The Sachs Program for Arts Innovation has announced the recipients of its 2025 Student Grant Awards. This year’s applicant pool represents the largest to date, with a diverse array of proposals across disciplines and practices. Supported projects demonstrate a wide range of creative traditions, such as film, music, visual arts and design, poetry, and dance.

Andrew Burke (School of Arts & Sciences): The Most Human Human (working title)—an immersive, multimedia operetta loosely inspired by the book The Most Human Human by Brian Christian.

Alvin Luong (Weitzman School of Design): Before I Was Coral, I Was a Refugee—a multimedia project that foreshadows a future of climate migration through a deep investigation into Bidong Island in Malaysia.

Azsaneé Truss (Annenberg School for Communication): What World?—a curated group exhibition at the Arts League in West Philadelphia that reveals how artists (and society) are experiencing a surreal global political moment.

Celine Choi (College of Arts & Sciences): South Korean Feminist Poetics: Gender, Han, and the Violence of the Archive (Mundan)—an exploration of contemporary South Korean feminist poetics that resists patriarchal structures.

Darren Tindall (Weitzman School of Design): Psycheprocity: Designing for Psychedelics and Psychedelics for Design—a creative consideration of psychedelics and design through fieldwork, workshops, and case studies.

Ejun Mary Hong and Justin Nam Duong (College of Arts & Sciences): Footprints in the Sand—a mixed-media animated documentary that invites four lymphoma patients from South Korea to share their stories with the world.

Farrah Rahaman (Annenberg School for Communication): Palimpsest—a short speculative film recounting a moment on the brink of deportation in which visionary cultural organizer and writer Claudia Jones sets fire to her entire personal archive.

Katie Hindle (College of Arts & Sciences): Philadelphia Through Copper: Intaglio Depictions of Contemporary Histories—a print series that portrays Philadelphia social scenes as a form of archival contemporary history.

Lavanya Neti (Wharton School): Beneath the Surface: Amplifying the Voices of Divers—an immersive 360-degree mini-documentary highlighting the impacts of climate change on marine life and the livelihoods of the diving community.

Lucila Rozas Urrunaga (Annenberg School for Communication): Contra-Archivx—a transnational initiative that documents and shares the practices and narratives of transgender/feminist resistance across Latin America.

Max Johnson (School of Arts & Sciences): Web of Sound—a series of workshops, rehearsals, and experimental sessions to develop and refine a concert-length composition by composer and bassist Max Johnson.

Mira Kwon and Taj Swaminathan-Sipp (College of Arts & Sciences): Voices of Kakuma: A Collaborative Curation with FilmAid Kenya—a collaboration between Penn students and FilmAid Kenya—a nonprofit organization that teaches filmmaking in the Kakuma and Dadaab refugee camps of Kenya—to curate an exhibit and film screening that will present the stories of refugees on their terms.

Monolith (Student Group): Sade K. Taiwo and Abigail Florestal (College of Arts & Sciences): Monolith Annual Spring Exhibit—an annual exhibit that celebrates and uplifts Black visual art while connecting with people across the city of Philadelphia.

Penn Ballet (Student Group): Lisa Slattery (College of Arts & Sciences): Penn Ballet: Winter Showcase—a production of student-choreographed pieces and classical excerpts from The Nutcracker.

Sithabo Mathe (College of Arts & Sciences and Penn Engineering): Naive Photographs—a book project culled from a series of black and white photographs documenting the artist’s first return to Zimbabwe, which coincided with the 2023 presidential elections.