In late spring 2020, a team at the University of Connecticut and Brown University created the Pandemic Journaling Project (PJP), an online space where people around the world could create a weekly record of their pandemic experiences in writing, audio, or images. Over 1,800 people in 55 countries contributed nearly 27,000 journal entries—including almost 3,000 photos. PJP's mission is simple: 

Usually, history is written only by the powerful. When the history of COVID-19 is written, let's make sure that doesn't happen.

In Picturing the Pandemic, PJP teams up with Seeing Truth: Art, Science, Museums, and Making Knowledge to explore the open-ended power of journaling as a way to share our pandemic experiences, learn from others, find our creativity, and strengthen our voice. We ask: How can images—making them, looking at them, thinking with them—expand our capacity for self-care, history-writing, and change-making in our tough and troubled world?

Picturing the Pandemic first launched in Hartford, Connecticut, in Fall 2022. In Spring 2023, new iterations of the exhibition open in three new locations — in close collaboration with local partners and co-curators in Providence, Heidelberg, and Mexico City. In November 2023, a capsule version of the exhibition traveled to Toronto.

We are currently working on a book project about Picturing the Pandemic that includes images, contributor and collaborator voices, and feedback from visitors across the exhibition’s five locations in four countries.