Thursday, December 12, 2024
A passion for the arts has led two Wantagh High School seniors — Riley Wood and Ashlee Fucarino — to receive accolades in this year’s Long Island Arts Alliance Scholar-Artist competition, a program recognizing the area’s talented young artists.
Wood was named a Scholar-Artist in the media arts category, while Fucarino earned an Award of Merit for theater. They each found out about the competition while attending Nassau BOCES’ Long Island High School for the Arts, also known as LIHSA, in Syosset. They join six other students from LIHSA who were recognized in the competition and are among 40 throughout the island this year to be honored with the distinguished award.
According to Wantagh High School principal Paul Guzzone, Fucarino and Wood are “fantastic students” with a long-standing passion for the arts. Fucarino, he said, has a lengthy history of being a star performer in the school district’s theater shows, while Wood has a passion for filmmaking and production.
“They're creative, they're curious, they have a no-quit attitude,” Guzzone said, “and I'm just proud to have the opportunity to work with them, and I know that the future is bright for them.”
The arts alliance is a coalition of the region’s not-for-profit arts, cultural and arts education organizations, promoting awareness of and participation in Long Island’s arts and cultural institutions. Earning an award in its Scholar-Artist program requires students to demonstrate a high level of artistic excellence, which is determined based on a portfolio of their work, performances and a written essay about how the arts enhanced their lives.
Being recognized as a Scholar-Artist, according to the alliance, helps award winners connect with Long Island universities through eligibility for early scholarship consideration by the organization’s higher education partners.
For Fucarino’s theater presentation, she performed the song “I’m not Afraid of Anything” from “Songs for a New World,” a musical which features a series of songs exploring moments of decision, change and transformation in the lives of its characters, written and composed by Jason Robert Brown. She also performed a monologue from “Dentity Crisis,” a dark comedy play, written by Christopher Durang, about a young woman’s life as she recovers from a suicide attempt.
Since the age of 6, Fucarino has held a passion for theater. Growing up, she performed in shows at her church, St. Francis De Chantal Roman Catholic Church in Wantagh, before moving onto theater performances at Wantagh Middle School. In May, she won the Outstanding Female Performer Award at the 14th Annual Roger Rees Awards, a prestigious competition celebrating excellence in high school musical theater in the New York City area.
“I think it's so special to be able to be recognized for the work that we put in,” Fucarino said, “because we're sharing our art and our talent with people, hoping to make an impact and make people feel represented and make them feel something.”
For his portfolio, Wood submitted a short film, called “Disillusion,” about a Vietnam War veteran with schizophrenia who takes his own life. The idea for the video, he said, came to him in ninth grade after a history lesson on Vietnam and PTSD. He said he wanted to represent the experience of the lasting trauma that veterans deal with, so last year he wrote and shot the 20-minute short film.
This is the first award that Wood won for his filmmaking, he said, adding that it’s made all the years studying film “worth it.” Wood’s passion for film started when he was 5, after watching Jurassic Park. Growing up, Wood wrote short ideas for films and recorded scenes with friends on his iPad. His experience in filmmaking grew when he attended BOCES in high school, where he learned more about the basics of filmmaking, such as establishing shots and correct camera angles for filming scenes.
“I've had thousands of screenplays that I wasn't able to film, because I didn't have the time to do it until I finally made it to BOCES, where I was able to use the ideas I had,” Wood said.
Fucarino and Wood both credited their time spent at BOCES for improving their crafts. According to Fucarino, her goal is to pursue a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Musical Theater and one day be a Broadway performer. As for Wood, he plans to go to college to get a degree in film and has simple advice for those who wish to pursue the arts.
“Don't ever give up,” Wood said. “If I gave up, I would not be here. It's because of that passion that I held since elementary school that’s never stopped that I'm here right now.”
