Theater as Community
They played improv games. They passed scenes the way you pass a secret. The last session was a game she called "campfire" — kids on the floor in a circle, telling stories about how they got their names, or how they wished they had, laughing as they invented stories for one another.
"I felt like I really left them with a sense of community," Victoria Atilano said of her time student teaching at Vista Middle School in Panorama City as part of completing her Visual and Performing Arts Education (VAPAE) minor from the School of the Arts and Architecture.
Atilano has known they wanted to be a teacher since eighth grade (despite their high school history teacher's advice not to). VAPAE gave them the skillset to make that aspiration real. They also delight in their time stage managing, working on sets, props, costume design and the annual Bruin Fringe Festival at the School of the Theater, Film and Television, where they learned that theater is community and will celebrate that as a 2026 commencement speaker.
Atilano's end goal is to be a middle school drama teacher, with time in the industry first so they can tell students from experience that the path is possible.
