Anya is a preschool teacher, actor, and Marketing Director for her local community theater. She is also one of 300 English Teaching Assistants, who have come to spice up foreign language education of Czech students at various high schools all over the Czech Republic since 2005. With a BA in Theater Education, a PreK-12 teaching license, and family heritage in Central Europe, Anya was placed at Masaryk Gymnazium and Nursing School in Vsetín, a town of 25,000 in East Moravia. During the 2019/2020 academic year, beyond teaching English, Anya hosted a popular drama club, where students played theater games, learned how to improv, read parts of scripts, and built scenes with the expectation of performing a play at the end of the school year. In March 2020, however, Covid suddenly paralyzed the world. The Fulbright Program was terminated, and Anya, as well as thousands of other Fulbrighters all over the world, had to return home, often without the opportunity to say a proper goodbye to their
Andrew Harlan is a composer, sound designer, and bassist. A Boston Conservatory graduate currently pursuing a Ph.D. at UC Berkeley, Andrew has been mentored by leading figures in contemporary music including Marti Epstein, Myra Melford, and Ken Ueno. Andrew's original music was showcased in a multitude of festivals including the Valencia International Performance Academy, the Yellow Barn Young Artists Program, the Summer Institute of Contemporary Performance Practice, and the Wellesley Composers Conference. During the past academic year, Andrew spent nine months at the Music and Dance Faculty of The Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, where he composed music that combines improvisation and live electronics. Although Andrew's inspiration to spend a year in the Czech Republic was spontaneously inspired by a meeting with Czech composer Michal Rataj in California, today Andrew says: "My time as a Fulbrighter was a reminder to me that the most beautiful gift of being an artis