About Us

The Penn Global Documentary Institute (PGDI) collaborates with global communities to document human migration using film, photography, virtual reality, and other media. Ongoing projects examine the impact of politics, religion, and climate change on displaced and other at-risk communities. PGDI’s network of faculty, students, and partners embrace the latest innovations in scholarship, teaching, and media production to create collaborative, interdisciplinary, multimodal works that tell impactful stories.

In addition to global collaborations, PGDI foregrounds the role of student contributions to research and multimodal scholarship. As a result, PGDI’s award-winning films, books, and other work have been featured in international festivals and exhibits and have been distributed by the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR), Discovery+, and platforms.