Seven emerging artists, eight schools awarded 2014 Leonore Annenberg Fund grants

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-- WITH PHOTO -- TO ARTS, MUSIC, AND NATIONAL EDITORS:

Seven emerging artists, eight schools awarded 2014 Leonore Annenberg

Fund grants

PHILADELPHIA, April 8, 2014 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- A bass-baritone

opera singer raised amid rough surroundings in a trailer park in

Virginia; a violinist from a family of Philadelphia Orchestra string

players; a first-generation Serbian-American actor who won acclaim in

an offbeat Off Broadway musical.

These are among the seven arts fellows who will receive 2014 grants

from the Leonore Annenberg Fellowship Fund for the Performing and

Visual Arts, which provides $50,000 a year for up to two years to

young artists of exceptional promise. In addition, the Leonore

Annenberg School Fund for Children announced that eight underserved

public elementary schools each will receive a grant of $50,000 or more

for technology and other educational resources.

The seven arts fellows and eight schools will receive a total of

$984,000 from the Leonore Annenberg Scholarship, Fellowship, and

School Funds. The 2014 arts fellows and schools will join a list of

honorees that includes 10 high school students whose $2.5 million in

college scholarships were announced in 2013. Now in its seventh year,

the 10-year Leonore Annenberg Funds initiative has awarded a total of

$13.2 million to arts fellows, students, and schools. The funds are

administered by the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University

of Pennsylvania.

Past recipients of the arts fellowship include Misty Copeland, the

first African-American female soloist in two decades with American

Ballet Theatre and author of the recent autobiography "Life in Motion:

An Unlikely Ballerina"; actor Bryce Pinkham, who is starring on

Broadway in the musical comedy "A Gentleman's Guide to Love & Murder";

and photographer Richard Mosse, selected to represent his home

country, Ireland, at the 2013 Venice Biennale.

"The Leonore Annenberg Fellowship Fund provides support to artists

during a vibrant period of transition in their professional life,

enabling them to develop artistically as they realize their career

goals," said program director Gail Levin, Ph.D. Partnering with

organizations such as American Ballet Theatre, the Yale School of

Drama, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the fund

identifies and nurtures emerging artists of great potential with

career development grants and the support of mentors.

The 2014 recipients of the Leonore Annenberg Fellowship Fund for the

Performing and Visual Arts are:

-- Ryan Speedo Green , a bass-baritone raised in troubled surroundings

in a trailer park in Suffolk, Va., is a national winner of the

Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions. He got his start when a

middle-school chorus teacher pushed him to audition for a

magnet-school voice program. Green, who has "an extraordinarily

beautiful, versatile, and powerful bass voice," in the words of Wolf

Trap Opera's Kim Pensinger Witman, appeared at the Kennedy Center in

December 2013 in a tribute to soprano Martina Arroyo. After completing

his training this spring at the Met's Lindemann Young Artist

Development Program and singing with Wolf Trap Opera this summer, he

will join the Vienna Staatsoper as a member of the company.

-- Francesca dePasquale is a violinist from Philadelphia who comes

from a family of distinguished string players with the Philadelphia

Orchestra, including her mother (cellist), her late father (first

violinist and co-concertmaster) and three uncles. A master's degree

student at the Juilliard School, she is concertmaster for the

Juilliard Orchestra and assists Itzhak Perlman in teaching his

classes. She was nominated for the fellowship by the Perlman Music

Program. Perlman says: "An absolutely beautiful violinist, her

originality of style is unusual; never glitzy, pretentious, or

superficial." In 2010, she won first prize in the Irving M. Klein

International String Competition.

-- Sarah Sokolovic , a graduate of the Yale School of Drama, received

a Drama Desk nomination for her performance in "The Shaggs" (2011) at

Playwrights Horizons in New York. The following year her work in the

comedy "Detroit" prompted New York magazine to ask: "Is Sarah

Sokolovic theater's next great actress?" She has guest-starred on the

TV series "The Good Wife" and "Unforgettable." Raised in a

working-class town outside Milwaukee by her father and his father,

both of whom emigrated from Yugoslavia after World War II, Sokolovic

also is a writer who has completed a screenplay and is at work on two

more.

-- Mia Rosenthal , a Philadelphia artist, graduated from Parsons the

New School for Design (B.F.A.) and the Pennsylvania Academy of the

Fine Arts (M.F.A.). Rosenthal specializes in works on paper, fusing

her interests in science and art through a multitude of tiny sketches.

She has had two solo exhibitions at Gallery Joe in Philadelphia:

"American Landscapes" (2012) and "every day" (2014). The latter title

reflects the spirit of her response to the often-asked question "How

long did this take to make?" It is done, she says, "a little bit every

day." Her works are in the collections of the Pennsylvania Academy of

the Fine Arts and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

-- Tessa Lark , a violinist from Boston, was born and raised in rural

Kentucky, and her classical training is complemented by the

Appalachian folk music of her youth. Lark, who doubles as a bluegrass

fiddler, won first prize at the 2012 Naumburg International Violin

Competition - the first American to do so since 1960 - and a silver

medal at the 2012 Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition. Trained

at the New England Conservatory of Music, she has performed in solo

recitals, chamber music festivals, and concerti from Boston to

Beijing. For this grant, she has proposed to record Telemann's "Twelve

Fantasias for Solo Violin."

-- Calvin Royal III is a corps de ballet dancer with American Ballet

Theatre. "The moment I step on stage, the weight of the world

diminishes," says Royal, raised in St. Petersburg, Fla., where he

auditioned at 14 on a whim for a performing-arts high school. He

joined ABT's pre-professional school after being discovered at the

Youth America Grand Prix competition in New York in 2006 and was

promoted to the main company in 2010. A 2014 Clive Barnes Award

nominee, Royal has the potential "to be a breakthrough artist of color

in a classical forum," says ABT artistic director Kevin McKenzie.

-- Molly Bernard , who grew up in Las Vegas, "is a highly skilled,

highly versatile actress," says André Bishop, producing artistic

director of Lincoln Center Theater. Bernard trained with her

grandfather at the Joseph Bernard Acting Studio, and at the Yale

School of Drama in addition to the Moscow Art Theater School and SITI

Company. She can be seen in the Amazon Prime series "Alpha House" and

made her Yale Repertory Theatre debut in 2013 in Dario Fo's farce

"Accidental Death of an Anarchist," a co-production with Berkeley

Repertory Theatre.

The elementary school grants, from the Leonore Annenberg School Fund

for Children, have "provided support to help meet a broad range of

children's learning needs," said Dr. Levin. "Those include curricular

and other materials for an environmental science program, a new

playground and fitness station, an updated media center and art

studio, musical instruments for a school orchestra, and technology

tools for English language learners."

The schools receiving grants and the resources they plan to acquire

are:

-- Skyway Elementary School, Miami Gardens, Fla.; computers and

interactive white boards for school-wide access to a digital reading

and mathematics series;

-- Sandy Lane Elementary School, Clearwater, Fla.; interactive white

boards and laptops for classrooms, and books for the media center;

-- Hartsfield Elementary School, Houston, Texas; classroom technology

to support struggling learners in math;

-- Bess T. Shepherd Elementary School, Chattanooga, Tenn.;

skill-building program in leadership;

-- East Lake Elementary School, Chattanooga, Tenn.; Chromebooks for

all students in grades three through five;

-- Greenville Elementary School, Greenville, Fla.; technology to

integrate music and the visual arts in the curriculum;

-- Stewart Street Elementary School, Quincy, Fla.; library books and

media center upgrades;

-- PS 185: Early Childhood Discovery and Design Magnet School, New

York, N.Y.; a visual arts, theater arts, and arts integration program.

About Leonore Annenberg: Leonore Annenberg (1918-2009) was U.S. Chief

of Protocol for President Ronald Reagan and wife of the late

Ambassador Walter H. Annenberg. Mrs. Annenberg established the grants

to support her lifelong commitment to public service, education, and

the arts. All grants are made on an invitation-only basis, in

consultation with a partner organization. Visit

www.leonoreannenbergscholarships.org for more information.

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20140408/DC99835

SOURCE Annenberg Public Policy Center

-0- 04/08/2014

/CONTACT: Michael Rozansky, Director of Communications, Annenberg Public Policy Center, 215-746-0202 | mrozansky@annenbergpublicpolicycenter.org; Gail Levin, Director, The Leonore Annenberg Funds, 215-746-5461 | glevin@asc.upenn.edu

/Photo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20140408/DC99835

PRN Photo Desk, photodesk@prnewswire.com

CO: Annenberg Public Policy Center

ST: Pennsylvania

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