Harina Bereket
Harina is a first-year graduate student pursuing her Master's in Data Science in Health at the University of California, Los Angeles. She earned her undergraduate degree in Health Administration at California State University, Northridge, and is passionate about leveraging data to improve healthcare systems and patient outcomes. Through her academic training and professional experience, Harina has worked closely with Keck Medicine of USC within the Information Services department, where she is developing expertise in healthcare IT and data-driven solutions. She has also served as a student volunteer with the Office of Service Excellence at UCLA Health, contributing to initiatives focused on enhancing patient experience and care delivery. Harina aspires to build a career in healthcare IT, using data to improve healthcare operations and elevate patient satisfaction.
Sonya Brooks
Sonya Brooks is a PhD candidate in Education Policy at the University of California, Los Angeles and holds a Master of Public Health in Community Health Sciences from the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. She currently serves as the University of California Student Regent and is the first Black woman to hold the role, representing students across all ten UC campuses at the highest level of university governance.
A first-generation college graduate and mother of three, Sonya’s academic and leadership journey is rooted in resilience and a deep commitment to educational and health equity. Her research examines the cumulative impact of structural inequity on Black girls and women, centering healing, dignity, and collective care.
She is the founder of We Are Our Mothers’ Gardens, an intergenerational healing initiative designed to affirm the worth and resilience of marginalized women and girls.
Through scholarship, public service, and community leadership, Sonya works to ensure that every child is protected, valued, and given access to transformative education. She aspires to serve as U.S. Secretary of Education, advancing systems grounded in care, justice, and opportunity for all.
Lena Chen
Born in San Francisco to immigrants from Kaiping, China, Lena Chen was raised in the San Gabriel Valley, an ethnoburb of Los Angeles built on the unceded territory of the Gabrielino/Tongva people. She is an artist, curator, and Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Berkeley in the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies. A recipient of the Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowship, she holds a B.A. in Sociology from Harvard University and a M.F.A. in Fine Art from Carnegie Mellon University.
As a scholar of feminist performance and socially engaged art, Lena's research examines the performance practices of Asian American/diasporic artists, sex workers, and community organizers in Los Angeles and New York City. An internationally exhibiting artist herself, she has received awards from Mozilla Foundation, Sundance Institute, and the Center for Cultural Power. Her work has been published in Amerasia Journal, PUBLIC, Performance Research, and in the edited volumes Curating as Feminist Organizing (Routledge, 2022), Sex Work Today: Erotic Labor in the Twenty-First Century (NYU Press, 2024), and To Be Named: The Cultural Politics of Naming (Routledge, 2026). She has taught classes on feminist theory, Asian American performance art, and the politics of sex work.
Yao Wang
Yao Wang is an American artist, writer, and educator whose work explores how cultural symbolism and everyday objects articulate nuanced depictions of the migrant experience and poignant critiques of violent Western landscapes. Situated between themes of labor, loss, and poverty, Yao’s work generates new images of Asian-American life in the contemporary United States.
As an arts educator, Yao is the founder of Art For All Hands, the first free after-school studio art program for public high school students in West Philadelphia. She previously served as Arts Education Manager at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where her initiatives focused on accessible art curriculum and expanding free museum programming to Philadelphia's low-income migrant communities.
Yao graduated magna cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania with a Bachelor of Fine Arts. She is an alumna of the Yale Norfolk School of Art and the CAMRA Mellon Fellowship Program. She is currently a student at the University of California, Los Angeles, pursuing her Master of Fine Arts in sculpture.
About our Graduate Fellowship Awards
Soroptimist International of Los Angeles is proud to have offered our Fellowship Award to deserving graduate students since 1948. This year we are offering two awards in the amount of $5000 each. ​Qualifications include being in a graduate degree program at an accredited institution of higher education in Los Angeles County, and have a cumulative GPA of 3.0 or higher. The field of study is open, but consideration is given to candidates who have high financial need and work for the betterment of the community through volunteer efforts, with particular attention to the betterment of women and girls.​​​​
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Our Graduate Fellowship Awards honor two SI Los Angeles members whose extraordinary contributions made these awards possible. Joan Johnson managed nearly every aspect of the program for almost two decades, demonstrating remarkable dedication and leadership. Ann Read’s generous bequest to SI Los Angeles enabled us to endow these awards for the future. Both Joan and Ann deeply valued education, and we are honored to celebrate their lasting legacy as members.
Ann Read
Ann Read joined SI Los Angeles in 2011 and remained a member until she passed in 2023. Ann taught at Fullerton College as a tennis specialist, 20 of those years as coach of the women's tennis team. She was on the front lines in 1972 when Title IX passed giving young women an equal playing field getting the same support and opportunities as the young men. Ann loved gardening, crafts, and playing bridge.
Joan Johnson
Joan Johnson began playing tennis young, and was a serious player by the age of 17. Between 1954 and 1970, she won 18 national public parks titles and competed at Wimbledon as well as around the world. Joan and her partner Geralyn (Jeri) Shepard competed in three of the four Grand Slam events over the course of their careers.
She began teaching at the then Los Angeles State College in 1955, teaching Tests and Measurements, Statistics, and Research Design. She was instrumental in founding the Women’s Recreational Association and the Southern California Women’s Intercollegiate Tennis League. In 1957, she became the coach of the first women’s tennis team on campus, whose roster included Billie Jean King as well as several national, state, and regional champions.
Joan was the first woman in the country to manage an NCAA Division I athletics program, and was instrumental in developing Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 which protects people from discrimination based on sex in education programs or activities receiving federal funding.
In 1996, she was inducted into the Intercollegiate Tennis Association Hall of Fame for her significant contributions to the growth and development of women’s intercollegiate tennis.
For her memorial service, Billie Jean King wrote of Joan “When it came to college tennis, she was a game changer. And for me, she was a life changer.” Al Marino, a colleague and friend, praised Joan as “a talented and accomplished woman who led with honesty, integrity, and a definitive vision...,” to whom “every girl and woman who ever donned an athletic uniform since the ‘70s owes a debt.”
