Scholarship Recipients 2007-2008 Wolf Trap Foundation Scholarship for Performing Arts Teacher Recipients

These scholarships honor the exceptional instruction and performance achievements of public high school teachers of music, dance, and theater in Fairfax County in Virginia, Prince George’s and Montgomery Counties in Maryland, and the District of Columbia.

District of Columbia

Lori Williams
Woodrow Wilson Senior High School

Students in the high school’s Music Department collaborated with a variety of professional local musicians to research, analyze, and interpret the impact of contemporary Hip-Hop, Rap, R & B, and Go-Go genres on youth and culture. A culminating public presentation of the project, Positive Music for Positive Minds, also featured original works by students and interspersed dialogue between participants, local musicians, disc jockeys, and community activists.

Fairfax County

The 60-piece Annandale High School Symphonic Band collaborated with composer Vincent Oppido to develop a new composition for band using students’ creative input as a compositional foundation. The piece, a tribute to one of the band’s former members who lost her life in the 2007 Virginia Tech shootings, premiered at the band’s annual spring concert.

Roy Holder
Lake Braddock Secondary School
James Barnes, Professor of Music Theory and Composition at the University of Kansas, composed a new work for the school’s Symphonic Band and conducted the ensemble in rehearsals and in concert. In addition, 500 students from the high school and middle school bands learned about the composer’s creative process as he conducted rehearsals of his larger body of works with the ensembles.

Montgomery County

Isabel Hernandez-Cata
Walter Johnson High School
Internationally acclaimed jazz vocalist Gretchen Parlato conducted a series of master classes for 145 of the high school’s choral students. During the master classes, Ms. Parlato worked directly with 15-25 students, focusing on jazz style elements, melodic improvisational ideas, text expression, and microphone technique. The high school’s jazz-themed spring concert spotlighted the new techniques and skills students gained through these master classes.

Justin Indovina
Quince Orchard High School
Rob Rule, a professional sound designer and engineer, instructed students on proper technical theater concepts and design. The students then implemented their new skills by creating and executing sound designs for the high school’s Show Choir and the high school Theater Department’s musical production of Grease.

Prince George's County

Lisa Lee
Largo High School
Four Master Teachers – Robert Burden, Janette Gillis, Linda Hallman-Darr, and Amanda Standard – worked with 125 student dancers over a semester to put the students’ biographical short stories into new choreography. The students learned how to choreograph a new work, apply theatrical makeup, and design sets and costumes out of recycled materials.

Ned Lewis
High Point High School
Two nationally renowned vocal coaches, Carman Balthrop and Angela Powell, worked with 45 choir students throughout the semester, focusing on basic vocal technique, diction skills, vowel production, breathing techniques, and consonant placement. The final performance showcased the choir in a full-length concert featuring the vocal coaches as soloists.

This program is made possible through a generous grant from the Catherine Filene Shouse Education Fund.