Announcing the Sachs Program 2023 Student Grant Awards

The Sachs Program for Arts Innovation is excited to announce its 2023 Student Grant Award recipients. The breadth and ingenuity of the applications received this year were as impressive as ever. These 17 grant awards represent the depth and diversity of creative practices at the University of Pennsylvania.

The Sachs Program 2023 Student Grants projects include two magazines, creative writing, Jewish basketball, archives, community caregiving, participatory art-making, music, filmmaking, oral history, sculpture, poetry, textiles, and stained glass. The pool of applications these projects were selected from was also our largest to date for the Student Grants category. With these 17 newly awarded grants, the Sachs Program has proudly supported over 90 student-driven projects in its first six years of grantmaking, not including Ben Art Bucks.

We are delighted to share these awards with you and encourage you to read through the descriptions below. We will publish information pages for each project later this spring when we announce our 2023 Annual Grant Awards. We will also celebrate all 2023 Sachs Program Grant Awards at an announcement event in the Arts Lounge at the Annenberg Center on Tuesday, May 9, 2023.

Let’s give a cheer to the Sachs Program 2023 Student Grant Award recipients!

Sachs Program 2023 Student Grant Awards

• Alan Zhang

  College of Arts and Sciences, English

  Unraveling Hidden Stories: Chinese American Families — a multimedia project that documents Chinese American identity and separation due to various physical, cultural, and/or linguistic barriers between Chinese Americans and their family members.

• Angel (Qi) Wu

  College of Arts and Sciences, Fine Arts and Design; Wharton, Economics

  Lighting the Way — a multi-pronged exploration of developing a new technique to create modern stained glass, utilizing stained glass in activism and community engagement, and shaping the development of contemporary stained glass.

• Black Cultural Studies Collective (Amber Rose Johnson and Taylor Manigoult)

  School of Arts and Sciences

  …be, not allowed, but embraced — an installation that gathers a small group of Black artists and art-curious individuals within Philadelphia to occupy a shared space intended to foster the safety necessary to experiment and create.

• James Diaz and Julia Suh

  School of Arts and Sciences, Music

  [speaking in a foreign language] — a sonic dialogue of intersectionality between a Colombian composer (James Diaz) and a Korean violinist (Julia Suh) resulting in an hour-long concert for violin and electronics.

• Julia Ongchoco

  College of Arts and Sciences, Cognitive Science

  Grids — a documentary film in which a scientist at Yale and an artist at UPenn explore the gap between hallucinations and reality in a series of experiments that use the rudimentary form of a grid.

• Julie Flandreau

  College of Arts and Sciences, Comparative Literature and Religious Studies

  Lessons in Love and Struggle: the story of Karen and Omar Ali — a documentary that tells the story of Philadelphia resident Ms. Karen Ali and her late husband and organizing partner of 50 years, Mr. Omar Askia Ali, who was wrongfully convicted to life without parole by an all-white jury, in 1971.

• Juliet Glazer and Giovanni Cestino

  School of Arts & Sciences, Music

  In the Workshop: Collaborative Multisensory Ethnography of Musical Instrument Making — experiments with audiovisual research and presentation methods to explore the multisensory relationships that makers of violins, violas, and cellos forge with the materials, tools, and sonic possibilities they craft.

• Kevin Mulvey

  Weitzman School of Design, Graduate Fine Arts

  Gay Sex, Excess, and Work — All Lights On/All Lights Off — Through long exposures on wood pulp paper, developed with a rust solution and wheat pasted onto glass, Kevin Mulvey will be making a series of collages depicting relationships between gay sexuality, labor, and excess time and energy, illuminated by rings of light.

• Khayla Saunders

  Weitzman School of Design, Historic Preservation

  HERitage — begins with our genealogy as Black women in America as an oral history project and translates it into various art mediums to visually contextualize short stories rooted in first-hand interviews.

• lexi welch

  Weitzman School of Design, Graduate Fine Arts

  Obstinate document — a counter-memory project that uses low frequency sound and vibration to explore the subtle, non-narrative resonances of fleeting queer encounters.

• Marta Rodriguez Maleck

  Weitzman School of Design, Graduate Fine Arts

  What I want you to know — a conversation and lens-based project for trans/nonbinary/agender participants to initiate dialogue with a family member of their choosing.

• Maxime Cavajani

  Weitzman School of Design, Graduate Fine Arts

  grounds (chapter1) — an artbook on queer death. Thinking through artworks addressing the murder of Pier Paolo Pasolini several authors explore across life & death relationships. How to move between love and loss, presence and absence, remembrance and memorialization.

• Meg Gladieux and Mira Sydow

  College of Arts & Sciences, Cognitive Studies, French & Francophone Studies; English, Urban Studies

  Woodlands Magazine — an online and print magazine that combines journalism and creative writing—contributors will write reported and personal pieces to tell source-driven narratives that are often forgotten by mainstream journalism.

• Nicole Cheng

  Weitzman School of Design, Landscape Architecture

  Multispecies Relations Across Diasporic Landscapes — a participatory textile art project that weaves together diasporic narratives through constructing landscapes of relationships between humans and nonhumans.

• Quake Magazine

  College of Arts & Sciences

  Quake Magazine — using literature, photography, design, and other art forms to facilitate the appreciation of bodies, relationships, sex, and love of all kinds, striving to explore these themes in a respectful, inclusive, and artful space which is welcoming to all identities.

• Rudy Gerson

  Weitzman School of Design, Graduate Fine Arts

  It could lead to dancing: where basketball was Jewish — a mixed media project that engages the legacies of a professional Jewish basketball team in Philadelphia and the social dances they would hold after their home games between 1933 and 1947. The project assembles impossible artifacts and memory ephemera in the present in print, moving image, and text-based works.

• Tayeba Batool

  School of Arts & Sciences, Anthropology

  Memories of a Forest City: Ecological Encounters and Affect in Islamabad — an online multimedia archive of oral histories, images, and artwork that captures the transformation and affective politics of urban nature in Islamabad, one of South Asia’s premier post-colonial planned cities.