For our April Third  Thursday Azsanneé Truss and CAMRA will give a recap of their annual SSMF festival! This years theme is “ Portals” and we will hear about how the 2026 submissions explored and engaged with this theme. Please join us for an exciting conversation over lunch and refreshments

Join us for a screening of the documentary film The Empty Grave (dirs. Agnes Wegner & Cece Mlay), followed by a discussion. The documentary follows two Tanzanian families in their efforts to locate and repatriate the remains of their ancestors, which were taken to Germany during the colonial era and are currently held in museum collections.


The post-screening discussion will feature Erinest Kaaya, Felix Kaaya, and Ndelekwa Kaaya (whose ancestor's remains are held at the American Museum of Natural History) and German artist and activist Konradin Kunze, who has worked on issues of colonial restitution for over a decade. Some discussants may join via Zoom.

For our March Third  Thursday we will break bread with Senior Fellow at CEE, Angelantonio Grossi  in a conversation that bridges Ghanaian popular media cultures, Black Atlantic religions, and music. S

This short documentary follows Cesar Vargas, a Garifuna language teacher and researcher from Honduras, and Eli LaBan, a documentary filmmaker from Philadelphia, as they record and translate traditional songs to use as teaching tools to support the revitalization of the endangered afro-indigenous Garifuna language in Honduras. 
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Apologies, the event has been canceled! 

Please join us for our monthly CEE Third Thursday event. This month, CEE affiliated faculty Margit Edwards will be hosting a discussion  with Nicosia Shakes, Profesor and Author of Women's Activist Theatre in Jamaica and South Africa: Gender, Race, and Performance Space . Please join us for an exciting conversation over lunch and refreshments  

Please join us for Ṣèègèsí , our CEE Fall Fellow Courtney Desiree Morriss Final Event! No registration needed!
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Ṣèègèsí (pronounced shay-gay-see) is a durational performance that explores the ritual of hair braiding as a practice of survival. Over 8 hours, performance and visual artist Courtney Desiree Morris will install a set of braid extensions in her hair in the museum. The performance will be accompanied by a soundscape of five mixtapes. Audience members are invited to make offerings of pennies, flowers, sweets, honey, stones/minerals, or shells.

​The event includes a film preservation workshop and panel discussion on four recently restored Senegalese newsreels from the 1960s and 70s. We will be joined by Dr. Mamadou Diouf, Professor of African Studies and History at Columbia University and Visiting Professor at Global Studies University of Sharjah (AE), as well as Tiziana Manfredi from Atelier MamiWata and consultant to the Cinematography Department of Senegal.  The workshop and screening are catered towards student, faculty and community members interested in film/photography preservation and restoration, national archiving and storytelling, political histories of Senegal, West Africa and the Caribbean as well as Black arts festivals of the 1960s and 70s. The newsreels will be screened in their original French language with English subtitles. 

Join us for a screening of "The Prison in Twelve Landscapes" by Brett Story, a film about the prison in which we never see a penitentiary. Instead, the film unfolds as a cinematic journey through a series of landscapes across the USA where prisons do work and affect lives, from a California mountainside where female prisoners fight raging wildfires, to a Bronx warehouse full of goods destined for the state correctional system, to an Appalachian coal town betting its future on the promise of prison jobs.  

Join us for a screening of the academy-award shortlisted documentary "Union" and a conversation with co-director Brett Story. Up against one of the most powerful companies on the planet, a group of Amazon workers embark on an unprecedented campaign to unionize their warehouse in Staten Island, New York. Documenting the struggle in intimate cinéma vérité, UNION presents a gripping human drama about the fight for power and dignity in today's globalized economic landscape.

Our first Third Thursday "Meet the Fellows" event will introduce our Fall Fellow Courtney Desiree Morris who will discuss upcoming projects, their course, and chat with of CEE community.  Join us in the CEE Lounge RM 438 for exciting discussion, snacks and refreshments.

For our Spring Fellow s final event , zavé martohardjono takes us into a soundscape of multichannel sound and performance, to set the room to facilitate our visualization of geological futures. Expanding a solo performance into a collaborative work with Philadelphia artists, zavé martohardjono is joined by performance into a collaborative work with Philadelphia artists , zavé martohardjono is joined by performers Mel Rodman and Amalía Colon-Nava and asmr4apocalypse features the biomaterial sculptures of Cecilia McKinnon. Music by Daphne Silbiger and spatialized sound design by Mike Clemow New choreographic research for this iteration was cultivated in zavé's Center for Experimental Ethnography at the Penn Museum course and local dance workshop made possible by the support of Leah Stein Dance Studios. 

March 28th, 2025 12PM | Penn Museum Rm 438 

An afternoon of poetry and conversation with Fukudapero, a poet, artist, and multimodal anthropologist living in Kyoto, Japan. In this lunch gathering, we will think together about the intersections between anthropological inquiry and poetic practice specifically, and more broadly about what happens when we let our creative talents inspire and enrich our research projects.

​Bio: Fukudapero is a poet, artist, and multimodal anthropologist living in Kyoto, Japan. Employing various modes of expression, viz: text, drawing, photography, film to installation, his works question reality and how they are collectively constructed. Highly commended by Forward Prize for Poetry 2020 (flowers like blue glass), his poetry has appeared in prominent magazines such as Gendaishi Techo, Bungakugaki, Australian Poetry Journal and more. fukuda is currently working on his second poetry collection, how to eat a mackerel (working title), a collection which investigates globalization and transcontinental folk imagination.

This Third Thursday we will be joined by Omar and Cybille of Honeysuckle! Omar Tate and Cybille St.Aude-Tate are social entrepreneurs who believe in centering the Black experience and are fueled by the conviction that chefs have a social responsibility.
Their overarching brand, Honeysuckle Projects, expands the mission of Honeysuckle Provisions into a network of community spaces centered around the values of ancestry, nourishment, and reclamation across pop-ups, dinner parties, and events.

A chorus of voices from 1953 to 2024; interior subjectivities that render a spectral and meditative portrait of objects and remains – abducted, looted, and encased in centuries of deleterious colonial holding that nonetheless bear the faculty to speak back. The films in this program assert that there are as many paths to restitution as there are stolen objects and people. Millions, innumerable, unthinkable, with every person and item imbued with spiritual meaning and still worth imagining.

At this screening we will be showing: 

Statues Also Die (1953)
The Violence of a Civilization Without Secrets (2017)
 Dahomey (2024)
YOU HIDE ME (1970)

This Missing Image is a screening that involves a case study of the research, preservation and restoration of the audiovisual archives of the Senegalese Department of Cinematography. Retracing history through the recovered images of “Actualités Sénégalaises”, the post- independence newsreels

This showing will include: 
IFE / 3ème FESTIVAL DES ARTS (1971)
SÉNÉGAL AN XVI (1976)
LE SÉNÉGAL ET LE FESTIVAL MONDIAL DES ARTS NÈGRES (1966)