Guided by the belief that the power and beauty of the arts benefits and lifts us all, the Institute’s Media Arts & Culture unit develops new 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

• Band Aids Don’t Fix Bullet Holes—Compilation of works by Youth Advisory Council members about gun violence.
• We Will Talk About These Days—Collection of interviews about living with disability while navigating a pandemic.
• Punch Light—Virtual performance project that highlights minute-long original works by local artists with disabilities and their creative collaborators.
• 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 complex history of institutionalization through personal experience using an arts-based methodology so residents who do not communicate in a traditional method can be heard.
• 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—19 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.

For More Information

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