10 minute read
Development News
ADear Friends of the Priory, As we enter the holiday season we in the Development Office are grateful for our many blessings, especially the generosity of our community. After many years in the Development Office, Gail Kimball, George Mears and John Baldwin are no longer a part of our Development Team. We graciously thank them for the contributions they made to Priory in the many years they were here. We now have a two new faces. Meghan Heath comes to us with 12 years of Development experience, including 10 years in Development at Charles Armstrong School. She is heading our Annual Fund and bringing fresh ideas to this effort. She is joined by Erin Irber who brings with her a strong business background. Casey Wynn, our Associate Director of Development and Alumni Relations is as busy as ever. Please do stop in and say hello when you have a chance. Last year was another great year for annual giving. Our total gift support was over $2.3M. Our annual giving could not be possible without the tireless work of our many committed volunteers. For their time and talents, we continue to be very grateful. As always, we strive to reach 100% participation from our entire faculty, staff, Board of Trustees, and families, and we could not be successful without their dedication. To our many volunteers, THANK YOU! As we look back, we are proud of our success with our Annual Giving but are also continuously reminded of the successful impact of our last capital campaign. In 2007, we opened our Performing Arts Center. Since its opening, student creativity and expression have blossomed in ways we had only dreamed. In November our students put on an amazing performance of The Three Musketeers, an ambitious production that showcased the many features of not only our PAC but also our entire Performing Arts Program. From multi-level sets, to intricate light and sound design, to over 12 professionally choreographed sword fights, we created a professional theatrical experience for the students and audience combined. We know from experience that new spaces create new opportunities. But the PAC was only the first phase of Priory’s 25 year campus master plan. Our capital campaign goal for this next phase, named Honor, Inspire, Lead: The Campaign For Priory, is to create new classrooms throughout the entire campus that will catalyze academic opportunities for students in the same way the PAC energized the performing arts program. Our vision is to honor our timeless Benedictine values so we can inspire our students to develop their gifts and become thoughtful leaders in a global world. The new larger classrooms and Science Center will feature flexible space along with integrated state-of-the-art technology that will be included in all new construction and renovations. To support these transformational improvements and additions to our campus, a Campaign Leadership Team has been formed and is in the early stages of the campaign. The Team is chaired by Mike Calbert and co-chaired by Michelle Galloway and Mike Carusi. It is an honor and a pleasure to work with these amazing and dedicated leaders along with the rest of our Campaign Team. If you haven’t had a chance to make your Annual Fund gift to the school, please consider doing so before heading out for the holidays. Our Annual Fund goal is to get 100% parent participation by December 31st. We wish you a most blessed holiday season.
Top L-R: Development Department team: Development Assoc. Erin Irber, Assoc. Dir. of Development Meghan Heath (top), and Assoc. Dir. of Development Casey Wynn.
Alumni Profiles: Priory alums Nika Clark ‘07 and Sammy Hiller ‘10 like to DANCE, DAN by Karen Macklin
NNika Clark ‘07 has danced on many stages throughout the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles—but she never expected to be dancing on prime time television. That is, until her hip hop troupe Academy of Villians was invited to compete on America’s Got Talent this past August. Nika, who graduated from Priory with honors in 2007, was a ballet dancer when she attended. The school didn’t have a dance department at the time (in fact, the new
Performing Arts Center was not yet completed), so Nika trained with Western Ballet in Mountain
View after school. Still, she says, Priory was instrumental in her growth as a dancer.
“Priory was really supportive of me,” she recalls. “There was a requirement to do an after school sport, but Priory let me do dance instead. Priory is such a great place for students to grow and focus on their creativity. It’s not just about book smarts, but growing as a person all around.”
During high school, Nika danced in classic ballet productions like Sleeping Beauty and The
Nutcracker with Western Ballet. Though she did her dance training outside of Priory, she took other performing arts classes at Priory that strongly influenced her as an artist. For instance, she’d never sung or acted before, but at Priory she delved into both of those fields. “The singing and acting classes I took helped me realize how all of the performing arts coincide. A lot of the techniques we used in acting, I was able to apply to dance as well.”
After she graduated, she went on to study ballet at the San Francisco Conservatory of
Dance, where she eventually got turned on to hip hop as a dance form. Soon after, she was invited to join Academy of Villians (AOV), a new Bay Area hip hop competition dance team.
“It was a different experience for me, and I loved it,” she says. She competed with AOV for three years before bravely moving to LA alone to try to make it as a dancer down there. But a few months ago, AOV asked her to come back home: The team had been asked to be on America’s Got Talent, and they wanted Nika to be with them when they competed. Nika flew back to the Bay Area and spent several nights practicing with her dance troupe from dusk till dawn until they were flown out to New Jersey to be on the show. They were put on the show immediately, and made it to the semi-finals before they were cut.
So, who won? It was a dog act, Nika says with a good-natured laugh. She doesn’t seem at all perturbed by the fact that AOV didn’t make it to the finals; she just feels grateful that she was able to be a part of the show at all. “Dance is still trying to make its way,” she says, noting that dance companies are rarely asked to compete in nationally televised variety and reality shows like America’s Got Talent. “So it was cool for our company to be recognized and to have the chance to represent dance nationally.”
Nika’s easygoing attitude and optimism shines through in all of her dance endeavors. She spends little time worrying about perceived failures and instead focuses on her next challenge with enthusiasm. She simply does not take things personally. This makes her a very unusual—and mature—23-year-old dancer.
“I got into dance because I loved it,” she says, “and I have to remember how blessed I am that I am able to do this. If I have this opportunity, why not take it?” She adds that the supportive environment at Priory helped her have the confidence to take risks as an artist, and to be grateful for the opportunities that come her way.
Nika also says Priory was the place where she learned one of the most important tools to build a career in a challenging, cutthroat industry: work ethic. “In the dance world, you don’t necessarily get the job if you’re the best,” she says. “That’s just how it is. But I can’t change the way I look, or how tall I am. I just have to be the best dancer I can be. Priory taught me to have this work ethic. And it’s helped me not only in dance, but in life.”
CE, DANCE
WWhen Sammy Hiller ‘10 arrived in Salt Lake City, in the dead of winter in February 2011, there were more than 800 people vying for a spot on the TV hit show So You Think You Can Dance. She was one of them. Sammy, who graduated from Priory in 2010, has been dancing since she was 11 years old. But she’d never quite had an experience like this. “It was wild,” she says. “They pull you out in lines of 20 and you each get 15 seconds to improv. While I was waiting, I was trying to come up with dance moves in my head. But when it was my turn, I just started doing what I needed to do. You have only a few seconds to show them what you have and make them remember you.” Sammy made it past three off-camera preliminary rounds and an off-camera interview with a producer. Then, she was invited to make her debut on television. After an on-camera interview, she competed in the nationally televised solo round (only 100 or so out of the original 800 made it that far). She was accepted to the next round, and was cut after that. But it didn’t matter to her. Despite the intensity of the process, she says, the experience was amazing. Going through an audition like this would be an incredible test of courage for any young dancer, but for Sammy, it was an even more impressive feat. After Priory, Sammy went on to study dance at Chapman University, but in her first year there, she developed an illness that left her exhausted, depleted, and with some frightening memory loss. Eventually, she got so sick that she had to unexpectedly return home from school to recover. (The illness was later determined to be mononucleosis, and the memory loss luckily turned out to be temporary). It was during that recovery period in 2011, with the encouragement of her family, that she decided to go to Utah for the audition. “I had nothing to lose,” she says with a laugh.
Sammy, now 20, says that her ability to rise out of a difficult circumstance, and make the best of it, was cultivated at Priory, where she was strongly influenced by the Benedictine saying: Always we begin again. “Life will throw curve balls at you,” she says. “Priory taught me that you just take it as it comes and move on.”
Sammy also credits the supportive staff at Priory for her ability to conquer stage fright; she says she learned this skill in John Sugden’s acting class and in her AP art class,
where she had to present her artwork in front of the room. “Owning the room is definitely something I learned from Priory,” she says. And though she never took dance classes at Priory, the teachers there knew she was a dancer and invited her to perform in the dance show at the end of the year—a gesture that she has always appreciated.
After So You Think You Can Dance, Sammy has been continuing to recover at home, and making up some of the coursework that she missed at the local junior college. She still loves dance, but her interests have extended to other avenues, like communications and graphic design—and dance has become less of a career path and more of a hobby. She talks about her decision to switch gears without the slightest hint of regret or hesitation. “Priory taught me that once you have one passion in your life, you’re fully capable of finding another,” she says. “If you have the experience of having dedication and a desire for a goal, it’s possible to transfer that to something else. Different experiences are a part of life and make people who they are. That’s definitely something I learned at Priory.”
