I am the first person in my family to pursue art as a career rather than going into finance or medicine. My parents came to the United States from Poland in 1992. While they have done their best to provide us with a plentiful life, they have never been encouraging when it comes to me pursuing a path that is alternative to what they want. However, without intending to, they helped put me on this path. My mom enrolled me in various activities like ballet, figure skating, soccer, and more. Her efforts to keep me engaged and entertained cumulated into my love for the arts and a profound need to express myself through them. And my dad– I owe him gratitude for my love of nature. Whether it’s winter or summer, rain or shine– whenever I’m with him, we are outside. He has taught me to love and appreciate nature through the various activities he would do with my siblings and me: hiking, skiing, kayaking, and climbing. My dad also loves tennis and taught my siblings and me how to play. Whenever I pick up his old Wilson racket, I am hit with a wave of nostalgia; memories of my dad making us chase tennis balls across the court. At eleven years old, my parents gifted me a Nikon Coolpix camera, and I fell in love with photography. It had the basic functions, but it was perfect for me to learn the foundations. I took pictures of anything and everything, and it accompanied me wherever I went. Unfortunately, my passion was stifled when I entered middle school. Family circumstances, bullying, and an uncomfortable realization of my identity as a lesbian plummeted my mental health. High school was not much better. Self-doubt stunted my capacity and confidence. As a result, I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, so I used a gap year to work and figure things out. During this time, I had revitalized my love for photography. In my free time, I picked up my Nikon Coolpix once again and began creating the kind of photography I wanted to see as a queer woman who values expressing herself. My lifelong friends offered themselves as models to help pursue my passion. Together, we have created beautiful scenes of the female form in nature. With their encouragement, I applied to SUNY Purchase after completing community college. I am striving to learn as much as possible while obtaining my BFA in photography. My tuition is what I plan to use this scholarship for. Every summer since my childhood, I have committed to travelling to Poland for a month. I have utilized Poland’s proximity to other countries to my advantage. I have visited Prague, Barcelona, Rome, Paris, and other artistically influential cities. I have made it my mission to visit an art museum in every country I explore. Immersing myself in art is how I absorb different cultures and procure inspiration. Although there are many endearing places, I am most drawn to Puerto Rico. This beautiful island is an enchanting entanglement of nature and artistic expression. Some of my best photos were taken there, intermeshing the lush jungle of El Yunque with the organic human form. I strive to synthesize the skills that enable my photography to express my perspective and experience as a woman who attempts to love every part of herself. Nature, in its rawness and realness, I feel, is the medium through which connection and affirmation reach women and queer people. Nature is one of my most valuable tools in achieving authenticity and embracing it.

I did not realize this until I was 20 years old, but my life has always been surrounded and guided by the arts. As a kid, I was fascinated by dance and I was enrolled in ballet and figure skating for a long time. This specific category of the arts projected me into the world of the arts that I am in today, which is photography. I never really had the talent for drawing or painting as a kid, but I loved taking pictures. I eventually convinced my parents to get me a camera and it was a big hit with me. I loved learning how light can be captured and how many different types of motion I could use to get a unique picture. Unfortunately, I was discouraged from pursuing photography as a career due to my parents wanting me to have a more traditional career. After being discouraged I gave up art completely aside from certain hobbies here and there. As a senior in high school, I had no motivation to go to college because I had no interest in life, let alone pursuing a career that I had no love for. Taking a gap year changed my mind a bit, so I decided to try community college. That's where I rediscovered my love for photography in a digital photography class. The person that taught this class is the person who has inspired me the most and pushed me to continue pursuing my craft. Professor F is a wonderful and kind professor who had the utmost patience for all of the questions I asked her. Much of our time in class consisted of learning how to use applications like Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom which are two very important things for a photographer to learn. I was constantly raising my hand, asking for her opinion and readily absorbing any knowledge she could give me. When it came to assignments, we had certain guidelines to follow but she gave me free range aside from that and encouraged me when I explored self portraits and nude photography. Through this I developed my style of photography, which explores feminism, sex, and the human body. In the middle of the semester, there is an art contest that the college holds and I won Best in Show for one of my photos that year! Professor F certainly helped me to develop my skills enough in order to be able to do that. I am now at SUNY Purchase pursuing a BFA in Photography. This is thanks to the encouragement I received to apply there from Professor F and a couple of other wonderful professors at CT State Community Colleges!

Regardless of the fact that I grew up in the United States, my connection to my Polish heritage through culture, family, and language is very strong. My parents immigrated to the US from Poland in 1992 and made it a priority that my siblings and I stayed connected to our Polish roots. Because of this, I am able to speak Polish fluently and communicate with my extended family when I visit almost every year. When I am in Poland, I immerse myself in art and culture. MOCAK (Museum of Contemporary Art Kraków) is one of my favorite places to do that. The causes that I am most passionate about are women’s rights, LGBTQ+ rights, and environmental conservation. As a queer woman in a Polish family, I’ve faced my share of challenges, but I’ve channeled those experiences into activism and art.. In high school, I was a part of the Gender Sexuality Alliance club and we would hold fundraising events for queer organizations as well as spreading information and awareness through presentations. I am currently active in these communities through attending women’s rights protests and queer centered events. I also express these identities through my artwork, focusing on themes of womanhood and queerness. Ever since I was a kid I have cared about the planet and keeping the world a safe and healthy place for people to live. As I have gotten older, I have maintained habits that keep the amount of waste that my family and I produce as low as possible. We compost our food scraps, get a lot of our clothing and household items through second hand stores, and do anything else that we can. One of the most meaningful childhood memories that I have is when my dad took me hiking in the Tatra mountains for the first time when I was 8 years old. We hiked all the way to the Morskie Oko (Eye of the Sea). Walking up to the lake, I thought it was beautiful, but when we hiked farther and I was able to see it from above, I was changed. Laying my eyes on this beautiful sight changed the way I thought about our planet forever. Even at such a young age I knew that I wanted to do what I could to conserve the beautiful nature that the earth has given us. Today, that passion lives on in how I live, the art I create, and how I spend time outdoors. If I could have dinner with a famous Polish woman, I would choose Natalia Lach-Lachowicz. Natalia LL was a female Polish artist who lived from 1937 until 2022. She created infamous pieces of artwork such as her film “Consumer Art”, which helped to shape contemporary feminist art in Poland and beyond. I consider her to be my biggest inspiration as a Polish-American photographer who aspires to create feminist and queer art. The question that I would ask her is, “How did your personal experiences influence the artwork that you made, and how do you think your art impacted the world?” Learning this information about her thought process would be invaluable information to me as an artist who wants to make an impact.

"Don't tell your siblings. They'll get infected." This sentence is the first thing I heard my mom say when I came out to her as a woman who is attracted to women in high school. I am a female bisexual first generation immigrant from Poland. My parents immigrated to the United States in 1992. As a lot of immigrant parents from an older generation are, they are not very educated, or empathetic towards mental health struggles. As the oldest daughter of three children in an immigrant family, there has always been a lot of pressure on me to go to college. A common phrase I would hear is "If you don't go to college, you'll work at McDonalds!" This kind of pressure, along with my parents' extremely unhealthy relationship that resulted in fighting every day caused my mental health to spiral downwards from a very young age. I started to become extremely depressed and suicidal around the time I turned 13, which was also when I first learned that I am attracted to women. Emotional and verbal abuse was a very common occurrence in my household, due to my poor mental health and poor grades at the time. There were days in high school where I contemplated if I should even be alive, and whether I should just rid the world of myself so that I wouldn't have to feel how much my mom disliked me anymore. Thankfully, I started to meet other people like me. People who were creative and weren't afraid to be themselves. I also joined the GSA at my high school. I met so many accepting and unique people through this resource and I am very thankful for it. Some things my GSA club did was promote the idea of starting GSAs at the middle schools in our town, throw LGBTQ+ dances, fundraising, and much more. Being able to help my community through this club was such a rewarding experience. I still was experiencing troubles with my mental health at this point, and I got diagnosed with severe depression and got started on medication. Therapy didn't help much to be honest. It was amazing to be able to get things off my chest to someone who would be able to help me, but the mental health resources that my insurance was able to give me access to, weren't the greatest. My first therapist recorded everything I said to her about my parents and then sent everything I said about them to my mom when she requested her to. This created an even bigger divide between myself and my mom. I started spending more time with friends which drastically uplifted my mood and mental health. When the pandemic started in 2020, I was in my junior year of high school. My mental health that had been slowly on the rise in the previous year, has just plummeted once again. Because I was isolated at home, I wasn't able to escape my parents' fighting between themselves and judgements against me because I was doing poorly in school. My senior year began similarly, and I had no idea what I was going to do with my life. After I graduated, I decided to take a year off to work and build community amongst other people like me. This is when I rediscovered my passion for photography. I started taking classes at my local community college, and two years later I'm applying to different schools to get my BFA in Photography. I was able to persevere through my mental health struggles, and I'm so proud of myself.

I am a creative and eccentric first-generation Polish immigrant and the oldest child in a Polish household. Both of these factors have put immense pressure on me from the day I was able to conceptualize the word “college”. My parents are very traditional when it comes to getting a degree and getting a good job (you have a choice of doctor, lawyer, or banker). Living with this kind of pressure made me extremely insecure about my intelligence, goals in life, and my entire future. This, along with living amid my parents’ extremely unhealthy marriage and family conflict, sent me into a deep depression from middle school until my senior year of high school, during which the only future I thought of for myself was nonexistence. At this crucial point in my life was when I was supposed to decide what I was supposed to do for the rest of my life. I had no answer to these life changing questions, so after I graduated high school in 2021, I took a year off and worked multiple serving and bartending jobs. During this time, I learned the value of hard work and creating deeper relationships with people. I also pursued many hobbies including dance, learning languages like Spanish, roller skating, and photography. Through a lot of cleaning and designing, I also created a collaborative party and art space in the unfinished basement of my house, where many parties and artistic projects and photoshoots have taken place. I enrolled in community college in 2022, and while I have been there I have consistently been working between 1-3 jobs while holding a high GPA. I currently hold a 3.79 GPA, I am in Phi Theta Kappa, and I will be earning my associate degree in liberal arts and sciences in May 2025. During my time at CT State Norwalk, I have relearned my love for learning about art, the value of punctuality, creativity, and being passionate about pursuing a direction in life. After taking art and photography classes, I decided to pursue photography, even with my parents’ voices in my head telling me it isn’t practical. I have been interested in photography for 10 years on and off, but I really started to take it seriously and learn about 1 year ago. The most important and fascinating thing about photography to me is capturing a feeling of a moment and relaying it in a single scene. I have a very long way to go when it comes to learning to make art, which is why I want to go to SUNY Purchase. SUNY Purchase has a diverse array of classes I could take and where I can learn different art forms, which will not only inspire my photography but assist me in my creative journey and my career as a photographer. Something that might hold me back at an art school or in an art-based career is my tendency to compare myself to others and belittle myself. I plan to overcome this by using my persistence to learn how to interact with other artists and learn from them instead of comparing myself to them.