Departments & Programs
At Penn, the arts encompass the full range of creative practices and the academic disciplines that interpret their histories, meanings, and methods.
Anthropology
In addition to having a sound knowledge of anthropology as a whole, students are trained to do independent research in at least one of the major subfields of Anthropology.
Architecture
The Penn Program in Architecture is committed to the productive creation of critical knowledge in Architecture that brings value to the built environment.
Art and Archeology of the Mediterranean World
The Graduate Group in the Art and Archaeology of the Mediterranean World trains students for careers in the art and archaeology of Classical and Near Eastern Civilizations.
Cinema and Media Studies
Training is provided in a variety of global and comparative approaches to studying diverse national cinemas and a wide array of media texts, formats, institutions, and creative practices.
Creative Writing
Home to a faculty of award-winning writers who teach more than sixty workshops each year in various genres for children and young adult. As well writing that engages with community organizing, multimedia and visual arts, and performance.
Design Major
Students will acquire contemporary representation, prototyping, and fabrication skills and engage with theoretical frameworks yielding advanced research and knowledge production.
Digital Media Design
Prepares students to understand, program, and apply theoretical, artistic, aesthetic and experiential principles associated with computer graphics, animation and digital media design.
Fine Arts
Through studio work, seminar courses, and interactions with vital working artists, the program provides an open intellectual framework to foster critical awareness and independent methods of artistic research.
History of Art
The Penn History of Art program seeks to deepen students’ knowledge of artistic production and practice over the scope of human history, as well as to broaden awareness of the critical and interpretive aims of the discipline itself.
Music
Penn Music fosters many approaches to the study and making of music. Performance, listening, academic investigation, and composition are all supported, as is the notion that building connections between approaches can lead to rich outcomes.
Theatre Arts
The Theatre Arts Program at the University of Pennsylvania is dedicated to developing the student’s mind and artist’s creativity through an interdisciplinary exploration of theatrical history, literature, and artistic practice.
Visual Studies
Visual Studies at Penn prepares students to forge innovative connections across the disciplines that study vision and images. Students acquire a critical awareness of seeing and the problems and possibilities for investigating, thinking, and writing about seeing in the 21st century.
Course Highlights
ARTH 3970 Spiegel-Wilks Seminar: Curating Contemporary Art
This class integrates the theory and practice of curating contemporary art from the conceptualization of an exhibition to its realization. The class will feature conversations with leading curators to provide insight into their practices, and field trips to major institutions in Philadelphia.
FNAR 3090 Art and Social Work: Art and the Ecology of Justice
The class engages the work of creative practitioners who are mapping new relationships between art and social justice and directly impacting individual and communal well-being. In so doing, the course seeks to challenge traditional constructions of public health, which often isolate individual histories from their social life and their relation to families, communities, and geographies.
AFRC 3251 Writing for Children: Magic, Demons, Activism
You will play with building blocks of genres for children, including picture books, graphic novels, stories in verse, nonsense, and suspense. Then, we will take those stories out to schools in West Philadelphia to workshop, stretch, and refine with young readers. ABCS course cross listed with the Netter Center.
CIMS 3664 Documentary Ethnography for Museum of Exhibition practices
Class will utilize cinematic techniques that investigate cultural narratives revolving around cultural heritage sites, rituals and ceremonies, artifacts, materials and living traditions. Students will engage in process of the creation of the new digital and in-gallery content that will reframe the Metropolitan Museum’s African art galleries.
Research Centers
Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication
Exploring new ways of understanding the world, including through public scholarship, the arts, multimodal scholarship, and digital archives.
Center for Experimental Ethnography
Promoting multi-modal research practices as both method and theory, integral dimensions of scholarly research.
Netter Center for Community Partnerships
The Netter Center develops and helps implement democratic, mutually transformative, place-based partnerships between Penn and West Philadelphia that advance research, teaching, learning, and service.
Penn Center for Neuroaesthetics
Exploring beauty, language, cognition, and the brain using converging evidence from behavioral, neuroimaging, and lesion studies.
PennPraxis is the applied research, engagement, and practice arm at the Weitzman School of Design. We collaborate with students, clients, and community organizers to develop tools, strategies, and design interventions that imagine new futures for both urban and rural landscapes.
Positive Psychology is the scientific study of the factors that enable individuals and communities to thrive. Founded on the belief that people want to cultivate what is best within themselves, and to enhance their experiences of love, work, and play.
Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing
The Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing has brought together all of Penn’s writing programs, entities, and projects – to form a collaborative that excites and welcomes all students, faculty, staff, alumni and other Penn-affiliated writers.
Center for Public Art and Space
Supporting Penn faculty, staff, and students in incubating public art projects and securing grant-based funding, advances the work of exceptional MFA students as artists in residence, and partners on critical initiatives that bridge the campus and the public realm in Philadelphia and beyond.
The Wolf Humanities Center is Penn’s main hub for interdisciplinary humanities research and public programming. The goals are to demonstrate how vital the humanities are to the life of the mind and the health of society.
