Announcing our Fall 2021 Student Grant Awards

We are thrilled to announce the recipients of our Fall 2021 Student Grants. In a year of record applications across all of our grant opportunities, the decisions made around which student projects to support were, as you can imagine, incredibly difficult. We received so many wonderful proposals of which we could only fund a portion. The fourteen that we are supporting cover a range of artistic and academic fields and practices, engaging audiences across Penn’s campus, Philadelphia, and the world more broadly.

We encourage you to read through the descriptions below, and please note that we will be creating individual Grants Pages for each of the projects later this spring, so stay tuned for more information. In the meantime, please join us in congratulating the Fall 2021 Student Grant recipients!

Sachs Program Fall 2021 Student Grants

• Alan Jinich and Max Strickberger

  College of Arts and Sciences, Neuroscience and English 
  Generation Pandemic — A multimedia oral history archive that documents the impact of COVID-19 on emerging adults.

• Anat Dan

  School of Arts and Sciences, Comparative Literature and Cinema and Media Studies 
  Third Take (working title) — A video essay that explores the sensorial experience and the moral implications of spectatorship.

• Anirudh Karnick

  School of Arts and Sciences, Comparative Literature and South Asia Studies 
  Pravās aur Pravās Translated — Anirudh will produce an annotated translation of Pravās aur Pravās (Exile and Exile) by the Hindi writer Krishna Baldev Vaid.

• Antoine Haywood

  Annenberg School for Communication
  Telling Our Stories: A Philadelphia Community Media Oral History Project (working title) — The creation of a new public archive of Philadelphia-area BIPOC community media maker narratives.

• Brian Nguyen

  College of Arts and Sciences, Design 
  The Hall of Funk: Strictly Funk’s 25th Anniversary Pop-Up — The creation of an immersive experience to celebrate Strictly Funk’s 25th anniversary.

• Devorah Bass, Manoj Simha, Rebekah Donnell, and Rowana Miller

  College of Arts and Sciences, Political Science; Finance and Legal Studies; English; Sociology, Urban Education and Creative Writing 
  Cosmic Writers — Support for a new community-focused writing project, Cosmic Writers, that provides education in creative writing for K–12 students.

• Hillary Morales Robles

  Weitzman School of Design, Architecture and Historic Preservation 
  Tactical Preservation for Climate Emergency — An architectural design project that will inform the adaptive rehabilitation of vacant early 20th-century public schools in Puerto Rico as models of alternative spaces for emergency protection and autonomy.

• Laura Li 李婧宜

  Weitzman School of Design, Fine Arts
  Born/Raw — A film investigating familial trauma under China’s One-Child Policy through a queer lens.

• Mae Eskenazi

  Weitzman School of Design, Fine Arts
  We Make The Banal Feel Spectacular — A multimedia project that explores carework as an exchange worth celebrating amongst trans and queer disabled kin.

• Maya Pratt-Freedman

  College of Arts and Sciences, Sociology and Cinema and Media Studies 
  Food for Thought: An Examination of Gender Inequality in the Culinary Profession — Maya will produce a film examining ongoing gender inequality in the culinary arts.

• OreOluwa Badaki

  Graduate School of Education, Literacy, Culture, and International Education 
  Seeds of the Diaspora: Using creative writing to explore critical food literacies with Black youth — A collaborative scriptwriting workshop series with Black youth working for food justice. Through creative and speculative storytelling, we archive and re-imagine culinary, agricultural, and activism traditions from communities disproportionately harmed by unjust food systems.

• Penn Animation

  College of Arts and Sciences and Penn Engineering 
  Penn Animation 2021-2022 Animated Film Production — A collective of Penn students from all different backgrounds who will create an animated short film.

• Shelley Zhang

  School of Arts and Sciences, Music
  Li Delun in Philadelphia: Ethnography, Archives, and Music across the Pacific — A pop-up photo exhibit and recital that will coincide with a public symposium honoring Chinese Conductor Li Delun and featuring members of the Philadelphia Orchestra.

• Yasmine McBride

  Weitzman School of Design, Architecture 
  Unpacking and Reimagining the American Dream — A study of the construct of the American Dream as it relates to the aestheticization of public housing.