Drexel’s Antoinette Westphal College of Media Arts & Design is pleased to announce that the keynote speaker for our 2025 Commencement ceremony will be Grammy Award-winning musician, producer, and composer James Poyser.

In spring 2022, Drexel’s Antoinette Westphal College of Media Arts & Design and Curtis Institute of Music presented Rehearsing Philadelphia: A Meta-Score by Ari Benjamin Meyers through a series of events across the city. Rehearsing Philadelphia was initially conceived prior to the start of the pandemic, but the project’s driving questions – centered around justice, virtuosity, access, memory, and togetherness – were shaped and reshaped by COVID’s impact. Taking place across the city, Rehearsing Philadelphia became a poignant analogy for the ways in which people would come back together, as pairings, small groups, and large collectives.