 Friday, March 27th
Opening Performance | Penn Museum's Widener Auditorium @ 7:00PM SSMF 2026 will begin with an opening musical performance featuring pianist and singer-songwriter Black Buttafly. Her sonic practice invites audiences into a space of emotional truth, hope, and creative vulnerability, setting the tone for a festival that explores portals as sites of passage and possibility. Register for the SSMF Opening Performance here! Saturday, March 28th Multimodal Conference | Annenberg School for Communication from 9:00AM - 5:30PM This portion of the festival brings together scholars, artists, educators, and cultural workers to explore how knowledge is made through performance, film, sound, visual art, and experimental forms. Panels and workshops will feature work that refuses the separation of theory and practice, highlighting the affordances of multimodal scholarship to create space for memory, political struggle, and creative world-making. The Multimodal Conference Program is now available Keynote | Annenberg School for Communication, Room 110 @ 1:00PM Following lunch, CAMRA welcomes founder and executive director of The Colored Girls Museum, Vashti Dubois for a keynote speech. She will discuss her transcendent curatorial practice, which assembles contemporary art, intimate archives, and creative technologies to create "a sanctuary for the ordinary colored girl of the African diaspora." Register for the Multimodal Conference portion of SSMF here! Closing | The Arts League @ 7:00PM SSMF 2026 will conclude with a closing performance by South African-born, Philly-based poet and scholar Katleho Shoro. The closing will offer a gathering and an opportunity to reflect on how we might carry the festival's energies forward. Register for the SSMF Closing Performance here! Registration is free, but required for entrance to EACH festival event, as they have varying capacity.
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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. 
Join us in the Art Department (1901 Vine Street Philadelphia, PA 19103) for a crash course in creating new entries and updating existing articles on Wikipedia, the collaborative online encyclopedia. We will focus on Philadelphia’s local art history, and utilize the research resources of the Central Library.
This working session will begin with an introduction to those library resources and a tutorial on how to make a Wikipedia entry. Together we will attempt to fill in gaps in the online encyclopedia relating to Philadelphia’s rich visual arts activity. This program is being organized by Sawyer Taylor-Arnold, Daniel Tucker, and Gustavo Valenzuela and is supported by the Center for Experimental Ethnography at the University of Pennsylvania, Penn Press and the Art Department of the Free Library of Philadelphia. Optional Details for Flier:
march 19 | 12pm | CEE lounge 438For 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.
Apologies, the event has been canceled!
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