Announcing the Sachs Program 2024 Student Grant Awards

The Sachs Program for Arts Innovation is thrilled to announce the recipients of our 2024 Student Grant Awards. This year’s applicant pool represents our largest to date, with an incredible array of proposals across disciplines and practices. The decisions made around what to support were challenging and not taken lightly.

We are incredibly proud to share this list of the 17 projects receiving funding this year. They represent the remarkable diversity of the University of Pennsylvania creative community, and we cannot wait to see them all come to fruition.

Projects include an exploration of an archive through drawing, a celebration of Chinatown through mural-making, a film exploration of conspiracy theorizing amongst Black Americans, video installations, speculative design, design with biomaterials, translation, and more.

Let’s give a cheer to the Sachs Program 2024 Student Grant Award recipients!

---

Sachs Program 2024 Student Grant Awards

• Alicia Riccio

  Weitzman School of Design, Graduate Fine Arts, MFA Candidate

  Hard Copy — a series of drawings that will culminate as a book. The work is based on the records of one day of sales at Giovanni’s Room circa 1977. Giovanni’s Room is the oldest LGBT bookstore in the United States, opening in Philadelphia in 1973.

• Alyssa Chandler

  College of Arts & Sciences, Fine Arts, Asian American Studies, C’24

  Save Chinatown, Save our City — a mural of celebration, resistance, and legacy in the heart of Chinatown, serving as a physical and artistic embodiment of Chinatown’s beauty, importance, and right to exist and of the past, present, and future fights against oppression.

• Azsaneé Truss

  Annenberg School for Communication, PhD Candidate

  Conspi(racism) — a short film exploring the culturally specific roots and logics of conspiracy theorizing amongst Black Americans via glimpses of an intimate conversation at a listening party and an exploration of the archives of the crack epidemic.

• Bonnie Samantha Maldonado

  School of Arts and Sciences, Africana Studies, PhD Candidate

  Rematriación: Casa, Tierra, y Liberación (Rematriation: Home, Land, and Liberation) — a four-day retreat where participants engage in themes of freedom, return, and worldmaking through cooking, farming, and documenting their experiences in a cookbook titled “Casa Materna” (maternal home).

• Catching On Thieves

  Weitzman School, Graduate Fine Arts, MFA Candidate

  Catching on The Nose, ep 01: what does a nose know? — a series of interviews with people’s noses about what it’s like to be a nose.

• Cienna Davis

  Annenberg School for Communication, PhD Candidate

  (Digit)al Dread — a collaborative assemblage that materializes afro-textured hair as a digital, touch-based network inviting viewers to engage in the possibilities of physical touch for negotiating the troubling demands of our digital society.

• Gayoung Lee

  Weitzman School, Graduate Fine Arts, MFA Candidate

  Humming from Babel — a non-narrative video installation that explores the complex pathways along which emotions travel when speaking in a language that is not one’s own with the often-invisible ESL speakers in Philadelphia.

• Irma Flóra Kiss

  College of Arts & Sciences, History of Art and Comparative Literature, C’25

  Phantom of a Fallen Queen — a multi-media installation that critiques the perennial historical challenge to women’s reproductive autonomy by resurrecting the figure of Anne Boleyn.

• Jacob Weinberg

  Weitzman School, Graduate Fine Arts, MFA Candidate

  Clusters (Landfill) — a non-narrative video-based installation that explores how latent threats appear and are analyzed within an American post-industrial landscape.

• Janice Kim

  School of Engineering & Applied Science, Computer Science, SEAS’24
  College of Arts & Sciences, Design, C’24

  Predictive Living — a speculative design installation with redesigned objects for the near-future consumer, exploring a dystopian future in which everyday products are getting smarter and inevitably monitor and manage our lives for us.

• Melissa B Skolnick-Noguera

  Annenberg School for Communications and the School of Social Policy & Practice, PhD Candidate

  Philadelphia Artists & Culture Keepers: A Digital Media Project — highlighting the stories of Latine and Black artists who use their creative work alongside social change in the Philadelphia region.

• Michael Martin Shea

  School of Arts & Sciences, Comparative Literature and Literary Theory, PhD Candidate

  Imaginary Bodies: The Early Poems of Liliana Ponce — a volume of poetry in translation that collects the award-winning yet out-of-print poems from Argentine poet Liliana Ponce’s first two books, making them available in English for the first time.

• Neha Shetty

  College of Arts & Sciences, Health and Societies, C’24

  Illuminating Unhoused Patients’ Healthcare Experiences through Photography — showcasing the lived experiences of unsheltered communities in their journeys navigating healthcare systems through the medium of original photographs and writings produced by people experiencing homelessness.

• Nina Hofkosh-Hulbert

  School of Arts & Sciences, History of Art, MA Candidate

  Drawing Together: Medieval Today (Working Title) — an interdisciplinary engagement with an unusual land surveying manuscript (c. 1405), seeking to develop a wider audience with an understudied volume, collectively test the methods illustrated in the text, and craft a response in a new project.

• Participatory Action Art Mentorship Program (Student Group)

  College of Arts & Sciences and Wharton School of Business

  Participatory Action Art Mentorship Program (PAAM) — empowering West Philadelphia high school students to create impactful art and narratives through animation, architecture, and design, addressing inadequate art education, fostering artistic development, and making a global impact.

• Penn Looks (Student Group)

  Weitzman School of Design and Wharton School of Business, Graduate Student Group

  Penn Fashion Show 2024, Illustrated Perspectives: A Rogue Relaunch — support for the 2024 iteration of the Penn Fashion Show, a joint venture between Penn Looks and the Wharton Fashion Club, ongoing since 2015 (except for 2020 and 2021), as an opportunity for Weitzman School of Design students to showcase their work.

• Yuanyi Cen

  Weitzman School, Landscape Architecture, MLA Candidate

  The BagasSeat: An Ode to the Southeast Asian Market — transforming local, organic, unavoidable waste from the Southeast Asian Market into a temporary, educational, and culturally engaging urban furniture system, contributing to a biomaterials revolution and challenging the permanence of our material world.

---

Sachs Program 2024 Grant Awards

Additional information about each 2024 Student Grant Award will be published on the Sachs Program website with the upcoming announcement of all Sachs Program 2024 Grant Awards.

Please join us on Tuesday, April 30, 2024, for an announcement celebration of all Sachs Program 2024 Grant Awards at an event in the Arts Lounge at the Annenberg Center at the University of Pennsylvania.

All are welcome, and we hope to see you there!