UCR Gluck Fellows Program of the Arts

UCR ARTS, Gluck Fellowship host Family Fun Day for 30th anniversary

kelvin — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 16:28:51 +0000

UCR ARTS, Gluck Fellowship host Family Fun Day for 30th anniversary kelvin Thu, 03/12/2026 - 09:28 More Press Releases Jeremy Gutierrez, Student Writer/CHASS Marketing and Communications March 12, 2026

On Sunday, Mar. 1, UCR ARTS celebrated the 30th anniversary of the Gluck Fellows Program of the Arts with a community, family-oriented day held at the museum in downtown Riverside. The Gluck Fellows Program awards funds to graduate students to support their education through community outreach. Fellows go to schools throughout the Inland Empire and lead classes or engage with institutions such as UCR ARTS or the California Museum of Photography (CMP). Gluck Fellow and master's student of art history Nicholas Barlow has been collaborating with both museums as part of his work with the Fellows Program.

“For today's activity, I've made a selection of photographs from the California Museum of Photography,” Barlow said. “And the theme I selected was landscape photography — “What is a landscape?” This includes materials from our Keystone mass stereoscopic collection. A holding of Mexican photography, fine art photography, California photography, and contemporary artists from the 70s until now.”

The event, which began at 12:30, featured several arts-and-crafts stations, catering, art exhibitions, and more. Many current UCR graduate students supported the event: running booths, helping kids, performing, and even leading group workshops. Gluck Fellow and second-year PhD candidate in critical dance studies, Sriradha Paul led one group in dance.

“I was here to teach an Odissi workshop,” Paul said, “which is a South Asian dance form, which has a lot of storytelling and a lot of movement techniques that I shared with the participants.”

Paul led her group — which included children, UCR community members, and other guests — through various dance forms, including several that emulated the appearance and behavior of animals such as deer and lions. Paul improves her pedagogy by developing her own teaching curriculum. She observes the response students have to her teaching, and thinks about how else to apply it. Community outreach is a way for people to gain experience in these arts that they might otherwise be unable to access.

“Dancing is a tricky thing; some people want to do it, but it requires a lot of visibility — a pressure — and courage to come up,” Paul said. “So I think in that way, [the Gluck program is a] really an interesting program, because it gives them that platform to try it out. So some people want to imagine how monkeys walk, or how deer run. So I think it gives them a push towards their imagination and to be able to think how they can be creative, and how they can create, build their own story through bodies, without verbal communication.”

Other activities included a button-making station led by Gluck Fellow Maya Salem and collage-making, as well as performances and workshops by the UCR Taiko ensemble and Gluck Fellows Amelia Lee, Cal Plett, Fabiola Ochoa Torralba, and Jorge Calaf. The Gluck Fellows Program is dedicated to diversity and represents a broad spectrum of cultures and art forms that the community can engage with.

FEATURED PHOTO. UCR families embrace as they enjoy the musical entertainment.

Gluck Fellows Program inspires Sherman students

kelvin — Mon, 07 Aug 2023 18:10:31 +0000

Gluck Fellows Program inspires Sherman students kelvin Mon, 08/07/2023 - 11:10 More Press Releases Alejandra Prado, Student Writer/CHASS Marketing and Communications August 07, 2023

The Gluck Fellows Program of the Arts at UC Riverside is on a mission to make opportunities for creative minds to access the arts for students across the community. Through its initiative, the program has recently collaborated with Sherman Indian High School to explore their artistic interests, from creating a photography book to touring UCR’s campus.

“Gluck Fellows create art programs for community audiences, and these programs are offered to the community for free,” said Christine Leapman, Assistant Director of the Gluck Fellows Program of the Arts. “Programs are offered to schools in our local school districts, and we are always expanding our roster of schools to serve as many sites in the community as possible.”

In the fall of 2022, the Gluck program partnered their fellow, Sofia Valiente, a second-year MFA student in the Department of Art, to work with a film class at Sherman Indian High School. Valiente helped to develop and print a photography book containing images of the Riverside community taken by the film students.

“My photo class said that they really enjoyed working with Sofia [which is] no surprise,” said Monica Royalty, who teaches the photography class at Sherman Indian High School. “They liked how she told them her stories and about her photographic adventures.”

The film students collaborated and spent their time with Valiente, coming together for photography sessions and bonding over their shared creative interests.

“Photography has given me a freedom to explore and take agency in my surroundings and I’d like to think that I extended this essence in working with the students,” Valiente said.

“Our 2022-23 Fellow, Sofia Valiente, has an abiding interest in projects of documentation of everyday life, and brought that interest to her students at Sherman Indian High School,” said Judith Rodenbeck, Director of the Gluck Fellows program and professor and chair of Media & Cultural Studies at UCR.

“For me, this marked the first project where I took a step back and really considered what it could mean to be more of a [guide] and extend what I know about making personal work to a group of young students,” Valiente said. “In other words, what it means to play a role in helping others to tell their own stories.”

In making the photography book, Leapman and the Sherman Indian High School film students crowdsourced equipment and cameras from the local Riverside community. Leapman turned to her local Facebook ‘Buy Nothing’ group for help with the project and received numerous donations of film cameras from the community.

“The project they have done together provided students with cameras so they could photograph their everyday lives at school and at home,” Rodenbeck said. “This book is the culmination of that project…[serving] as a small but potent intervention into a long history.”

During a visit to UCR on April 21, the Sherman Indian students unboxed “TRBL,” the finished photography book that they collaborated on with Valiente. During the field trip, the students toured UCR art studio and the Department of Art, and were invited for lunch hosted by Native American Student Programs.

“My hopes are that the experiences of working with Gluck fellow Sofia Valiente continue to drive their desire to interpret their world with fresh eyes and eager minds,” Royalty said.

For more information about the Gluck program, please visit gluckprogram.ucr.edu.

Gluck/IGERT grad students create award-winning video to dispel water myths

kelvin — Sat, 07 Dec 2019 00:10:36 +0000

Gluck/IGERT grad students create award-winning video to dispel water myths kelvin Fri, 12/06/2019 - 16:10 More Press Releases Chris Fleming, Student Writer/CHASS Marketing and Communications December 07, 2019

“Getting to know H2O" is a video collaboration between UC Riverside's Gluck Fellows Program of the Arts and National Science Foundation Water SENSE Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship program (IGERT). Mary Gauvain, CHASS Distinguished Professor of Psychology, is a developmental psychologist and was Principal Investigator on the IGERT award.

Created by graduate students in the Gluck and IGERT fellows programs, the video dispels myths about where water comes from and presents ways to protect water. The video won first place in its class and 2nd place overall in a field of 85 films in August at the Committee on Environmental Improvement environmental film festival, hosted by the American Chemical Society.

The Gluck Fellows Program of the Arts is a fellowship geared towards creating new opportunities for community engagement through the arts via the performances and creations of students from the Departments of Art, Creative Writing, Dance, History of Art, Music, Theatre, the Sweeney Art Gallery, and UCR/California Museum of Photography, according to the program’s website. The program gave Gluck Fellow Merideth Hillbrand, an artist, and undergraduate Gluck Fellow J.C. Leapman fellowships to work on this project with IGERT, consisting of CHASS, BCOE, and CNAS fellows.

Gluck assistant director Christine Geerlings Leapman is excited about the collaboration.

“We match Gluck fellows - exceptional CHASS students who have talents, abilities and the desire to be teaching artists - with opportunities that are mutually beneficial to our fellows and the public,” Leapman said. “We were thrilled to be able to make this match between Merideth Hillbrand and the IGERT fellows.”

Merideth Hillbrand, who graduated from UCR in 2019 with a Master of Fine Arts in Studio Art, was the filmmaker who directed, edited, and was the camera person for the film. Even though working in educational videos was unfamiliar to her, she took joy in using her expertise to work with people from other disciplines to create a video about water.

Hillbrand worked with 9 graduate students, all affiliated with IGERT, who served not only as writers and presenters on the film, but also as grips and stagehands. These fellows were Michael Bentel, Scott Coffin, Stacia Dudley, Daniel Harmon, Todd Luce, Parisa Parsafar, Samuel Patton, Parsa Saffarinia and Carolyn Schutten. It was the most people Hillbrand had ever worked with on a film.

“They helped me understand that video is such a fluid medium,” she said. “With this, it lends itself to working easily with others. It was really fun to take my video art background and make an educational video.”

“The nine of us fellows at the time were looking to create a project that capped the end of our fellowship,” said IGERT Fellow Michael Bentel. “We’d first conceived an idea about a book about our research. We saw that it might not only be time-consuming, but also not as approachable for the modern student. So, we took a different route into YouTube informational videos.”

All nine fellows wrote the script, with the fellows' expertise representing their major contribution: Harmon and Parsafar contributed significantly to the psychological aspects of the film, Luce and Schutten to the historical content, Coffin and Saffarinia to the ecological context, Bentel and Patton to the chemical treatment of water, and Dudley focused on water consumption with regards to food production.

Over the summer, Bentel submitted “Getting to Know H2O” into the American Chemical Society's’ film festival, where the film took second place in the overall show competition.

Scott Coffin, Ph.D hopes that the momentum for this video continues into further outreach.“The IGERT team hopes that the ‘Getting to Know H2O’ provides people with an understanding of how precious and amazing our water is, and inspires people to help preserve this limited resource so that it may provide nourishment for future generations and ecosystems.”

“Getting to Know H2O” and accompanying study guide, which is intended to be an educational resource for all ages, can be found by following this link: https://gluckprogram.ucr.edu/glucktv-steam-channel

FEATURED PHOTO. Photo courtesy of Scott Coffin.
The Water SENSE IGERT Fellows engage in applied research that can improve water quantity and quality.