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.

rotoscope frame of animation of a woman's grief stricken face

Animating Grief

Supported by the Summer DocuLab initiative, five Tri-College students will are spending summer 2020 working on the experimental film Smile4Kime, directed by Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow and Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Visual Studies Elena Guzman along with the film’s Executive Producer, animator Cybee Bloss.

The three women who make up the Gradual incubator team work at laptops on their project

VCAM Student Programs Continue Online for Summer 2020

VCAM’s summer student initiatives—the HIP Innovation Incubator, the Maker Arts Space Design + Making Collaborative Fellowship, and the joint VCAM-Hurford Center Summer DocuLab Program—will all be continuing online for summer 2020.

Ethnocine Artist Residency at Haverford College

From March 18-24, 2020, filmmakers Seemab Gul and Nida Mehboob will be in residence at Haverford College’s VCAM (Visual Culture, Arts, and Media) facility through its new Media and Makers Initiative. During their time at Haverford, they’ll meet with faculty and students, as well as work on post-production for their film How I Like It.

Strange Truth 2020

Strange Truth 2020 examines the relationship between the visual and structures of power by engaging with politics of race, gender, and identity. Showcasing the work of international filmmakers, artists, activists, and media scholars, this year’s series explores how documentary and expanded cinema practices make visible the role of images in complicating and (re)constructing complex narratives of history, memory, and time.

a film crew out in the field filming a fire beside a river

Call for Applications: Ethnocine Artist Residency at Haverford College

Haverford College’s VCAM Media and Makers Initiative seeks two feminist ethnographic filmmakers to participate in a joint one-week residency at Haverford College, March 18-24, 2020. Deadline to Apply: January 17, 2020.

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."