Media Arts and Culture develops arts initiatives and works collaboratively with university and community-based arts organizations and practitioners to create innovative, fully accessible cultural programming. The work includes oral history, archival preservation, documentary, exhibition, and public performance.

Projects include:

  • File/Life - We Remember Stories of Pennhurst—Community-led exploration of the Pennhurst archives, featuring visual profiles of former Pennhurst residents through the eyes of self-advocate archivists
  • Band Aids Don’t Fix Bullet Holes—Compilation of works by Youth Advisory Council members about gun violence
  • Smart Caption Glasses— Collaboration with People’s Light theater in Chester County, PA and National Theatre of Great Britain to allow people who are Deaf or have hearing loss to view captions at any performance, from any theater seat
  • Discovering the Selinsgrove Center—Project to illuminate the history of institutionalization through personal experience using an arts-based methodology
  • A Fierce Kind of Love—Play written by Suli Holum, using word, movement, and song to examine stories of Pennsylvania’s Intellectual Disability Rights Movement
  • Here—Stories from the Selinsgrove Center and KenCrest Services—Nineteen people with intellectual disabilities who live and work in these segregated settings in Pennsylvania—real and often divisive part of our history—tell their stories
  • Visionary Voices:
    Interviews—Collection of stories from advocates, self-advocates, and family members who took great risks to ensure the safety and freedom of people in Pennsylvania’s Intellectual Disability Rights Movement
    Archives—Preservation of personal papers collections significant to the Movement—a collaboration with Temple University Urban Archives—currently home to the personal papers collections of parent-advocates Dennis Haggerty, Leona Fialkowski, Eleanor Elkin and Audrey Coccia

More Information

Lisa Sonneborn
lisa.sonneborn@temple.edu
voice: 215-204-9542