Joan Johnson & Ann Read 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 four 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 or being a current resident of 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.
Applications will be available for the 2026-2027 year after October 1st.
Meet our 2025-2026 Awardees!
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 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.
Sonya Brooks
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 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.
