News

• September 16, 2020

  “KOSKETUS” a Short Film by Sachs Grant Recipient and Graduate Candidate in Ethnomusicology, Juan Castrillón

  KOSKETUS (the sense of touch in Finnish language) is a short film done in collaboration between Vilja Haapala, a Finish icon painter and contemporary artist, and Juan Castrillón a graduate canidate in Ethnomusicology. The piece was commissioned by an art collective based in Finland that set collaborations among artists during quarantine. Juan Castrillón explores music and indigenous analytics about listening, bodies, recordings and sound archives. His work is primarily ethnographic, conducting fieldwork among Muslim mystics in Turkey, and Tukanoan shamans from the Northwestern Amazon in Colombia. His methods include collaborative projects for producing texts, films, digital archives, multimodal installations, and radio.

• September 16, 2020

  Sachs Communications Coordinator, Gracelynn Wan’s Comics Help Disseminate Information in the Age of Social Media

  Gracelynn Wan believes in the power of stories and illustrations. When she was asked to be the main artist for the University of Saskatchewan’s COVID-19 comics project, she knew it had the potential to give people accurate information about the global pandemic, she said. “I wanted a story, I wanted a background, I wanted some sort of context narratively to bridge the gap between regular consumers who don’t really understand scientific papers and these researchers trying so hard to get the info out there.”

• September 14, 2020

  Penn Museum Features Objects From the Rarely Seen Oceanian Collection

  In the sixth year of the annual student-led exhibition internship, 2020 graduates Ashleigh David and Erin Spicola and senior Kia DaSilva spent last fall working alongside Museum staff to select a project that would connect to both the Provost’s “Year of Data” 2019-20 academic theme as well as the Oceanian collections. Together, the students and staff selected 13 objects from the Museum’s Oceanian collections, which encompasses nearly 28,000 objects, most of which are kept in storage, where the light, temperature, and humidity are controlled.

• September 14, 2020

  First-of-its-kind Virtual Summer Design Studio for High School Students

  As a large number of summer activities moved online due to COVID-19, the Stuart Weitzman School of Design partnered with the nonprofit organization, The Fresh Air Fund to launch a first-of-its-kind virtual studio. Led by Penn Praxis Design fellows, Fresh Air Everywhere was an intensive seven-week program that provided high school students with an introduction to architecture and landscape architecture while fostering skills in communication and community engagement.

• September 3, 2020

  Saachi Datta is Combining Her Passion for Religion and Science

  Saachi Datta, wants to be a physician. Her religious studies and biology majors prepare her for that, while also deepening lifelong passions. Recently, she co-authored a peer-reviewed article that combined her interests and found that in patients with neurodegenerative diseases, positive religious coping behaviors correlate with better health outcomes than those experienced by patients with coping behaviors negatively influenced by religion (e.g. holding a punitive view of religion) as well as those with nonreligious coping behaviors.