Instructors

Freddy Arroyo
Head Coach – Boys' Soccer

This is Coach Arroyo's eighth season as the head coach of the boys' varsity team and his eleventh season with the Harvard-Westlake Soccer Program. He coached the girls' JV team from 1998-2000. Also an accomplished player, Coach Arroyo set the Van Nuys High School record for most goals (70) in a four-year span, then led the Nation in assists in 1998 and 1999 while starring for California State University, Northridge. In 1998, Coach Arroyo was named Independent Player of the Year and was a member of the All-American Scholastic Team in 1998 and 1999. His coaching experience includes serving as an assistant coach for CSUN, coaching numerous club teams in the area, and earning a United States Soccer Federation “D” license and a National Soccer Coaches' Association of America (NSCAA) National Coaching Diploma. Coach Arroyo teaches Physical Education at the Middle School campus.

Anamaría Ayala is a Spanish native speaker from Quito-Ecuador. She has taught all levels of Spanish to a wide range of students, from elementary school through the university level, both in the United States and abroad. Ms. Ayala has taught at Kingsley Elementary School, St. Clements Middle School, Loyola University, De Paul University, Instituto Cervantes, and the University of Chicago where she is currently pursuing a doctorate in Hispanic Literature. In addition, Ms. Ayala was the coordinator and Spanish Instructor for the 2002 University of Chicago Study Abroad Program in Buenos Aires-Argentina. Ms. Ayala has been teaching Spanish at the Middle School at Harvard-Westlake since 2005. She is also a Spanish Instructor at Santa Monica College. Ms. Ayala uses a variety of dynamic teaching techniques to help students with the acquisition of the four basic language skills (speaking, listening, writing, and reading). In addition, Ms. Ayala has worked on the development of Spanish-teaching materials such as the video “Chicago habla” which is currently being used to teach Spanish at the University of Chicago.

Kate Benton is a middle school dean, acting teacher and musical theatre director at the Harvard-Westlake School.  In addition to mentoring student playwright’s for the upper school’s annual Harvard-Westlake One-Act Playwright’s Festival, she is also a guest teacher/director for the Harvard-Westlake Summer Intensive Acting Workshop. Previous to her academic career, Kate worked at the William Morris Agency in the Motion Picture Literary Department and as a development executive for an independent production company at Columbia Pictures. She was Vice President of Indian Neck Productions, an independent film company, and a performing member of LA’s premiere Improvisation Troupe, “The Groundlings”.  Kate has acted in numerous television shows, films and commercials.  She is a graduate of Northwestern University.

Darlene Bible
Head Coach – Girls' Swimming and Diving

Coach Bible, the Daily News 2006 Swimming Coach of the Year, has been Harvard-Westlake School's boys' and girls' Middle School head swim coach and JV and Varsity head girls' swim coach for 27 years. During her time at Harvard-Westlake, she has coached numerous All-Americans, including world class swimmer and 5-time Olympic swimmer, Dara Torres. Her career record at Harvard-Westlake is 173-15-1. Under her leadership, the girls' team has won 20 league championships and one CIF championship. Two of the eleven girls' swim records in Divisions II and III are held by Harvard-Westlake alumni. In addition to her coaching duties, Coach Bible is also Harvard-Westlake's Athletic Director for Operations.

Nina Burtchaell

Nina Burtchaell is the Performing Arts Department Chair and director of Vocal Music at Harvard-Westlake Middle School in Los Angeles. Prior to her arrival at Harvard-Westlake, Nina taught at the Mirman School for Gifted Children in Los Angeles and at The Perry School in Austin, Texas. Nina is a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin where she studied opera with Walter Ducloux and performed as orchestral flautist with Carl St.Clair. Her graduate studies include the University of Illinois study abroad program, where she was a student of William Bennett, London Symphony Orchestra. Nina is in her eighteenth year at Harvard-Westlake, where she has enjoyed building a vibrant choral program and serving as the Dean of Faculty.

Stephen Chae has been at Harvard-Westlake for seven years, teaching English and Journalism.  This is his fourth year advising the middle school’s award-winning publication, The Spectrum.  Originally from Los Angeles, Stephen received his B.A. from Georgetown University, where he double majored in English Literature and Theology.

Erin Creznic
Head of the Field Hockey Program
Head Varsity Coach
7th & 8th Grade Coach

Erin played high school Field Hockey at Kentucky Country Day School, where she was captain of her varsity team and was selected to both the All-County and All-State Teams. She went on to play at Davidson College and graduated in 2002. Erin has coached at Harvard-Westlake since that time and last year led the Freshmen Team to their first league championship. Erin currently participates in the Field Hockey Federation programs.

Vic Eumont
Head Coach – Football

Coach Eumont is beginning his fourth year as the leader of the Harvard-Westlake program. In his first season, he led the Wolverines to a 10 win season and an undefeated Del Rey league championship. He is a veteran coach with an impressive resume. He started his career at Tulane University as a student assistant coach in 1968 and made stops at the University of Kansas, the University of New Mexico and the University of Louisiana-Lafayette before settling at Jesuit High School in New Orleans in 2001. At Jesuit, he led the Blue Jays to the state playoffs four consecutive seasons and posted a 20-4 record over the 2003 and 2004 seasons. Hurricane Katrina cut short the 2005 season and led Vic to Los Angeles, where his daughters live. While on the West Coast, he became a volunteer coach for the Wolverine freshman football team and made his mark in an astonishingly short time. This brief relationship with Harvard-Westlake established him as the top candidate to direct the future of Harvard-Westlake football. He also teaches physical education at the Upper School.

Paula Evans

Paula Evans is Chair of the Math, Computer Science, and Economics Department at the Harvard-Westlake Upper School. She has been teaching Upper School Math and Computer Science courses for ten years. She has led workshops for elementary and middle school math teachers since 1992. As an adjunct faculty member at Los Angeles Valley College, she has taught math courses designed for elementary school teachers. She is primarily interested in developing curriculum and teaching methods that develop strong math skills in the early years. She received a Master of Arts—Mathematics from the University of Missouri and a Master of Arts—Math Teaching from the University of Florida.

Cheri Gaulke has been teaching Video Art at Harvard-Westlake for 22 years and her students’ films have been showcased in film festivals nationwide. She is Chair of the Visual Arts Department, as well as faculty advisor for the Harvard-Westlake Film Festival. As an artist, her work has been exhibited in museums, galleries and film festivals worldwide.

Christopher Gragg has been Director of the Technology Center and taught senior-year Mathematics at Harvard-Westlake for the past eleven years. He has also offered Introduction to Programming and Web Design during the past five years and has taught both during summer school. A graduate of Occidental College, where he earned his teaching credential in Math and double majored in German, and of USC, where he earned a Master of Arts. Chris worked at Occidental for 21 years before coming to Harvard-Westlake. Being a graduate of Frankfurt High School in Frankfurt, Germany, he speaks German fluently and also oversees the Harvard-Westlake Language Laboratory.

Carrie Ann Green is the director of the Dance program at Harvard-Westlake Middle School. Overseeing seven ensembles and producing three original concerts a year, Carrie is proud of the growth the dance department has seen since her first year in 2003.  An alumna of Harvard-Westlake, Carrie is thrilled to be teaching at the place that first inspired her to dance.  She recently completed the 200 hour Teacher Training at Yogaworks’ Center for Yoga and incorporates a strong yoga warm-up, coupled with athletic floor work and inversions in her Contemporary style of teaching dance. Prior to her arrival at Harvard-Westlake, Carrie attended Barnard College of Columbia University, where she produced her evening length work, “My Mother is a Fish,” for the Orchesis Dance Company. A Lester Horton Award winner, Carrie has performed both in Los Angeles and New York  and has trained in many dance techniques from Ballet to Jazz, Hip-Hop to Modern, Lyrical to Tap, Musical Theater, Pilates and Aerial, and she loves teaching, choreographing, and performing them all.

Mark started playing lacrosse when he was 14, and he represented his state in Australian national competitions at the age of 23. In 1982 when Mark turned 25, he began to play international lacrosse with the Australian National Team. He continued with the Australian National Team for the next eight years. After the 1990 season, Mark moved to the United States where his playing career came to an end. While living in Australia, Mark coached high school students at club and state levels and toured with the junior state teams. Since coming to the United States, Mark has continued to be involved with international lacrosse. Most recently, Mark was a team scout and special assistant to the head coach of the 2006 Australian National Men's team. That year, Australia won the Bronze medal behind USA (Silver) and Canada (Gold).

Melissa Hearlihy
Head Coach – Girls' Basketball

Melissa enters her ninth year as head coach at Harvard-Westlake, where she has taken girls' basketball to new heights. She started her coaching career at the University of California, Los Angeles as a graduate assistant in 1983, followed by a season as JV coach at Alemany High School. In 1985, she was named head coach at Alemany and for the next fifteen seasons led one of the most successful girls' basketball programs in Los Angeles. She compiled a record of 370-83 while winning 11 league titles, 3 CIF-SS Championships and reaching the State Finals. In 2000, Coach Hearlihy joined Harvard-Westlake and continued her winning ways. In 9 years, her teams won 5 league titles, 2 CIF-SS Championship and notched a record of 172-82. Melissa earned a basketball scholarship to the University of San Francisco, where she received her bachelor's degree in 1983. She has also received her master's in physical education from California State University, Northridge.

Rachel Johnson is a filmmaker born in Chicago, IL. Her last short film, The Toll Collector, was met with international critical acclaim. She was trained in puppetry at Makinnion and Saunders, the people who made the puppets for The Nightmare Before Christmas and The Corpse Bride. Johnson is currently working with John Irving on a feature length film, as well as a few other projects that she will be promoting soon.  Johnson has been teaching animation for four years. She's taught undergraduate and graduate students at NYU, Parsons School of Design and Pratt Institute.  She recently relocated to Los Angeles and is thrilled to be teaching at USC.

Ted Katzoff
Head Coach – Fencing

Ted has been at Harvard Westlake since 1980. He has been teaching Fencing since 1962. Ted received a diploma at San Jose State University as a Fencing Master in 1986. He is a Co-Founder of the Southern California Fencing League. Under Ted's guidance, the Wolverines have won seven consecutive league titles.

Kanwal Kochar has been with Harvard-Westlake for eleven years. Over the years he has taught Algebra II, Precalculus and Geometry at the Upper School. Although this is only the fourth year that Harvard-Westlake has offered a summer Geometry course, he has taught Geometry through the UCLA Extension for the past nine years. Kanwal holds a degree in Computer Science with a minor in Mathematics from California State University Dominguez Hills.

Jonas Koolsbergen
Head Coach – Boys' & Girls' Track and Field

Coach Koolsbergen enters his twenty-second season as Head Coach at Harvard-Westlake with an overall record of 273-83-2.  Coach Koolsbergen was honored by U.S. Track & Field as an emerging elite coach in 2007.  As an athlete, Coach Koolsbergen was a collegiate decathlete at UCSB and still participates in Masters Track & Field.  Coach Koolsbergen is also a Physical Education teacher at Harvard-Westlake.  Coach Koolsbergen is an alumnus, having graduated from the Harvard School in 1983.

Jeff Kwitny
A graduate of UC Berkeley majoring in comparative literature, with an emphasis placed on Milton, Shakespeare and Chaucer studies, Jeffrey Kwitny later earned his master’s degree in English. His master’s thesis: “The Duality of Body and Soul in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels.”

Using his literary and writing skills as footholds, Jeff entered the entertainment industry, where he subsequently worked as a professional screenwriter for 15 years. After earning scores of credits in television and film (and an Emmy for daytime-television animation writing), Jeff returned to his first love: teaching literature and writing. Finding his “home,” he never looked back.

He has taught English for thirteen years now—nine years at Harvard-Westlake School—focusing on sophomore and junior English courses.

Matt LaCour
Head Coach – Baseball

Matt LaCour enters his third season as the leader of the Harvard- Westlake baseball program. Coach LaCour is widely regarded as one of the top baseball coaches in Southern California and has developed an impressive resume. He came to Harvard-Westlake from El Camino Real High School in Woodland Hills, where he compiled a five-year record of 127-32. The Conquistadors won the Los Angeles City Section Championship in 2005 and reached the semi-finals in 2004 and 2006. He was twice named Coach of the Year by the Daily News and Los Angeles Times (2002 & 2005) and his 2005 team was named the California State Team of the Year by Cal-Hi Sports. Before taking over at El Camino Real, he was assistant coach at Chatsworth High School, where the Chancellors won two Los Angeles City Section titles.

Anna Lynn Martino teaches Library and Technology 7 at Harvard-Westlake Middle School. She is interested in new media and technology trends. She was a program director at KZSC, a community run radio station located on the UCSC campus. Anna Lynn is originally from San Diego, California and holds a BA in Art History from UC Santa Cruz.

Kathleen Neumeyer
Kathleen Neumeyer has taught journalism at Harvard-Westlake’s upper school and advised The Chronicle for 17 years. As a United Press International reporter, she covered murder trials, airplane crashes, brush fires, the Academy Awards and White House dinners. As a freelance journalist, she has written hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles and authored several books. She has been honored by both the Dow Jones Newspaper Association and the Columbia Scholastic Press Association for excellence as a high school newspaper adviser.

Eric Olson has been teaching English at Harvard-Westlake for 2 years; before that, he taught English and Humanities in private schools in Los Angeles and Ojai, as well as ESL in Japan.   A graduate of Cornell University, he earned his M.A. with high honors from California State University, Fullerton in American Studies.    Eric enjoys hiking, basketball, surfing, and writing poetry when he is not chasing after his two toddler boys. 

Katie Palmer
Katie Palmer has taught ceramics, sculpture and foundation art at the Harvard-Westlake Middle School since 2006.  She is a Harvard-Westlake alum.  Katie earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Glass and Sculpture at the Rhode Island School of Design.  After RISD she went on to receive a Masters of Education from Brown University.  Prior to coming to Harvard-Westlake Katie taught both special needs students and elementary aged students.  When she is not teaching she makes sculpture out of recycled materials, blows glass with her husband and works on children’s book illustration.

Moss, born in Las Vegas, NV, graduated from Cornell University with a degree in Applied and Engineering Physics in 1999, then came to UCLA to study Greek and Latin.  After receiving an MA in Classics, he began work on a PhD in Indo-European Linguistics and is nearing completion of his dissertation.  He has taught several classes in Classical civilization and the Latin language, and now teaches Latin at the Middle School.

Lisa Rado has taught English for the past eleven years at Harvard-Westlake Upper School, where she currently instructs seniors in AP English Literature and Composition and A. P. English Language and Composition. Prior to that, she taught at Cranbrook-Kingswood Upper School and the University of Michigan. Holding a Ph.D. in English and American literature, Dr. Rado has taught a wide range of texts at both the high school and university levels and has extensive experience in the teaching of writing. Author of (UP of Virginia, 2000), she has edited two volumes of scholarly essays and published approximately a dozen articles and reviews in leading journals of literary criticism.

Richard Simms
Head Coach – Girls' Soccer

Born in Manchester, England, Richard has lived in the Southern California area for the past twenty-seven years. Richard has spent the past seven years as a head coach for the Westside Breakers Soccer Club in West Los Angeles. In his first season at Harvard-Westlake, he led his unseeded team on an unprecedented run to the CIF Division I Finals. For the Breakers, Richard has coached every age level from U11 to U19 and currently coaches the Girls under 11, Girls under 12 and Girls under 17 White teams. Richard coached teams to several Coast Soccer League Titles and has earned league promotions for a team in every season that he's coached for the Breakers. In addition to his time with the Breakers, Richard was the Head of Boys' Soccer for Westmark School, Head of Girls' Soccer for Immaculate Heart High School and spent two seasons as the Head of Girls' Soccer at Crossroads School in Santa Monica. Richard holds a USSF National License and resides in Culver City, California.

Dianne Tritica has taught all levels of Spanish language to a wide range of students, from elementary school through the university level, both in the United States and abroad. She has spent a good deal of time in various parts of the Spanish-speaking world which has enriched her background and experiences as a teacher. She currently teaches Spanish at the Upper School at Harvard-Westlake.

Kelly Vernon has been cheerleading, dancing, choreographing and coaching for nearly twenty years. While attending the University of California, Berkeley, she was the choreographer and captain of the Cal Dance Team. Her professional cheer and dance experience consists of performing with the NBA's Los Angeles Clippers and the Golden State Warriors dance teams. In addition, she choreographed for both dance teams as well as the Portland Trailblazers.

Starr Schaftel Wayne teaches Instrumental Music at the Harvard-Westlake Middle School in Los Angeles. Prior to working at Harvard-Westlake, she maintained a studio and taught the clarinet privately to many students who have won numerous competitions, including The Los Angeles Spotlight Awards, The Young Musicians Foundation Chamber Music Competition, as well as acceptance in the Disney Summer Youth Orchestra. Ms. Wayne received her Bachelor of Music degree from The Peabody Conservatory of Music in Baltimore, Maryland, where she studied with Sidney Forrest and her Master or Music degree from the USC Thornton School of Music in Los Angeles, California, where she studied with Mitchell Lurie and David Shifrin.

Ryan is Managing Editor of The Black Boot, a Los Angeles literary journal, and Coordinator of the Deans' Office at the Upper School. Before arriving at Harvard-Westlake, Ryan led something of a double life teaching English at John Adams Middle School, while absconding at night to play his songs in the clubs of LA. Ryan’s works of fiction and poetry have been published in a number of independent presses; he recently edited the book, No One, poems by Dennis Cruz, and his novel-in-progress won a fellowship at The Vermont Studio Center for the summer of 2009. He holds a BA from the University of Missouri and an MFA from the University of Miami. 

Cynthia Winter is a dancer, choreographer and director. She began her professional career in television as a dancer when she was seventeen years old. She received her Master of Arts Degree in Dance from UCLA and danced with numerous dance companies.  She became lead dancer for Margalit Dance Theater and stayed with the company for fifteen years where she danced internationally. She continues to work as a choreography and performer.   Ms. Winter is the Director of the Harvard- Westlake Upper School Dance Program. She directs the annual Upper School Dance Concerts and teaches the advanced dance classes.  Ms. Winter created the summer dance intensive with the intent of offering dancers a unique opportunity to study with talented dance artists in a non studio setting.

Javier Zaragoza has been teaching Spanish since 1977 and particularly at Harvard-Westlake since 1988. He has a Masters in Spanish and Methodology from UCLA. Sr. Zaragoza has chair both the Middle School  and the Upper School  Language Departments. He has been involved in many projects dealing with effective ways to teach language. Prior to Harvard-Westlake he was a curriculum writer and teacher trainer for LAUSD.