COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT AND ADMINISTRATIVE FELLOW OF THE CENTER FOR EXPERIMENTAL ETHNOGRAPHY

Melissa Skolnick-Noguera is a Research Fellow at Penn’s School of Social Policy & Practice. Since 2010, she has been working with nonprofit and community based organizations throughout Philadelphia, while using media as a tool for community building and storytelling. She holds a Master of Social Work degree from the University of Pennsylvania, and a Bachelor’s degree in Sociology from the University of Delaware. While attaining her MSW, she was initially trained as an ethnographic documentary filmmaker by faculty affiliated with CAMRA (Collective for Advancing Multimodal Research Arts) at Penn.

​Melissa has taught both undergraduate and graduate students how to use film as a multimodal research method, particularly through her leadership in CAMRA. She is currently investigating to what extent and in what ways Latin American immigrant communities engage in the arts and multimedia as methods of social change and resistance. Her research aims to challenge stereotypical narratives of immigrants and people of color, through advocating for these groups to have equal access to social, educational, and economic opportunities through the support of public policies and social justice reform. She often engages in participatory community media projects, and utilizes a critical race theory lens in her work.

CONTACT:  mskol@upenn.edu