Announcing Fall 2020 Student Grant Awards

We are happy to announce the recipients of The Sachs Program for Arts Innovation’s Fall 2020 Student Grants. These are grants to support ambitious arts and humanities projects from across the university. Student Grants are now available twice a year and provide up to $4,000 in funding to both graduate and undergraduate students. For more information visit the Grants section of our website.

Ten projects were funded in a range of practices and areas of inquiry, including ethnographic filmmaking, multimedia storytelling, interactive sculpture, journalism, revisionary map making, illustration, and photography. Please join us in congratulating everyone involved, and please read more about the ten projects below. We will also be posting more information about these projects to sachsarts.org in the weeks and months to come.

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The Fall 2020 Student Grant Awards

 

• Amrita Stützle
  Weitzman School of Design, Graduate Fine Arts
  Philadelphia Media Arts Collective — Amrita Stützle will collaborate with MFA students from UPenn, PAFA, Tyler, and Moore to curate and prepare an exhibition of lens-based student work.

• Claire Conklin Sabel
  School of Arts and Sciences, History and Sociology of Science
  The Fossils We Live Amongst — Claire Conklin Sabel will collaborate with artist and illustrator Alix Pentecost-Farren to produce a set of illustrations and a digital animation illustrating Claire’s doctoral research into the history of the earth and environmental sciences and women’s participation in scientific inquiry.

• Emmet Foley
  College of Arts and Sciences, Undergraduate Fine Arts & Design
  Non-Conceptual Concepts — a video-based project that will use Kierkegaard’s method of indirect communication to explore his concept of subjectivity through the narrative of four friends’ struggles, desires, and dreams

• Debra Harner
  School of Social Policy and Practice, Master of Social Work Program
  Archiving Lived Experiences Through Film — Participants in a support therapy group through the Center for Carceral Communities will document their lived experiences re-entering society after being incarcerated.

• Joshua K Reason
  School of Arts and Sciences, Africana Studies
  Towards a Black Trans*lational Praxis: Archiving Black Queer Atlantic Performance Art — Joshua K Reason will combine performance and spatial visualization tools to critically remap the city of Salvador da Bahia, Brazil from a Black LGBTQI+ perspective, working with the Coletivo das Liliths art collective.

• Juan Castrillón
  School of Arts and Sciences, Music
  Unfolding Indigenous Archives of the Colombian Amazon — The completion of two films – Kiraiñia (Long Flutes) and Pami Kirami (Longhouse) – that call for changes in how ethnographic filmmaking has been performed and envisioned during the last five decades in the Northwest Amazon.

• Nikki Thomas
  Graduate School of Education, Education, Culture, and Society Program
  From These Hands — Nikki Thomas will create an audiovisual exploration of our collective relationships with plants, the natural world, and the people around us, through the specific lens of her own family.

• Rongxuan (Roxanne) Zhou
  College of Arts and Sciences, Undergraduate Architecture
  Death of the Sirens — an interactive theatrical installation intended to capture the last living moment of the Sirens in Greek mythology and their temptation of Orpheus and Odysseus

• t-art Magazine
  Student Collective, College of Arts and Sciences
  t-art Magazine — a student-run, online publication that exists at the intersection of art and technology: bridging the gap between artists and innovators within the Penn community and beyond

• Will Owen
  Weitzman School of Design, Graduate Fine Arts
  Scrimmage — Will Owen will create a set of collapsible, telescopic bleachers that, when opened and closed, will create a sonorous accordion-type sound, inspired by the multiple identities that bleachers hold within the North American psyche.