News

• February 1, 2021

  A Penn English Class Created and Taught by Author and Playwright Lorene Cary Explores Civic Engagement

  Penn students in a collaborative fall English course shared their experiences in civic engagement with each other and the world, writing for publication. They found new ways to share non-partisan information with other young voters, from the breakdown of complicated data in infographics to videos of dancing mailboxes. Most of the Penn students participating in the class were voting for the first time and for the first time in a national, presidential election. They wrote and published about what they learned.

• February 1, 2021

  ‘Understand This …’ A Podcast Series Which Examines Cross-Cultural Communication

  “Understand This ...,” is the fifth episode of the Penn Today podcast. This podcast series is designed as a journey to understand how to solve problems of the day—and of our time—by uniting minds from different disciplines. Mauro Guillén, professor of international management at the Wharton School and former director of the Lauder Institute, and Tomoko Takami, director of Penn’s Japanese Language Program in the School of Arts & Sciences, joined in on the conversation.

• February 1, 2021

  Cornel West in Conversation with Margo Natalie Crawford of the Center for Africana Studies

  In the Jan. 27 event, West testified to King’s legacy and its place in the rich tradition of Black artists and thinkers, citing the concept of a “A Love Supreme,” referencing both John Coltrane’s album along with the higher truth to which Coltrane aspired, the vision to create “a force for good tied to tenderness and beauty. Cornel West invoked African American intellectualism and musical history in what Margo Natalie Crawford called “a visionary jam session for social justice.”

• February 1, 2021

  Senior Dennis Sungmin Kim Hand-Drawn Animated Short Films

  Kim’s latest completed creation, “The Beginning,” his third film to win top honors in the Penn Student Film Festival, is now streaming on the commercial online platform Film Movement Plus. Using pencils, markers, and watercolors, Dennis paints and draws by hand hundreds of pages of illustrations to create his award-winning animated short films.

• January 27, 2021

  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. 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.