On May 12, the Sachs Program for Arts Innovation announced its fourth annual round of grant awards, providing $177,000 to support 25 ambitious and creative projects in the arts and humanities at Penn. Since its launch in 2017, the Sachs Program has funded over 200 projects and distributed approximately $1.1 million in artistic and creative support. The Sachs Program’s grantmaking is part of its larger efforts to support and advance the arts across the University. The 2021 grants support a broad range of projects in the visual arts, opera, theater, film, writing, music, translation, and cultural planning.

“These ambitious projects are a testament to Keith and Kathy Sachs’ vision to support a groundswell of artistic creation at Penn,” said Provost Wendell Pritchett.

Funded projects include:

• The department of fine arts will host Jamal Batts as their first Curator-in-Residence, engaging the Penn community around his work exploring Blackness, queerness, visual culture and the intricacies of sexual risk and risk-taking.
• Faculty member Eugene Lew (music) will present Shuttle Service, a series of improvisatory performances by weavers, musicians, and sound artists.
• The history of art department’s Living Land Acknowledgment Group will host a series of Indigenous artists, curators, and cultural leaders, called Indigenous Arts in Focus.
• Kelly Writers House will host a group of millennial Black Muslim writers, with the women guided by Husnaa Haajarah Hashim, C’22, a former Youth Poet Laureate of Philadelphia.
• The School of Nursing will partner with Elevate Theater Company LLC to create a series of theater events telling stories from healthcare’s frontline workers.
• Sachs will support three independent writing projects, including The Serpent Will Eat Whatever is in the Belly of the Beast, a speculative novel by Marc Anthony Richardson; Zain Mian’s translation of the Urdu meta-fiction novel Bhed (The Secret); and Paul Hendrickson’s research on a literary-cum-journalistic nonfiction book about his father’s life in World War ll.
• A new class, Designing Motherhood, will bring previously taboo and under-researched material on design for human reproduction into the classroom, in conjunction with a new exhibition at the Mütter Museum.
• Peter Decherney will complete a book of photographs and text exploring the Jewish Community in Gondar, Ethiopia, Ethiopia’s Last Jews.
• Undergraduate Julian Hunter will selfproduce an album of songs exploring themes of race, class, inequality, reconciliation, and love.

A complete list of the 2021 Grant Awards can be found in the Grants section of the Sachs Program website. These 25 grants are in addition to 10 Student Grants and 4 First-Year Seminar Grants awarded in the fall, as well as the grants awarded through our Ben Art Bucks program.

Congratulations to all of the 2021 grantees!

—John McInerney, Executive Director
—Chloe Reison, Associate Director
—Tamara Suber, Administrative Assistant