Announcing our 2018 Alumni Leadership Grant recipients

Published on

Apr 23, 2018

We are pleased to announce the selection of three outstanding From the Top alumni as recipients of the 2018 Alumni Leadership Grant:

The Alumni Leadership Grant, which began in 2017, seeks to support alumni of From the Top’s media and arts leadership programs who have created projects using music and the arts to impact their local communities.

We are delighted to support these outstanding young leaders in their efforts. The diverse locations of their projects, from a Navajo reservation to Cleveland, Ohio, to Mississippi/Alabama, shows that our alumni are truly making a difference throughout our entire country. Corinne, Ariel, and Thomas are showing us how music and the arts can be a force for positive change. Shea Mavros, Director of Education and Community Outreach at From the Top.

More on the 2018 Grant recipients:

19-year-old violinist Corinne Auger is co-founder and Executive Director of Music Lens, a free, summer music program for elementary school children in Boston, Massachusetts and Cleveland, Ohio. Corinne joined From the Top’s Boston area Center for the Development of Arts Leaders (CDAL) at the age of 16, where she led teaching residencies in local schools for 3 consecutive years. She appeared on NPR’s From the Top with the New England Conservatory Youth Philharmonic Orchestra in 2015. Corinne is a sophomore at the Cleveland Music Institute, pursuing a degree in violin performance under the tutelage of Jan Mark Sloman. For more on Music Lens, click here.

21-year-old violinist Ariel Horowitz founded the Heartbeat Project, which helps fulfill a need for music education in the Navajo (Diné) Nation. Horowitz, who received Alumni Leadership Grant funding in 2017, appeared on NPR’s From the Top in 2012, at the age of 16. Ariel graduated from the Juilliard School in May, and is a current student of Ani Kavafian at the Yale School of Music as a recipient of the Julia Havemeyer Scholarship and Fellowship. For more about the Heartbeat Project, including a video of the 2017 project, click here.

21-year-old baritone Thomas West founded the Collaborative Arts Ensemble (CAE), a group of performance artists dedicated to fostering dialogue in the American South. West, who hails from Tennessee, is currently attending The Juilliard School and appeared on NPR’s From the Top in 2012. He cites the From the Top arts leadership training he received as the moment when he first discovered what it means to be an artist-citizen and arts leader. For more on Thomas’ work as an arts leader, click here.

The Alumni Leadership Grant is generously funded by the Howard and Geraldine Polinger Family Foundation with additional support from the Karma for Cara Foundation.

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