The iSchool is pleased to announce that five of the eighteen students selected to participate in the 2021-2023 Association of Research Libraries (ARL) Kaleidoscope Diversity Scholars Program are from the University of Illinois. With the goal of attracting MS/LIS students from historically underrepresented racial and ethnic groups to careers in research libraries and archives, the Kaleidoscope Program offers financial support to scholars as well as leadership development through the ARL Annual Leadership Symposium, a formal mentoring program, career placement assistance, and a site visit to an ARL member library.
Master's students selected for the program include danielle luz belanger, Sylvia Figueroa-Ortiz, Krystal Madkins, Anthony Martinez, and Ari Negovschi.
belanger is an archivist at The Freedom Archives and a grassroots community organizer. She received her BA from the University of California, Berkeley, where she studied postcolonialism and visual culture. She is currently interested in "investigating how digital preservation technologies can be wielded to bridge the gap between established LIS standards of description and nontraditional forms of memory-making."
Figueroa-Ortiz holds a BA in modern languages and English linguistics and communication from the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras, and an MA in applied linguistics from The University of Edinburgh. She worked as a language teacher in Puerto Rico and Boston prior to beginning her studies at the University of Illinois. After earning her MS/LIS, she would like to work as an academic librarian focusing on community engagement and access.
Madkins holds a master of public health in epidemiology from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She works as a research project manager for an online HIV-prevention study at Northwestern University and as an Ask a Librarian apprentice at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her goal is to become a medical librarian and "help dismantle barriers to equitable health information and services."
Martinez is a member of the New York Library Association's Alternative Pathways to Librarianship Task Force and was recently a trustee at the Tompkins County (NY) Public Library. He is interested in serving rural, low-income, Indigenous, nontraditional, transfer, and first-generation students, as well as international and re-entry students. Martinez is also a producer at NPR member station WBEZ in Chicago.
Negovschi holds a BFA from the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) Film and Video Program, where she studied analog film and video technologies. A child of immigrants from Mexico and Romania, Negovschi hopes to "bring her intersectional perspective to the world of moving image archives in order to create a more complete and inclusive historical record."