NEH Fourteenth Colony Master Teacher, early Californio descendant, choreographer, and historian, will coordinate program focus groups and exploratory sessions with workshop teachers and participants.

Master Teacher

Martha Ann Francisca Vallejo-McGettigan is descended from four first families that came to California with Fr. Junípero Serra and Feliciana Arballo who came with Juan Bautista de Anza in 1775. She is a great, great granddaughter of General Mariano Guadalupe and Doña Francisca Carrillo Vallejo, great granddaughter of Dr. Platon M.G. Vallejo, granddaughter of Francisca Carrillo Vallejo and Dr. Charles McGettigan, and daughter of Edward Platon McGettigan.  She has been producing and presenting programs on early California history for over twenty years, and is a teacher of California Heritage, Spanish and Native American Indian music and dance.

Martha majored in Theater Arts and Music at Immaculate Heart College in Los Angeles, and in Management at St. Mary’s College, Moraga.  She is a choreographer, director and costumer of opera and turn-of-the-century musicals, Gold Rush, vaudeville acts and early California eras. She has lectured on Native American and Californio traditions with an emphasis on the Suysun Tribe, the Vallejo Family, and the women of early California. She worked with California 2000 on history documentaries for the State of California School System as art director, researcher, and costume and prop director.  She adapted primary source documents originating with Francisca Vallejo for a DVD on General Vallejo’s home, Lacryma Montis, which received a nomination for a Telly Award for scriptwriting. She has produced a CD of Las Posadas using historic and original California Mission music, and was the recipient of a Visiting Scholar Fellowship at the Autry Institute for the Study of the American West.