Grants
7 First-Year Seminar Grants
Partnership with Penn College of Arts & Sciences

Not included in this list are Sachs Program Rolling Grants, offered on a continuing basis to support arts activities outside our annual grant cycle.

We are incredibly proud of the 2025 Sachs Program Grant Awards. They represent the wide range of diverse creative practices and practitioners at the University of Pennsylvania, and we look forward to seeing the projects they represent realized.

Disability & Art in Nursing Education
- Alicia Kachmar and The Barbara Bates Center for the Study of the History of Nursing
- Department of Family and Community Health, Penn Nursing
Before I Was Coral, I Was a Refugee
- Alvin Luong
- Graduate Fine Arts Department, Weitzman School of Design
Orisha Tales: Preserving Afro-Cuban Heritage Through Stories for Young Readers
- Amalia Daché
- Graduate School of Education
The Most Human Human (working title)
- Andrew Burke
- Department of Music, School of Arts & Sciences
Migrating Lives: Celebrating Communities Through Participatory Murals
- Asian American Studies (ASAM), Center for Latin American and Latinx Studies (CLALS), the Centro de Cultura, Arte, Trabajo y Educación (CCATE), and Southeast by Southeast
- Asian American Studies Program (ASAM), Center for Latin American and Latinx Studies (CLALS), School of Arts & Sciences
What World?
- Azsaneé Truss
- Annenberg School for Communication
On Belonging: Music, Displacement, and Well-Being
- Carol Muller
- Department of English, School of Arts & Sciences
South Korean Feminist Poetics: Gender, Han, and the Violence of the Archive (Mundan)
- Celine Choi
- College of Arts & Sciences, Department of English, Department of Political Science
The Typography of Independence
- Common Press
- Penn Libraries
Psycheprocity: Designing for Psychedelics and Psychedelics for Design
- Darren Tindall
- Landscape Architecture, Weitzman School of Design
Lex Street Garden Stewardship Project
- Dyan Castro (Project Manager, Penn Praxis) and Dante Leonard (Executive Director, Smart Futures CDC)
- PennPraxis, Weitzman School of Design
Footprints in the Sand
- Ejun Mary Hong and Justin Nam Duong
- Cinema and Media Studies Program, College of Arts & Sciences, Department of Music, Department of Physics & Astronomy, Undergraduate Program in Fine Arts and Design
Poetic Prisms
- Ekaterina Derysheva
- Russian and East European Studies department, School of Arts & Sciences
Decolonizing French Food
- Elizabeth Collins
- Department of Africana Studies, Department of Francophone, Italian and Germanic Studies (FIGS), School of Arts & Sciences
Citywide Special: An Oral History of Philadelphia’s Drag Communities
- Eva Pensis
- Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies, School of Arts & Sciences, The Center for Research in Feminist, Queer, and Transgender Studies
Palimpsest
- Farrah Rahaman
- Annenberg School for Communication
Senegalese Archival Film Project: West African Film Heritage (working title)
- Hakimah Abdul-Fattah and the Center for Experimental Ethnography
- Center for Experimental Ethnography
A History of America’s Children
- Hardeep Dhillon
- Asian American Studies Program (ASAM), School of Arts & Sciences
Bridging Dyke and Trans Feminisms: An Intergenerational Exhibition and Salon Series
- Heather Love and Juno Rosenhaus (Founder, Dyke+ ArtHaus) with support from M.C. Overholt (Weitzman) and S.E. Eisterer (GSWS/FQT)
- Department of English, Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies, School of Arts & Sciences, The Center for Research in Feminist, Queer, and Transgender Studies, Weitzman School of Design
Playing Tunes – Healing Wounds
- Jack Drummond and The West Philadelphia String Music & Mentorship Program
- College Houses & Academic Services (CHAS)
Rivers, Culture, Power
- John Kanbayashi
- Department of History and Sociology of Science, School of Arts & Sciences
Why College?
- Jonathan Zimmerman
- College of Arts & Sciences, Department of History, Graduate School of Education, School of Arts & Sciences
Philadelphia Through Copper: Intaglio Depictions of Contemporary Histories (working title)
- Katie Hindle
- College of Arts & Sciences, Department of Francophone, Italian and Germanic Studies (FIGS), Undergraduate Program in Fine Arts and Design
CAPA + KWH: A Writing Partnership
- Kelly Writers House and Philadelphia High School for the Creative and Performing Arts
- Kelly Writers House
Beneath the Surface: Amplifying the Voices of Divers
- Lavanya Neti
- Department of Statistics and Data Science, Wharton School
Caves, Cathedrals, and Curiosities: Unearthing Stories of the Chemin des Dames in France
- Lisa Ann Britton
- College of Arts & Sciences, Department of Francophone, Italian and Germanic Studies (FIGS), Penn Global
ContraArchivx: Building a Living Archive of Trans/Feminist Resistance in Latin America
- Lucila Rozas Urrunaga
- Annenberg School for Communication
Web of Sound
- Max Johnson
- Department of Music, School of Arts & Sciences
Paris Under the German Occupation and Its Places of [Non-]Memory
- Mélanie Péron
- Department of Francophone, Italian and Germanic Studies (FIGS), School of Arts & Sciences
Bahay Kultura – Filipino American School of Philadelphia
- Melodee Arevalo Mendoza and the Board of the Bahay Kultura Filipino School of Philadelphia
- Center for Studies of Addiction, Penn Medicine
Voices from Kakuma: A Collaborative Curation with FilmAid Kenya
- Mira Kwon and Taj Swaminathan-Sipp
- Cinema and Media Studies Program, College of Arts & Sciences
Monolith Annual Spring Exhibit
- Monolith (Sade K. Taiwo and Abigail Florestal)
- College of Arts & Sciences, Department of Chemistry, Department of History and Sociology of Science
Oil Baby
- Patricia Renee' Thomas
- Undergraduate Program in Fine Arts and Design, Weitzman School of Design
Penn Ballet: Winter Showcase
- Penn Ballet (Lisa Slattery)
- College of Arts & Sciences, Undergraduate Neuroscience Department
Builders, Shapers & Independents: A Residency With Daniel Tucker
- Penn Press
- Center for Experimental Ethnography, Penn Press
KIYOSHI, A Feature-Length Documentary on the Life of Kiyoshi Kuromiya (working title)
- Rob Buscher
- Asian American Studies Program (ASAM), School of Arts & Sciences
Why Medical Treatments Work or Fail
- Robert Aronowitz
- Department of History and Sociology of Science, School of Arts & Sciences
Songs of Protest From South Asia
- Sara Kazmi
- College of Arts & Sciences, Department of English
Naive Photographs
- Sithabo Mathe
- School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (Penn Engineering), Undergraduate Program in Fine Arts and Design, Weitzman School of Design
Social Inequalities and Health: Global Implications
- Su Yeone Jeon
- Center for Korean Studies, School of Arts & Sciences
Neutrøis
- Syd Zolf
- Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing, Department of English, Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies, School of Arts & Sciences, The Center for Research in Feminist, Queer, and Transgender Studies, Undergraduate Program in Fine Arts and Design
Storytelling Through Art at the West Philadelphia Sanctuary
- West Philadelphia Sanctuary
- Department of Family and Community Health, Penn Medicine

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