Visual Culture, Arts, and Media VCAM

Haverford’s Visual Culture, Arts, and Media (VCAM) facility is a 24/7 creative hub for students, faculty, staff, and the wider community.

VCAM houses the College’s Interdisciplinary Minor in Visual Studies, the Haverford Innovations Program, a Maker Arts Space, and the John B. Hurford ’60 Center for the Arts and Humanities and its Philadelphia Area Creative Collaboratives initiative.

COOL CLASSES: “Body Media: Wearable Technology and Digital Bodies”

This visual studies course introduces students to critical design and creative practices that address technologies that are worn on the body, that digitize the body, and that extend the body.

Technology and Justice 2019-20

This series focuses on the ethics of technological adoption and adaptations, inviting technologists, academics, activists, and artists to examine issues from algorithmic decision-making in the criminal justice system to the near constant surveillance of our actions to the future of work in an automated world.

A woman playing table tennis, a couple dancing, an older couple seated together

Contemporary Japanese Cinema

Contemporary Japanese Cinema invites you to experience Japanese culture and society through stories that depict love, loss, and friendship. This series features three films: Mixed Doubles (Dir. Ishikawa Junichi, 2017), Hanagatami (Dir. Obayashi Nobuhiko, 2017), and Mori, The Artist’s Habitat (Dir. Okita Shūichi, 2018).

Exhibitions Boom

Thanks to its flexible Create Spaces, resources, and support, VCAM has made possible a surge in faculty-inspired, curriculum-related, and student-initiated creative projects on campus.

Interior shot of VCAM showing all three levels of the building

VCAM Wins SCUP/AIA-CAE Honorable Mention

VCAM has received a SCUP/AIA-CAE Excellence in Architecture for Building Additions or Adaptive Reuse Honorable Mention. The Society for College and University Planning (SCUP) Excellence Awards program is a juried competition that showcases how using strategic, integrated planning can result in exemplary buildings, grounds, institutional success, and careers that inspire.

VCAM sign on the wall inside the building

VCAM featured in Architecture MN

Joel Hoekstra writes that the building "allow[s] makers of every stripe to indulge their creativity—whether it’s baking cookies, crafting a documentary, or soldering a motherboard—whenever the impulse strikes."

A student films in the VCAM using a green screen

VCAM Wins AIA Minnesota Honor Award

VCAM is one of four projects to win an AIA Minnesota Honor Award this year.

VCAM Featured in Architectural Record

Describing the building’s multilevel insertion, Josephine Minutillo writes, “It’s the way those spaces in the new block interact with the rest of the building that makes the project sing.”

Strange Truth 2019

Strange Truth 2019 explores the non-fiction imagination in the film and installation work of mediamakers Christopher Harris, Laura Parnes, Jonathan Olshefski, and Sabrina Schmidt Gordon. This year’s series engages with the politics of place, race, history, performance, and cinema itself.