2026 Medici Circle Scholars

UC Irvine Claire Trevor School of the Arts names 17 new Medici Circle Scholars

UCI Arts is pleased to announce the 2026 Medici Circle Scholars. These scholarships allow recipients to extend their education beyond the classroom, collaborating with academics and artists in the community and worldwide.

The Medici Circle Scholarship supports artists and scholars’ projects within their respective disciplines of art, dance, drama or music. This unique program involves a faculty mentor to oversee the completion of each project, ensuring students receive an meaningful and formative educational experience. These projects further students’ creative practice and research to enhance their portfolios and graduate dissertations.

Each scholarship is generously supported by a Medici Circle Patron, who is paired directly with an awarded student to help them reach their creative and professional goals.

Congratulations to the Summer 2026 Medici Circle Scholar awardees: 

Yadira Dockstader-Gonzalez, M.F.A., Art '27: Sound Waves and Whispers
Faculty Mentor: Simon Leung, Professor of Art
Research: Yadira will research environmental sound related ephemera at the British Library Sound Archive in London, England which houses the largest collection of recorded sound in the world. She will search the archives and extend her work by finding relationships to work in other countries. From her findings she will create a sound-based installation work titled Sound Waves and Whispers (The Last Word on Nothing).

Leah Hager, B.A., Dance '29: Aesthetic Histories and Future Directions in Dance Performance Creation
Faculty Mentor: Charlotte Griffin, Associate Professor of Dance
Research: Through personal journaling and embodied practice, Leah will archive and synthesize her off-campus studies to create and document movement phrases and solo works inspired by these experiences, allowing her to explore how historical influences and contemporary ideas intersect within her own choreographic process, and apply this intersection to create novel dance phrases and larger choreographies.

Solita Harder-Montoya, M.F.A., Fine Art '28: Artist Field Study: Geology and Mythology of Mount Etna
Faculty Mentor: Monica Majoli, Professor of Art
Research: Solita will travel to the stratovolcano Mount Etna in Sicily and carry out an artistic field-study which will investigate the geological forms and mythologies surrounding the volcano. This will expand the breadth of her practice in drawing and painting, which takes inspiration from subterranean forms and the transmissions of shifting landscapes.

Emma Houton, Ph.D., ICIT '29: Else to Hear
Faculty Mentor: Michael Dessen, Professor and Robert & Marjorie Rawlins Chair of Music
Research: Emma will create a sound art installation exploring new approaches to perception through composition, which will lay a foundation for her emerging dissertation research on listening and sonic experience.

Selina Hsieh, B.Mus., Violin Performance '27: Meadowmount School of Music Travel and Tuition Support
Faculty Mentor: Geoffrey Pope, Assistant Professor Teaching in Music
Research: Selina will attend the Meadowmount School of Music to study with Professor Janet Sung, acclaimed pedagogue and internationally performing violinist. Under Professor Sung, Selina will develop her technical and musical foundation in order to compete for graduate schools and a future career in a professional orchestra.

Olivia Johnson, B.F.A., Dance Performance '27: Apprenticing at Laguna Dance Festival
Faculty Mentor: Charlotte Griffin, Associate Professor of Dance
Research: Laguna Dance’s Summer Stage Festival is a three-week-long residency held by Laguna Dance that will take place from July 20 through August 9, 2026. WE the People will be the title and theme of Laguna Dance’s first ever Summer Stage Festival, and will bring professionals, emerging artists and pre-professional students together in a collaborative creation process. Olivia has been accepted as an apprentice for the program.

Melanie Juniel, B.Mus., Vocal Performance '27: Perform Opera in Weimar, Germany
Faculty Mentor: Darryl Taylor, Professor of Music
Research: Melanie will participate in a four-week opera intensive training program featuring a fully staged production of Mozart’s The Magic Flute, voice lessons and piano coaching, classes in acting and movement, and the opportunity to audition for and network with working agents in Europe.

Kathryn Lau, B.Mus., Piano Performance '27: Eastern Festival of Music
Faculty Mentor: Lorna Griffit, Professor of Teaching in Music
Research: Kathryn will participate in the Eastern Festival of Music which is a five-week-long intensive music program that entails a piano academy, chamber music program, and orchestral institution than gathers a wide variety of instrumentalists and conductors to play together.  

Nolan Miranda, Ph.D., ICIT '28: Presenting compositions at Ludomusicology 2026
Faculty Mentor: Rajna Swaminathan, Assistant Professor of Music
Research: Miranda has been invited to present his compositions at this year’s Ludomusicology conference, a prestigious event that gathers the most knowledgeable scholars in this field. Nolan will travel to England and receive valuable feedback on his work from a specialized audience and solidify existing connections with professors and graduate students.

Yu Qin, Ph.D., ICIT '29: Bodies of Love: Five Elements for Music and Movement
Faculty Mentor: Kojiro Umezaki, Professor and Graduate Director of Music
Research: Bodies of Love: Five Elements for Music and Movement is an interdisciplinary performance project that reimagines choreography as a dynamic field of relations between bodies, materials, sound and environment, structured around five elements — stone, Drapery, Beads, Blades and Net. Over the summer, Yu will collaborate with dancers, musicians and visual artists, alongside a faculty mentor, to develop improvisational scores and sculptural environments using natural and recycled coastal materials in Southern California.  

Jackson Sanders, B.A., Dance '27: Cross cultural Explorations: Researching Contemporary And Traditional Dance In China To Inspire New Ideas in Sanders' Artistic Practice
Faculty Mentor: Lindsay Gilmour, Associate Professor of Dance
Research: Jackson will spend 12 days in Beijing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong taking classes across contemporary, traditional and classical Chinese dance forms and attending live performances. He will document his experience through journaling and video, with the goal of producing an essay exploring how contemporary-modern dance has evolved in China and its intersection with western forms.

Beatrice Schleyer, M.F.A., Art '27: Intergenerational Collaboration through Photography and Research — The Ports of Shinagawa in 1968 and 2026
Faculty Mentor: Amanda Ross-Ho, Professor of Art and Associate Chair for Graduate Studies
Research: Beatrice will travel to Tokyo to retrace her late father's steps from his 1968–69 voyage aboard the USNS Robert D. Conrad, a marine geophysical research vessel, during which he documented his travels in black-and-white photography. Using the same medium-format camera, she will develop a new body of photographs and writing illuminating the architectural, cultural and infrastructural transformation of Shinagawa across nearly 60 years.

Cierra Torres, M.F.A., Dance '27: Cierra’s NYC Dream Training
Faculty Mentor: Ariyan Johnson, Assistant Professor of Dance
Research: Cierra will travel to New York City to participate in a two-week intensive focused on Fosse-Verdon technique and repertoire. The training will deepen her technical foundation and her understanding of storytelling through movement, and will inform her M.F.A. thesis research on visibility and belonging in dance spaces.

Lala Ukita, B.A., Drama '27: No-No Boy, a ‘Solo’ Show
Faculty Mentor: Eli Simon, Chancellor’s Professor of Drama
Research: Lala will be joining the production of No-No Boy, a 'Solo' Show as Production Stage Manager — produced and co-written by 2025 Medici Circle Scholar, Kurt Kanazawa, M.F.A. '27, alongside Scott Keiji Takeda and with director, Reena Dutt. They aim to tell the initially rejected story that was rediscovered and reissued in 1976 to become a widely celebrated classic of American literature — advocating for representation of Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander (AANHPI) artists and narratives.

Loren Wang, M.F.A., Art '28: after the ruptures
Faculty Mentor: Simon Leung, Professor of Art
Research: after the ruptures will investigate earthquake as both geological phenomenon and sites of social, historical and ecological paradigm shift. The project centers on Alaska's Denali Fault and Kodiak Island, which was partially and permanently uplifted by the 1964 Alaska Earthquake, and examines how ecosystems, landscapes and communities adapt to violent seismic rupture.

Reed Wixson, Ph.D., ICIT '27: Participation in Time of the Owl: A Field Recording Workshop
Faculty Mentor: Kojiro Umezaki, Professor and Graduate Director of Music
Research: Reed will attend Time of the Owl, a five-day field recording workshop led by composer Jana Winderen and hosted by CAMP in the French Pyrenees, followed by seven additional days in residence. Reed will create a library of field recordings, which they will release edited versions of and/or use as materials for creating future compositions connected to their dissertation research on ecology, listening and attention.

Lucas Zaifiriou Zeeberg, M.F.A., Fine Art '28: Research trip to the Seth Siegelaub Papers in the MoMA Archives
Faculty Mentor: Rhea Anastas, Associate Professor of Art
Research: Lucas will spend two weeks in New York City conducting archival research on Seth Siegelaub, an influential Conceptual Art movement curator and researcher, in the Seth Siegelaub Papers in the Museum of Modern Art Archives.  

The Claire Trevor School of the Arts gratefully acknowledges our 2026 Medici Circle Scholarship Patrons: Dennis and Diane Baker, Gerald and Veronica DeVries, Albert and Anne Encinias, Valerie Glass, Susan K. Hori, J. Nami Kaur, Dean Tiffany López, Sheila and James Peterson, Suzanne Priebatsch, Cheryll and Richard Ruszat, Steven M. Sorenson M.D., Richard and Alison Stein, and Mary Watson-Bruce.

Learn more about how you can become a Medici Circle Patron and unlock opportunities that would otherwise be out of reach for remarkable Claire Trevor School of the Arts students at arts.uci.edu/medici-circle.