Announcing our summer internship funding awards
As another academic year draws to a close, we are delighted to announce four winners of our summer internship funding awards. Made possible by alumni support including gifts from the Class of ’93 and Class of ‘72, these awards will enable students to accept internships in talent management, film production and television, and will support their moving and living expenses during summer 2023. A record number of applicants with a wide range of arts and entertainment career interests made the decision process competitive and challenging.
Read more...It’s time for the 2023 Philadelphia Children’s Festival
Children's Festival
At Penn Live Arts, the return of cherry blossoms to our Outdoor Plaza can mean only one thing: the steady approach of our
Philadelphia Children’s Festival, entering its 37th year this May 20th through 23rd.
Like all large public gatherings, the Children’s Festival was on extended hiatus throughout the pandemic and had a soft return in 2022. This year, it will look more the way our audiences remember it, with live performances of dance, theatre and music for pre-K to middle-school students.
Read more...Engaging our communities with the Negro Ensemble Company
February’s world premiere of
Mecca is Burning, our commissioned play co-produced by our
22/23 season artist-in-residence, the Negro Ensemble Company (NEC), was a resounding success. Through our residency activities, over 150 students at Penn and in Philadelphia schools received special insight into the development of new theatre. NEC Artistic Director Karen Brown visited theatre arts instructor Margit Edwards’ Movement for the Actor class with NEC actor Steven Peacock Jacoby. Speaking to a room of Penn students studying everything from engineering to economics, Brown and Peacock Jacoby emphasized the meaningful place theatre could occupy in students’ lives, regardless of their career paths.
Read more...Bringing Beowulf into the present day with Benjamin Bagby
When we contacted a group of early modernist faculty in the Penn music and English departments about a possible engagement event featuring Benjamin Bagby, whose performance of
Beowulf took place on January 27, the response was immediate and enthusiastic. These faculty, including Assistant Professor of Music Mary Channen Caldwell, Assistant Professor of English Caroline Batten, and Professor of English David Wallace, were more than scholarly appreciators of Bagby’s painstaking historical investigation into the type of harp most likely to have accompanied the epic poem, or his years of touring the globe enlivening the Old English text for contemporary audiences: they were
fans.
Read more...Our fall education and engagement activities
“It’s like watching people paint with their life, with their bodies,” longtime Negro Ensemble Company actor Kene Holliday told a roomful of Penn students about the art of acting this past November. Holliday would know; the historic company’s
Brownstein Residency for Artistic Innovation with Penn Live Arts this year marks more than 50 years of the stage, film and TV actor’s career. He and NEC Artistic Director Karen Brown made Penn Professor McKenna Kerrigan’s Intro to Directing class one stop in a busy series of outreach engagements to students and the West Philadelphia community, kicking off our education and engagement activities for the season.
Read more...
