Our Mission

CAMRA (Collective for Advancing Multimodal Research Arts) fosters interdisciplinary collaborations amongst scholars, sensory ethnographers, artists and educators within and beyond the University of Pennsylvania to explore, practice, evaluate and teach about multimedia research and representation. 

We ask questions about the affordances, challenges, and possibilities of multimodal scholarship in teaching, learning, mediamaking, and knowledge production. Our aim is to support media-based research and pedagogies, with an explicit focus on: (1) providing practical guidelines for evaluation of multimodal research; (2) utilizing participatory, digital, and ethnographic methodologies; (3) creating digital and physical spaces for multimodal work to be showcased; (4) critically examining how technology is changing the processes of teaching and learning.
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Upcoming Events
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The 2026 Screening Scholarship Media Festival: Portals | March 27-28, 2026

This year, SSMF will explore and experiment with the idea of Portals: spiritual, virtual, historical, (meta)physical, and technological. Embodying the act of crossing boundaries, shifting perceptions, and navigating between worlds, portals act as gateways between what is and what might be. The 2026 festival will consist of three parts: 
  • The Opening Performance featuring Philly-based singer-songwriter and pianist Black Buttafly.
  • The Multimodal Conference portion of SSMF, including a keynote speech by curator and founder of The Colored Girls Museum, Vashti DuBois.
  • The Closing Performance, which is a poetry night at The Arts League featuring South African-born, Philly-based poet Katleho Shoro.
More details and registration links can also be found here!

Reflections of Home | February 25, 2026

CAMRA and the Center for Experimental Ethnography are excited to host sisters Lunise and Talie Cerin for a screening and conversation around MIWA: a in-progress film that observes the transmission and preservation of Haitian tradition through vignettes, stories, recipes, dance, and poetry. The film was also transformed into an immersive installation and performance this fall.

Join us to learn about how MIWA has thus far mobilized documentary film, spatial design, and sound as multimodal methodologies for producing knowledge about Haiti and the Haitian diaspora.


​CAMRA Salon | December 2nd, 2025
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CAMRA will be hosting a salon on Tuesday, December 2nd!

Salons are an opportunity for folks engaged in multimodal scholarship to commune and talk about our work. We invite 1-2 people to present an in-progress project to ground the conversation, but the event is largely informal.

​Come gather over wine and snacks! All are welcome 
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