Celebrating the 2024 Gordon Hay Scholarship Winners!

At the 11th Annual Blumey Awards celebration on May 26, Blumenthal Arts celebrated the incredible achievements of high school musical theater students across a wide range of disciplines. Among the evening’s highlights was the presentation of several competitive scholarships, including this year’s recipients of the Gordon Hay Scholarship.

This unique award provides funds to graduating high school seniors and college students early in their academic program with a passion for a behind-the-scenes role in theater. The money is not for tuition expenses but rather to supplement the costs of outside experiences or equipment that can help them reach their goals.

The scholarship committee selected three outstanding recipients this year: Sophie DiBella of Central Academy of Technology & Arts, Gracie Guess of Knoxville Catholic High School, and Ella Grace Wolfe of UNC Chapel Hill.

We recently spoke to each of the winners about their inspirations, goals and how they plan to use their scholarship. Here’s what we found out!

A Passion for Lighting Design

Senior Sophie DiBella was awarded $10,000. She’s the first recipient of this increased scholarship amount, which became available this year. Sophie will head to NYU Tisch School of the Arts, her dream school, where she will pursue a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Lighting Design.

She fell in love with lighting design during high school after dabbling in a variety of onstage and behind-the-scenes roles. It combined everything she enjoyed: the analytical, linear side of academics along with the artistic skills and creativity required for engaging storytelling.

Lighting designers use computer code to create cues (combinations of colors, shapes and shadows) to illuminate the stage, set the mood and guide the audience’s eye. Plays may only have a few distinct light cues, Sophie says, while some musicals — like her school’s recent production of “Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812” — can have as many as 100 different cues in a single song.

(Sophie DiBella)

During her time at CATA, Sophie created lighting designs and operated the light board for more than 20 productions spanning theater, dance and concerts. Sometimes she juggled that role with other responsibilities, too. She’s nominated for a Blumey Award this year for Stage Management for the school’s production of “Natasha, Pierre…” She stage managed alongside designing for the show.

“I just really believe that gaining experience in all of the different [tech] aspects is always going to make you better,” Sophie says.

Even though she is fully committed to pursuing a career as a lighting designer, she is grateful for the opportunity to practice stage management.

“It's taught me a lot and I definitely would not be opposed to dabbling in it a little bit in the future,”  she says.

(Sophie DiBella (center) with her mother Julie (left) and 2023 Blumey Awards Best Actress Winner Katie Ruttenberg at the 2024 Blumey Awards Pre-Show VIP reception) 

Where Lighting Design is concerned, Sophie says she’s mostly self-taught. For others who want to explore the field, she recommends YouTube, where there are loads of videos showing how to code for specific light boards. She also advises learning the basics of color theory and how colors work in a theatrical space.

Sophie plans to use her scholarship to purchase a new computer. She’s got her eye on a MacBook, which is standard for the industry, she says.

“I'm excited to get that because I think it'll make my life so much easier.”

The scholarship will also cover the subscription cost of computer programs used by theatrical and lighting designers and allow her to pursue potential summer internship opportunities in New York, she says, since the funds could help subsidize living expenses.

The Scholarship’s First Knoxville Recipient

Gracie Guess is the first recipient of the Gordon Hay Scholarship to come from Knoxville, Tennessee. She is also fascinated by lighting design and stage management and was awarded a $2,500 scholarship to support her passion. She heads to Elon University in the fall where she will study Theatrical Design and Technology.

Gracie discovered how much she enjoyed behind-the-scenes work, when she helped build an outdoor stage for her first high school show, in the midst of COVID. Students had just returned to in person classes and they were still wearing masks. At the time, a performance in the school’s very small black box theater wouldn’t have been feasible, she says.

(Gracie Guess)

 Later, when the school opened a brand new, state-of-the-art theater, Gracie who had always thought of herself as primarily a performer, decided to give stage management a try and loved it.

After that, Gracie split her time between performing and tech roles at Knoxville Catholic High School. Sometimes she did both at the same time! She starred as the Wicked Witch of the West in “The Wizard of Oz” her junior year and this spring, as the Baker’s Wife in “Into the Woods,” while simultaneously overseeing lighting design for both productions.

During tech week, Grace says she would run off stage in between scenes to adjust lighting. She had a team of underclassmen assistants helping her. Sometimes during rehearsals, she’d have one of them fill in as a body double so she could go adjust the lights for a scene.

That hard work paid off. Last week, the school’s production of “Into the Woods” won recognition for Outstanding Technical Execution at the inaugural Marquee Awards — East Tennessee’s equivalent of the Blumey Awards — hosted by the Tennessee Theatre in Knoxville.

Gracie says she has several ideas for how she could use the scholarship. She may hold on to it for a while to see if she can put it toward any workshop fees. She’s also considering using it toward purchasing her own lighting console, so she can design from anywhere.

She’s looking forward to her program at Elon University, where she says she’ll have the opportunity to get a strong background in all areas of theater design and tech to help determine her exact path forward.

“I am so grateful for the Blumenthal Arts organization for extending this scholarship towards Knoxville area residents,” Gracie says.

“I saw ‘Into the Woods’ at the Belk Theater around this time last year right after learning that it would be my senior show… When I learned about this scholarship I was absolutely floored at how much it encompassed who I am and so it's just such a small world that I won such an amazing scholarship from the same organization that I had been inspired by!”

This Former Blumenthal Arts Intern Explores Everything She Can

Ella Grace Wolfe, who grew up in Cornelius, was also awarded a $2,500 scholarship. She is currently a rising junior at UNC Chapel Hill, where she is majoring in Dramatic Arts and pursuing minors in Musical Theater and Media and Journalism: Advertising/Public Relations.

She has many different interests in the dramatic arts and she has explored an incredible variety of roles in the last few years, including a work study job in a prop shop at the university, and internships in marketing and theater education. She’s performed, stage managed, taught and directed children in summer camps and after school programs, too.

(Ella Grace Wolfe at Blumenthal's Belk Theater)

Last fall, she spent the semester working full time as an intern in Blumenthal’s marketing department, earning academic credit toward her degree program.

“It was a wonderful experience,” Ella says. “They treated me as if I was somebody who was on their level and let me take the time to learn different aspects of everything, knowing that this is not only a work experience but an educational experience.”

She loved seeing her ideas used in actual marketing campaigns, like a poster she designed to support Blumenthal’s “Made in Charlotte” program, and a giveaway promotion she spearheaded. She also got to shadow different roles within the theater: she accompanied Blumenthal’s publicist on media appearances with the cast of “Funny Girl;” she followed the stage managers from “The Wiz;” and she got to observe the spotlight operator for “Beetlejuice.”

This spring, while continuing her college studies online, she worked as an intern to Davidson Community Players’ Education Director. Outside of her internship, she taught two after school theater courses for DCP to elementary school aged children.

“I kind of get the best of both worlds, in the sense that… I'm able to keep advancing through my classes but I also get to have this real world experience,” Ella says.

For Ella, theater education holds a special place for her. She remembers well her own days learning and putting on shows as a student at DCP. She worked several seasons at the organization's summer camps before teaching this spring. And she will continue this summer, with additional responsibilities as a lead instructor.

(Ella Grace Wolfe (right) with Blumenthal Arts President Tom Gabbard (left) at the 2024 Blumey Awards Pre-Show VIP reception)

“Last summer, I taught a lot more than I normally have at Davidson Community Players … and I would just come home every day like, ‘Wow, I love this! I love being able to teach. I really enjoy this whole experience.’ And so then I went, okay, I think I want to go into some facet of children's theater.”

She has also recently spent some time revisiting photography, a skill she developed as Editor-in-Chief for her high school’s award-winning Yearbook. She borrowed a camera to shoot a production at DCP this spring. Now, she’s considering purchasing a used camera with the scholarship money so she can continue to explore that field.

She’s also thinking of directing funds toward travel expenses or registration fees for a theater seminar or to supplement living expenses should she find another internship or work opportunity at a local theater.

Ella says she is intentionally trying everything she can before she graduates in order to narrow down her focus once she’s out of school.

Providing the opportunity to explore and grow in theater arts is exactly what the Gordon Hay Scholarship helps young artists to do. For more information on the variety of scholarships offered by Blumenthal Arts, click here. Applications will be posted this fall!