About this Event
Arts at Penn Launch Party
After doors open at noon, Vice Provost for the Arts Timothy Rommen will share plans for advancing Arts at Penn. Next, ICA Director Johanna Burton will invite you to experience a unique tour created by Theatre Arts Director Brooke O’Harra and student ambassadors that will have you responding to ICA’s exhibits in new and surprising ways. Provost John L. Jackson, Jr. will bring us back for a toast to kick off the reception and mid-day dance party with a DJ set by Sarah Parmet C’29.
The first 100 people through the door will receive limited edition Arts at Penn swag!
12:00 / Doors
12:30 / Remarks from Timothy Rommen and Johanna Burton
12:45 / How Art Moves Us with Brooke O’Harra and ICA student ambassadors
1:15 / Toast by John L. Jackson, Jr. to kick off reception and dance party
About the Arts at Penn
In January of 2025, University of Pennsylvania appointed its inaugural Vice Provost of the Arts. After an intensive listening tour and the development of a strategic plan, we are thrilled to celebrate this formal recognition of the essential role the arts have always played at Penn. At Penn, we believe the arts are central to advancing knowledge, imagining new futures, and exploring our shared humanity. Through creative, interpretive, and integrative practices and methods, we challenge ourselves to discover new insights, develop innovations, and foster inclusive places of belonging.
Timothy Rommen, Martin Meyerson Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies and Professor of Music and Africana Studies in the School of Arts and Sciences, began his tenure as Penn’s inaugural Vice Provost for the Arts on January 1, 2025.
A renowned expert in the music of the Caribbean, he is the author of Funky Nassau: Roots, Routes, and Representation in Bahamian Popular Music (University of California Press, 2011) and “Mek Some Noise:” Gospel Music and the Ethics of Style in Trinidad (University of California Press, 2007), winner of the Alan Merriam Prize for the best book of the year in ethnomusicology, in addition to several edited volumes and numerous articles and book chapters. At Penn, Vice Provost Rommen has served as Chair, Director of Graduate Studies, and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Music, as well as Interim Chair of the Department of Africana Studies. He earned a PhD in Ethnomusicology from the University of Chicago.
Johanna Burton is Daniel W. Dietrich, II Director of the Institute of Contemporary Art.
Burton has been active in the contemporary art field for nearly 20 years, including more than a decade of leadership experience in major museums and prominent arts and education institutions. An art historian, curator, writer, and educator, Burton has organized major thematic exhibitions such as “Trigger: Gender as a Tool and Weapon” (2017) at the New Museum, and “Take it or Leave It: Institution, Image, Ideology” (2014) at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Burton’s past posts include tenures as Maurice Marciano Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles; Executive Director of the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio; Keith Haring Director & Curator of Education and Public Engagement at the New Museum, New York; Director of the Graduate Program at Bard College’s Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS), New York; and Associate Director & Senior Faculty Member at the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program (ISP), New York. She was a 2019 Center for Curatorial Leadership (CCL) Fellow and currently serves on the board of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
Brooke O’Harra is Professor of Practice and Director of the Theatre Arts Program in the School of Arts and Sciences
A professional theater director and artist, O’Harra’s current projects include Be Holding, co-created with poet Ross Gay, composer Tyshawn Sorey, and Yarn/Wire. In addition, O’Harra and Sharon Hayes created Echo Chamber, a performance using personal and found audio cassette tapes. Time Passes, an 8-hour performance with Hayes and their daughter, uses the book-on-tape recording of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse as its spine. Brooke co-founded the NYC based company Theater of a Two-headed Calf in 1999. She also conceived, directed, wrote for, and performed in The Dyke Division’s live serial drama Room for Cream at La Mama, ETC (2008–2010) and the New Museum (2017). O’Harra’s research and performance work I am Bleeding All Over the Place: Studies in directing or nine encounters between me and you was performed in NYC and Philadelphia and culminated in a book of essays titled Who Is In the Room? (Routledge Performance Series, 2025).
John L. Jackson, Jr., Penn’s 31st Provost, is a world-leading urban anthropologist, filmmaker, and scholar of visual culture.
His widely influential work includes six scholarly books and ten films that have been screened across international film festivals, including the multi-award-winning Making Sweet Tea and the widely screened and taught Bad Friday: Rastafari After Coral Gardens. Elected in 2026 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he has written extensively for popular media, as well as such landmark studies as, most recently, Thin Description: Ethnography and the African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem, Racial Paranoia: The Unintended Consequences of Political Correctness, and Harlemworld: Doing Race and Class in Contemporary Black America. At Penn, he is currently Richard Perry University Professor and has served as the Dean of the Annenberg School for Communication and the School of Social Policy and Practice, was appointed in 2006 as the university’s first Penn Integrates Knowledge University Professor, and co-founded the Center for Experimental Ethnography and the Collective for Advancing Multimodal Research Arts.
Sarah Parmet is a sophomore English major at the University of Pennsylvania, where she is also a board member of DJ@Penn.
A music producer, composer, and DJ from Los Angeles/Hong Kong, she is an intern at MilkBoy the Studio and is UPenn's first-ever Grammy U Ambassador. You can find her original music on Spotify.
Event venue & nearby stays
Institute of Contemporary Art, 118 South 36th Street, Philadelphia, United States
Concerts, fests, parties, meetups — all the happenings, one place.