Breanna Moore
Breanna Moore, a Penn undergraduate alum and current Ph.D. student, conducted independent ancestry research and found connections between her own family history, Penn's history, and slavery. Her research is featured in the Penn & Slavery Project's Augmented Reality App.
I’m currently a second-year graduate student pursuing a Ph.D. in History at the University of Pennsylvania. My passion is to disseminate diverse histories to the public, especially marginalized groups, inside and outside of academic spaces through multimodal mediums such as film, digital media, fashion, and public history projects. In 2019, I was commissioned by the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology to create an art installation for the opening of their New Africa Galleries. I created a dress, titled “Wearable Literature,” which uses art and embroidery to express the importance of ancestral communication and the principle of Sankofa in the design of the fabric.
I joined the Penn Slavery Project in Spring 2018. Through the Penn and Slavery Project’s Augmented Reality Mobile App, scheduled to be released in Spring 2021, I document the history of my family over five generations, from slavery to the present, set in contrast with the fortunes of my family’s enslavers which included two men who received medical degrees from Penn during the 19th century. I'm currently working on a documentary and an interactive ArcGIS StoryMap which centers my family as a microcosm of the southern Black experience from slavery to the present day and explores issues of reparatory justice, intergenerational wealth and privilege, and legacies of inequality between the wealth, educational attainments, and resources of the families of white enslavers and the families of the enslaved.
Membership: Spring 2018