Philadelphia College of Physicians received funding from The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage to expand access to its unique medical humanities collections. Beth collaborated to engage and elicit feedback from both existing and potential audiences to ensure the project incorporated goals around diversity, equity, and inclusion. Through community-based engagement with residents in Philadelphia’s Mantua neighborhood and research with diverse museum advisors, the project initiated an ongoing reckoning with the institution’s history of acquisition and the ethics of exhibiting human remains.

Beth provided sensitivity editing for exhibition materials for Designing Motherhood: Things That Make and Break Our Births, a first-of-its-kind consideration of the arc of human reproduction through the lens of design, including an award-winning book and an exhibition that was in Philadelphia (2021), Boston (2022), and Seattle (2023) and is in Stockholm and Houston in 2024-2025 and New York City in fall 2025.

Beth collaborated with artist collective Blast Theory from the UK and the Philadelphia College of Physicians to catalyze community-engagement efforts for Spit Spreads Death, a public parade and exhibition at the Mütter Museum commemorating the 100-year legacy of the 1918 influenza pandemic in Philadelphia, with the goal of including perspectives from neighborhood residents and community members in the exhibition and the events surrounding its launch.

Beth collaborated with artists from Amber Art & Design and Fairmount Park Conservancy as part of a residency at the historic Hatfield House. Together with residents of Strawberry Mansion, a community advisory board, and local arts and culture makers, we transformed the underutilized house into a platform for experiments in civic engagement. Along with ethnography and oral history collection, we activated a cultural asset mapping process which culminated in the design of a deck of playing cards celebrating local people and places.

Beth was urban ethnographer and community organizer with Cohabitation Strategies and Mural Arts Project for Playgrounds for Useful Knowledge, a socio-spatial research and engagement project in South Philadelphia. The team collaborated with a variety of neighborhood partners using participatory research and engagement methods to critically engage local environmental and social concerns. Though a series of “actions” staged on a vacant lot and a culminating festival celebrating local cultural producers, the pilot project increased cross-cultural communication while supporting ongoing local organizing efforts.

Beth created a public art workshop in collaboration with Penn’s Program in Environmental Humanities as part of their event Futures Beyond Refining. Students spent the semester collaborating with residents and activists who live near the Philadelphia Energy Solutions Oil Refinery Complex, which exploded in June 2019. The 100-year-old complex has produced cancer, respiratory ailments and other health concerns for persons living nearby. During the workshop, participants created ‘visions’ of the area 100 years from now on postcards and mailed them to local officials.

As part of Fairmount Park Conservancy programming, Beth developed curriculum for a summer multi-media (photography and video) camp in Strawberry Mansion. The camp paired local field trips with historic information and offered local youth a chance to learn digital photography and storytelling techniques while exploring the history of their neighborhood.