College Access and Preparation Forum
Speakers
Opening Keynote
Lara Downes
Musician and Director, UC ArtsBridge
Lara Downes is a world-renowned pianist whose recordings and performances garner ecstatic reviews. Her new album, titled For Lenny — Lara’s debut with Sony — is a centennial tribute to Leonard Bernstein’s music and legacy. The album was recognized with the 2017 Classical Recording Foundation Award and appeared in Billboard’s Top 20. Lara’s collaborators include Yo-Yo Ma, Kevin “K.O.” Olusola, Adam Gopnik and former U.S. Poet Laureate Rita Dove. She is artist-in-residence at the Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts at UC Davis and also directs the National Young Artists Program there. Closer to home, Lara is Director of the ArtsBridge program, one of UC’s Student Academic Preparation and Educational Partnership (SAPEP) programs. ArtsBridge courses help to prepare K–8 students for “a-g” arts requirements while providing UC students with a teaching-career pathway. For many K–8 participants, ArtsBridge is the only arts instruction they receive during the year.
Closing Keynote
Monica C. Lozano
President and CEO
College Futures Foundation
Monica C. Lozano is president and chief executive officer of College Futures Foundation, a philanthropic organization dedicated to college access and success for low-income and underrepresented students. She is a widely respected leader with strong experience in the realms of business, news media, philanthropy and education.
Before coming to College Futures, Monica spent 30 years in media as editor and publisher of La Opinión, the largest Spanish language newspaper in the country, and then as Chairman and CEO of the parent company, ImpreMedia. Monica has long held a deep commitment to improving public education for all students, particularly for traditionally underserved populations, and has been very active in education at the institutional governance level. She served on and was chair of the California State Board of Education and the Board of Regents of the University of California, spent 24 years as a trustee of the University of Southern California and is currently a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Commission on the Future of Undergraduate Education.
Plenary Session
Alberto Ledesma, PhD
Assistant Dean for Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity
UC Berkeley
Alberto Ledesma was born in Jalisco, Mexico, in 1965. He was brought to Oakland at 8 years old as an undocumented immigrant. Since then, Alberto has graduated from UC Berkeley three times over and has held faculty positions at Cal State University, Monterey Bay and UC Berkeley. His dissertation, The Dialectics of Silence and Subterfuge, is one of the earliest critical works written in the United States on the representation of undocumented immigrants in fiction.
Over the years, Alberto has published poems, essays and short stories in a variety of venues. He is a past winner of UC Irvine’s Chicano/Latino Literary Prize and was a featured writer in Gary Soto’s Chicano Chapbook series. His essays have appeared in various edited collections, including David R. Maciel’s Culture Across Borders and Arturo J. Aldama and Naomi Quiñonez’s Decolonial Voices. During the last few years, Alberto’s cartoons have appeared on various websites, including New American Media, Culturestr/ke, Buzzfeed and Pocho. They have also been published in Dismantle: An Anthology of Voices from the VONA/Voices Writing Workshop. His current work in progress is Diary of a Reluctant Dreamer: Vignettes from an Undocumented Life. He now works as assistant dean for Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity in the Division of Arts and Humanities at UC Berkeley.