Three renowned international designers and technicians from Chile and Mexico will be joining us at USITT 2020 for our Student Ambassador Program. Three student members will each be paired with one of the visiting international guests with similar areas of focus.

That's where you come in.

Participating in the Student Ambassador Program allows you to expand your international connections through one-on-one conversation and learning with our guests. Fostering this international networking between early designers/technicians and our global colleagues has been proven to cultivate life-long connections according to past participants. 

This year, all three of our guests are fluent in Spanish. In Houston's Harris County, 1.6 million people speak a language other than English at home. Of those, 1.3 million residents speak Spanish, according to an article from the Houston Chronicle.

Houston's Hispanic population is increasing rapidly as more Latin American immigrants move to the area to work. Houston now has the third-largest Hispanic population in the United States. Roughly 38 percent of Houston locals speak Spanish according to World Population Review statistics.

Meet our 2020 International designers and technicians!

Jerildy Bosch began as a dancer/actress in Mexico. After founding her own company, she started designing costumes for shows she directed, and now designs for their National Theatre Company, National Opera Company, and National Dance Company. Her design vocabulary is focused on making sensations grow from texture, which has fired her passion for searching for new materials and exploring new techniques. She received a Gold Medal for her costume designs in PQ 2019. Visit her website at jerildybosch.com.

Josefina Cerda Puga is a sound art designer from Chile where she works at the Universidad de Chile. She is exploring new relationships between scenery and spectator, which produce a sound revolution that aesthetically and politically transforms the experience of the scene, incorporating sound as a formal axis of creation, reaching beyond technical elements.

Natalia Sedano of Mexico was honored as the most promising student of the PQ 2019. She is a recent graduate of the National School of Theatre Arts of Mexico, having trained in scenic, costume, lighting, and production design. The jury admired her unique vision where, “forests become fabrics, fabrics become landscapes: Nature becomes somehow un-natural…(with) huge vegetables exploded on impact, rooted humans with bare feet.” Theatre design in Mexico has frequently been recognized by PQ and WSD juries, and this is your opportunity to find out about how designers there are trained to expand their theatrical vision.

If you are a Spanish speaker or have a connection to Spanish culture, we strongly encourage you to apply. On that same note, if you are not a Spanish speaker, we also encourage you to apply, as learning about different cultures brings people together and can highlight our differences whilst create a bond through our similarities.

Student members will be chosen for this honor based on their fields of study, compelling application, and letter of nomination/ recommendation from a mentor. Student Ambassadors will receive free conference registration and a luncheon with the three international guests. The deadline for applications is Jan. 31. Winners will be announced by Feb. 15.