Gluck Fellows of University of California, Riverside

Gluck fellow Sofia Valiente's program at Sherman Indian High School in 2023

Gluck Fellows Program inspires Sherman students The Gluck Fellows Program o

Gluck Fellow Sofia Valiente had an ASK Residency with the film students at Sherman Indian High School, and they published a book of their work.

We wish to thank the community who looked through their cupboards and donated their unneeded film cameras for this project - Tracy Cleary, Trina Elerts, Diane Eskritt, Dale Whitney Heron, David and Christine Leapman, Judy Lehr and Rusty Russell, Parthena Rosahl, Cheryl Scarano, Adlyn Strelecki, William and Tedra Trimm, and Laura Norberto Williams. And also Victoria Ross, Dawn Pia and Sonja Sekely-Rowland for their support in spreading the word about the project and helping us gather these cameras.

We extend our greatest appreciation to Monica Royalty, art teacher at Sherman Indian High School, and tremendous advocate for bringing Gluck fellow opportunities to her students, for hosting Gluck fellow Sofia Valiente.

Kimberly Guerrero (Colville, Salish-Kootenai, Cherokee) is a native Oklahoman and a graduate from UCLA and UCR. She is a legacy Gluck Fellow and is currently a theatre professor at UCR CHASS.

As a Gluck Fellow, Kimberly taught a workshop called "Who's the Hero: Storytelling Native American Style" and was the lead for our Improvology Theatre Troupe. Kimberly has worked with at-risk youth in Native American communities delivering motivational speeches, substance abuse prevention workshops and trainings that utilize filmmaking as a tool to promote personal and community development. Kimberly was selected as a Fellow for the Sundance Writer’s Lab, was a finalist for the Rockefeller Foundation New Media Fellowship and the ABC/Disney Writing Fellowship and has won several awards for acting including Best Actress at the 2014 Red Nation Film Festival for her portrayal of the inspirational Cherokee chief, Wilma Mankiller. Most recently, Kimberly was invited to join the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in recognition of her 30-year acting career! Congratulations! 🎉

Merideth Hillbrand was a M.F.A. candidate in Visual Art at UCR. She received her B.F.A. from Tufts University in partnership with The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 2010. She received the Edward Cinotti Prize in Video, 1st Place in Photography from Yosuf Karsh Prize, the Deans Discretionary Fund Travel Grant, and four years standing of the SMFA Merit Based Scholarship all from SMFA. Merideth lives and works between Los Angeles and Riverside where she focuses on her own sculpture and video based practice exploring how objects inform and influence our relationships to physical and psychological spaces. She recently mounted a solo exhibition at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center's McDermott Learning Center (https://www.wildflower.org/pressroom/artist-in-residence-merideth-hillbrands-work-on-display-through-september-2020)

As a Gluck Fellow, Merideth was a part of the GluckTV team of fellows that created an award-winning film about water called "Getting to Know H2O" (which you can find still on Gluck TV), and she taught a workshop called, "Be You Thing! An Exploration in Form From a 2D Shape to a 3D Object". This hands-on workshop led students in exploring and distinguishing geometric and biomorphic forms by transitioning a 2D line drawing they create into a three-dimensional shape with pipe cleaners. You can find resources for this workshop in our Gluck Creative Classroom in the Visual Art section under "Make It Activities" 🎨
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Estefania Sanchez is a UCR graduate earning her M.A. in Art History with a focus on Latin American art. She previously completed her B.A. in Art History with a minor in Anthropology at Bowdoin College in Maine. While she was at Bowdoin College, she interned and volunteered for two years at Bowdoin College’s Museum of Art as a tour guide for school fieldtrips. After graduating with her B.A. and moving back to California, Estefania worked for two years at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, as a gallery attendant where she received training on how to analyze art and spark conversations with visitors. Estefania is looking forward to working at a museum’s education department to help in making art accessible to the public.

As a Gluck Fellow, Estefania Sanchez taught a workshop called, “Murals: Our Talking Walls”. Students got to learn a brief history about murals and specifically the mural work of Diego Rivera. They also got to learn more about Diego Rivera through his Pan American Unity mural. This was a guide that students got to use to then create their own personal mural about themselves. Find resources for this workshop in our Creative Classroom on the History of Art page. 🖼
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JT Lachausse is a M.F.A. candidate in Creative Writing and Writing for the Performing Arts at UCR. He earned a B.A. in Fiction from Columbia College Chicago, and he was the editor for The Matador Review. His literary work has been published both online and in print, in publications such as Hair Trigger, pioneertown, and The Adirondack Review.

As a Gluck Fellow, JT taught a workshop that was called "Building Spaces: Using Memory to Write the Senses", which provided a space for students to identify environments that are special to them, write about those places, and share their stories with their fellow classmates. These spaces and places that are special to each student are attached to their identities, so by sharing their stories about these special spaces, they are sharing their cultures and identities by bringing them to life with pencil and paper for others to hear about.
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Talia Mason is a dancer and choreographer interested in the intersections of kinesthetic and verbal language. She grew up dancing at the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange and at the Kibbutz Contemporary Dance Company. Talia choreographs because she believes wholeheartedly that ordinary bodies can do extraordinary things and that anyone can dance and that everyone should dance.

As a Gluck Fellow, Talia taught a workshop called "Finding Flow through Movement", which gave students an opportunity to learn movement games and yoga fundamentals. Prior to moving to Riverside, Talia taught Movement full-time to Pre-school through Kindergartners at Greene Towne Montessori School in Philadelphia. Talia graduated magna cm laude, phi beta kappa with a B.A. in Dance and Francophone Studies and Education from Bates College and a post-baccalaureate in performance from Headlong Performance Institute. Talia’s work has been presented at the Philadelphia Fringe Festival, Movement Research’s Open Performance and at Fringearts’s Scratch Night. Talia is now graduating with an M.F.A. in Experimental Choreography from UCR.
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As a Gluck Fellow, Rebekkah Hart taught a workshop she created called "Becoming Visually Literate: Reading and Writing an Aztec Codex", which introduced students to the Aztec culture and focused on Aztec pictorial writing while building visual literacy and visual communication skills. Check out our Gluck Creative Classroom to find the syllabus and workbook for Rebekkah's workshop! 💻

Rebekkah Hart is a M.A. student at UC Riverside in the History of Art department with an emphasis on the devotional art of late medieval and early Renaissance England. Rebekkah was awarded a research grant to study medieval English alabasters at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, where she had previously spent a semester studying. She has also spent several months in Siena, Italy where she studied medieval Tuscan art. She previously graduated in 2019 from Brigham Young University with a B.A. in Art History & Curatorial Studies. Rebekkah hopes to pursue a Ph.D. and become a university professor of art history.
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Maribel Apuya is currently pursuing a M.F.A. in Creative Writing and Writing for the Performing Arts focusing on Screenwriting at the UC Riverside, where she was granted the Chancellor’s Distinguished Fellowship Award. She is a graduate of the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where she was both a Presidential Scholar and a National Science Foundation Scholar. She attended the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theater, a two-year acting conservatory, and worked with renowned theater companies such as SITI Theater, Shakespeare & Company, the Linklater Center, and others. She is an alumnus of UCLA’s Professional Program in Screenwriting.

As a Gluck Fellow, Maribel taught a workshop called "Have a Blast with Animation Using Stop Motion", which introduced students to the basic concept of animation and how to create their own animation using the popular and free app, Stop Motion. Students engaged in a fun group activity where they worked together to create an animation frame-by-frame by drawing the images on a white board. Animation is a powerful tool to engage students’ creativity and connect them to the world of visual storytelling. Stop Motion is a simple easy-to-use app where students can bring their animation projects to life.

She is also an award-winning Filipino-American filmmaker. Maribel produced, directed, and narrated The Sakada Series, three documentary shorts highlighting the life stories of the Sakadas – Filipino contract workers who worked as laborers on Hawaii’s sugar and pineapple plantations between 1906 and 1946. The Sakada Series won an Award of Merit from Impact DOCS Awards (2018), Best Documentary Short from the Honolulu Film Awards (2018), and Silver Award from Spotlight Documentary Film Awards (2018). Find these shorts on Gluck TV! 🎥
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Next in our spotlight is a graduating Ph.D. candidate in Critical Dance Studies, Kelly Bowker!

As a seasoned Gluck Fellow, Kelly has taught several dance programs, such as "Dance Your Numbers", which taught students how movement can be synchronized in a dance through the practice of counting the music, and "Your Body is Your Instrument”, which taught students how to warm up their bodies and the use of different body parts. She has also created videos as a fellow, which you can find on GluckTV 💃

Kelly previously earned a M.A. in Choreography from Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance and a B.F.A. in Dance from University of Michigan. Kelly’s choreography has been seen on the stages of the Garage, Union Square, CounterPULSE and ODC in San Francisco as well as the Menomonee Club and Chicago Art and Design Center in Chicago. She has been teaching movement to students ranging in age from three to eighty-five for over a decade and is a certified Pilates instructor. She has also taught dance in public schools through SFArtsEd, Leap, and Montgomery County Council for Arts and Humanities.
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Alexandra Henry is a graduate student studying Art History. She received her bachelor’s in art history and classics & archeology from Loyola Marymount University, where she was on the Dean’s List and graduated cm laude. Having worked as a Getty Multicultural Intern for two summers at the Rancho Santa Ana Botanical Garden and the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles, she understands the importance of incorporating diversity into an educational setting. She aspires to challenge museums to become more culturally diverse and accurate by becoming a museum curator one day.

"The Color of Ancient Greece" is a program that Henry created and taught as a Gluck fellow, and it aimed to expose students to the archeological and historical aspects of Ancient Greek statuary. Students got to be archeologists for the day by finding "broken fragments" and putting them back together. Once the statues are "restored", students then had the opportunity to learn about the history of how ancient statues were once colored, and they got to see other possible careers relating to the arts.
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