The Sachs Program for Arts Innovation has announced the recipients of its 2024 Student Grant Awards. This year’s applicant pool represents the largest to date, with a diverse array of proposals across disciplines and practices.

Alicia Riccio (Weitzman School of Design)

Hard Copy—a series of drawings that will culminate in 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)

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)

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 & Sciences)

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)

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)

(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)

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

Irma Flóra Kiss (College of Arts & Sciences)

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)

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 and College of Arts & Sciences)

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 School of Social Policy & Practice)

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

Michael Martin Shea (School of Arts & Sciences)

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)

Illuminating Unhoused Patients’ Healthcare Experiences Through Photography—showcases 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)

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 in the College of Arts & Sciences and Wharton School of Business)

Participatory Action Art Mentorship Program (PAAM)—empowers 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 in the Weitzman School of Design and Wharton School)

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)

The BagasSeat: An Ode to the Southeast Asian Market—transforms 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 the material world.