about
The Creative Ventures series supports creative collaborations across
discipline, emphasizing evolution and innovation, convergence, creative
process, and imagination.
Find out more about past events here.
awards
Creative Capital
Creative Ventures Capital will reward fresh, daring, and unusual ideas, support intellectual
risk-taking, and offer practical assistance from a project's launch, through its development, to
its realization. Funding from Creative Ventures Capital is awarded competitively to support
undergraduate students at the University of Pennsylvania in semester-long creative projects
that, by their inter- or extra-disciplinary focus, complex nature, or eccentricity, may otherwise
find difficulty attracting start-up support. Accepted project proposals will receive up to $500 in
initial funding and funding recipients will receive mentoring, project presentation space, and
ongoing development and production assistance from Creative Ventures staff and our affiliates at
the Kelly Writers House.
Previous Recipients:
Becca Goldstein – Through my Creative Ventures project
"Changing the Way We Drink," I plan to educate the community about locally produced spirits. I was
inspired by learning about the growing number of American craft distilleries during my summer
internship at a start up whiskey distillery in Brooklyn. I plan to compile research about the
current local spirits renaissance by touring distilleries and interviewing distillers, speaking
to government officials, surveying bars and restaurants, and visiting archives. My hope is to
make new information about this movement accessible to the public by documenting my progress
through social media. Now, drinking responsibly is also about drinking locally and sustainably.
Jenny Chen & Tim Miller – Ever ponder about the journey of a
secondhand coffee table? Or wonder what bottoms have sat upon the heirloom couch in your
grandmother's parlor? Ever stop to consider what the busted bookshelf you're about to toss in the
trash could be transformed into? This semester, a Creative Ventures project spearheaded by Tim
Miller and Jenny Chen aims to find out the answers to all such musings! Combining the talents of
renovators, handymen, repair-women, bloggers, programmers, videographers, and photographers, Tim
and Jenny will collect old and broken pieces of furniture on the brink of being thrown away and
repair or recreate them. For each piece of furniture, a blog will be created, featuring the
previous owner's stories about an old chair or table as well as documentation about each piece's
transformation. Every new piece of furniture will also be labelled with a QR code so that future
owners can easily link to their furniture's blog and add to their stories.
current event
An Investigation in Text and Movement as Artistic Materials
In artistic practice and production, TEXT and MOVEMENT are materials with distinct texture, history, function, possibility, charge. This evening’s program includes five artists, working in choreography, performance, sound and the written word. Through a variety of multimedia performance, “reading” and participatory workshop, each of these artists will lead audience members through an embodied and communal investigation of text and movement: what they are, what they do, the overlap and interstice, the way instances of each construct space, bodies, and community, the possibility of a map, the relationships we find and make.
