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Gulliver Prep senior Olivia Peña is the Prep’s Silver Knight nominee in the area of Music and Dance. Peña is a dancer and has earned 1500 community service hours – most of which are dance related.
The community service Peña highlighted for her Silver Knight application is called Inclusion theater project (ITP), a community-based program where she teaches actors with emotional, physical, and intellectual developmental disabilities to sing, dance, and act.
“It’s a musical theater program,” she says.
The program is at Area Stage, and she’s been helping the actors since the summer going into freshman year as a partner actor.
“This year I took the role of assistant choreographer,” she says.
It’s a year-round, on-going program.
“We do three big performances. One in the summer, one in the winter and one in the spring,” she says. “In the theater program, it’s the ITP actors and 4-5 partner actions. We help them with their lines and choreography.”
This special program integrates challenged actors into the acting community and gives them the opportunity to express themselves.
She helps the actors learn the choreography that has been created for them.
“They learn it before so they don’t get stage fright when it’s time to perform,” she says.
While she’s been deeply enmeshed in the Area Stage program, Peña does not do theater outside of Area Stage. She’s involved in musical theater because her family has always been involved in musical theater. Her mom, who is a physician, is also a dancer and singer.
In fact, her whole family was in the musical, Annie. Even her doctor dad.
Otherwise, she dances at school, as a member of the Sundancers dance team. The team competes nationally; however, competitions are now modified in the age of COVID-19.
“This year we are doing it virtually,” she says. “It’s the only thing we can do. We have to take what’s given.”
For the competitions, she’s doing a senior solo and a duet with her younger sister.
The Sundancers are national champions in the large group division at the National Contest of Champions. This occurred her junior year. They are currently filming for this year’s competition. deleted this sentence.
When she attends Duke University, she may take a few dance classes in between her biology classes. She hopes to go into pre-med and possibly become a pediatrician, but she has not decided if that will be her specialty.
At Gulliver, she’s the Student Body Vice President. She’s a senior officer in the dance club and a senior officer in Uniteen. She’s secretary of Operation Smiles, secretary of the National Science Honor Society and a member of the National Honor Society, Rho Kappa Honor Society, National English Honor Society and the National Spanish Honor Society.
Peña volunteered at Nicklaus Children’s Hospital doing a research project on school shootings.
“It all began when I proposed a question to the research team while volunteering in the ER at the hospital,” she says. “I asked why there were so many psychiatric patients in the emergency department and if this was related to the Marjory Stoneman Douglas shooting that had happened a few weeks before.”
That question led to a research project where she and the research team extracted data from a national database.
“We saw a correlation between the increase of pediatric mental health cases seen in the ER’s all over the country and mass shootings,” she says. “In other words, immediately after a mass shooting, pediatric ERs get flooded with patients looking for mental health services.”
Linda Rodriguez Bernfeld
