Marty Sklar Entertainment Innovation Fellowship

UCLA REMAP is proud to announce the Marty Sklar Entertainment Innovation Fellowship, established in 2020, which will support high-achieving students with $10,000 each to participate in major collaborative projects at REMAP that interweave the physical and digital worlds to share new kinds of stories, and engage with the legacy and future of themed entertainment.

The Fellowship will support UCLA students from TFT as well as other disciplines including Engineering. In the 2020-2021 academic year, we will award one fellowship; in subsequent years, we will award up to three fellowships.

A UCLA alumnus, Martin A. Sklar was the author of Dream It! Do It!: My Half-Century Creating Disney’s Magic Kingdoms. Early in his 53-year career at Disney, he played pivotal roles in projects such as the 1964 New York World’s Fair and the It’s a Small World attraction. He’d go on to lead the creative development of Epcot, and supervise the design and construction of Tokyo Disneyland, Disneyland Paris, Disney-MGM Studios, among many others. He rose to President, then Vice Chairman and Principal Creative Executive of Walt Disney Imagineering, and in 2001, was recognized as a Disney Legend. In 2006, he left his chairmanship to became Walt Disney Imagineering International Ambassador, and in 2007, received the Professional Achievement Award from the UCLA Alumni Association. On July 17, 2009, Disneyland’s 54th anniversary, he retired, and was honored with a window on Disneyland’s Main Street, U.S.A..

Considered by many to be “the Jiminy Cricket of Imagineering,” Sklar’s pioneering work in the themed entertainment industry demonstrates how artistic creativity can drive engineering innovation at a large scale, consistent with REMAP’s goals for its research and student experiences. The Fellowship will be funded by a new leadership gift to UCLA TFT from the Sklar family, in his honor, along with funds from the UCLA Chancellor‘s Centennial Scholars Match Initiative.

UPDATES:

Call for Applications: Marty Sklar Entertainment Innovation Fellowship 2024 (November 2023)

Five UCLA students chosen as 2nd round of Marty Sklar Fellows (April 2022).

2022 Call for Applications (February 2022).

UCLA TFT PhD student Zama Dube chosen as inaugural fellow (January 2021).

2021 Call for Applications (August 2020).