In its ninth year, the Women of Distinction award by Faculty Excellence and the Center for Success of Women Faculty highlights the achievements of outstanding women faculty at UCF. Three awards – one for one to five years of service in academia at UCF, six to ten years, and ten or more years – in the theme of “Creative Entrepreneurship” were given at the event on Tuesday, September 10.
Two of the three winners are from the College of Arts and Humanities: Anne Bubriski of Women’s and Gender Studies, and Julia Listengarten of the School of Performing Arts – Theatre. Each winner will receive one-thousand dollars in professional development funds from the President’s Office.
Dr. Anne Bubriski is the winner in the one to five years of service category. In her four years as a lecturer in Women’s and Gender Studies, Dr. Bubriski spearheaded and expanded the Young Women Leaders Program, an after-school curriculum-based mentoring program assigning a 7th grade “little sister” to one UCF student “big sister,” including securing outside funding. After winning a grant and piloting a smaller one-day program focused on STEM leadership, she saw an opportunity and transformed the program into SLAM: Science Leadership and Mentoring in 2019. Through SLAM, Dr. Bubriski has secured funding to empower girls to be assertive, brave, confident and develop leadership abilities while exposing them to exciting STEM careers. In partnership with a local middle school, SLAM meets weekly with 20 UCF women in STEM majors and provides programming with workshops and guest speakers.
Dr. Julia Listengarten is the winner in the ten or more years of service category. Dr. Listengarten has been at UCF since 1999 and is a tenured professor of theatre and the Artistic Director of Theatre UCF. A theatre artist and scholar, Dr. Listengarten collaborates with stakeholders from the academic community and the city of Orlando to combine scholarship with creative activities. In summer 2018 she created Pegasus PlayLab, a summer theatre festival dedicated to developing plays by emerging playwrights. With over 300 scripts submitted nationally, four are chosen to ‘workshop’, engaging national playwriting networks, UCF students, Orlando audiences and professional theatre networks. She was also recently awarded the Pabst-Steinmetz Foundation Arts and Wellness Award to spearhead “The Arts and Aging: An Interdisciplinary and Intergenerational Initiative”, a community-based project to study and establish protocols for arts and literature programs to enhance the well-being of Florida’s aging population.
Congratulations to both Dr. Bubriski and Dr. Listengarten!
Photos from the event can be viewed here.