I identify as a queer trans man and have lived publicly as a trans person since eighth grade. Being one of the only openly trans students in a majority republican town wasn’t easy, and I faced bullying and harassment from both my peers and the adults who were supposed to be protecting me. One place where I was able to find refuge was the art wing of my high school which was a place that other LGBTQ students gravitated towards. In my art classes, I felt as though an immense weight was lifted off of my shoulders. I was able to put my energy into the classwork without having to be consistently hypervigilant of my body language, and what I was saying or doing. Finding a safe space in the visual arts is one of the reasons I chose to pursue art in college. I’m currently working towards a BFA in illustration and am hoping to spend an extra year after graduation to obtain a Masters of Arts in Teaching. As a student, I work to learn and absorb as much as possible, and I try to take advantage of every opportunity that’s offered to me. The summer going into my sophomore year I was able to complete an internship where I taught different printmaking methods to youth ages 10-17. I was fortunate enough to be a Teacher's Assistant in the 2022 fall semester. I am the student representative of my college's zine club, which creates a space for artists to come together to create and share zines, attend workshops, and provide students the opportunity to table at different events. I’ve participated in vendor events where I get the chance to sell my original artwork, and I often use that as a way to fundraise for different trans-centered organizations (usually For The Gworls which raises funds for Black trans people). I ran a harm reduction workshop with the Grayken Center for Addiction which then turned into an ongoing partnership. Narcan is now available on campus, and faculty and Resident Assistants can receive further training. I’m also going on to my third year as a team member of Sparc! The ArtMobile is a work-study I have with the Center for Art and Community Partnership (CACP). As a team member, I help to make art accessible to people in the local community and help teach and facilitate art events and workshops. I believe that every student (and every person) deserves a space where they feel not only accepted but wanted and included. That belief has informed my educational journey, aside from pursuing a BFA in illustration I am also planning to obtain a Masters of Arts in Teaching. I want to be an art educator to create and facilitate safe spaces where everyone is welcome and given the opportunity and support, they need to create visual art. My goal is to work as an art educator but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to develop and create my own work as an artist. I want to help develop, write, and create sequential work (like graphic novels and comics) and I want those stories to include characters from a wide array of backgrounds, identities, and experiences. I know that I’ve already made an impact on the LGBTQ youth I’ve worked with in art education settings. Educational institutions and spaces desperately need people who will be advocates for LGBTQ students (and other students who hold marginalized identities) and I want to continue to create safe spaces so that people of all ages can be their authentic selves.

I live with Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome (also known as POTS). I developed POTS as a result of a viral infection and it began to seriously affect my life during my senior year of highschool. It’s drastically changed the way I navigate college and what I thought my college life would look like. I practice activity pacing in order to manage my symptoms and reduce flare-ups, which means that I often have to stay home while my friends go to parties and events. It can take me a long time to finish school assignments, and I have to ask friends to help me get medication or groceries because I don’t always have the ability to. Besides activity pacing I take various medications, wear compression garments, and recently started physical therapy in order to reduce my symptoms. This past academic year was very challenging physically. In the fall semester I wound up going to the ER twice, and in the spring I unfortunately caught covid which made my symptoms much worse and took awhile to recover from. Living with POTS has been difficult, I sometimes mourn the life I could’ve had without it. Surrounding myself with supportive friends, advocating for myself and my peers, and being open and honest about how I feel has been very helpful. I finished the 2022-2023 academic year with all A’s (and one unfortunate B+). I don’t necessarily like to think that I’m beating or conquering my POTS. I think I’m learning to live with and manage it, and I can live a full, joyfull, and rich life while doing that. I do still feel sad thinking about what college would’ve looked like without POTS, but I’m also very proud and happy of what my life looks like right now, even if it’s not easy. I’ve learned to plan my classes in a way that sets me up for success. In the past few years I’ve taken classes at my local community college during the summer and winter intersessions to free up time in my schedule and to get required credits out of the way. This has allowed me to register for classes early for the incoming fall semester and to explore a wider variety of classes and electives. I’m currently pursuing my college's 4+1 program in which I can obtain a Masters of Arts in Teaching the year after I receive my BFA. I’m very passionate about art education and have taken up jobs (and an internship) both during the school year and in the past few summers that have helped me gain experience in that field. As a disabled student I want to make accessibility and equity a priority as an art educator. I believe that I can offer future students an educator that is invested in their whole selves. I will strive to create a safe and inclusive learning environment that promotes a growth mindset. I will make my classroom a place where students can make mistakes and learn from their experiences. My mission is to address students' individual needs and find styles of learning that work for them. As an art educator I want to make art accessible to students of all backgrounds and skill levels.

I don’t think I could live without art. I’ve been doodling, daydreaming, and creating stories ever since I first grasped the very basic concepts of what that all meant. Visual art has always been what’s kept me afloat when the waves of life got rough. I spent my highschool years camped out in the arts wing of my highschool, taking as many classes as I could. I would visit both my school and town library and scour the graphic novel section trying to find anything I hadn’t read yet. It seemed only natural that I would decide to study visual art in college. As an illustration major I’m learning how to effectively communicate my ideas so they can be more than just stories that live exclusively in my own mind. I love the accessibility of digital art. I started my artistic journey working within traditional mediums but as I’ve grown as an artist I’ve begun to incorporate more and more digital work. I love to scan my drawings and sketches and take them into programs like photoshop, which I can use to turn them into more polished pieces. I believe that everyone has the capability to create art, and that digital drawing applications have helped to make art more accessible for those who are interested in exploring it. I’m particularly excited about what a mix of traditional and digital media will look like in the future. I’ve used digital art tools to create designs that I then print and expose onto screens for screen printing, and I’ve scanned relief prints into photoshop to then be printed out digitally as stickers. That’s just one example of multimedia, interdisciplinary art involving technology. I can’t wait to see what the future holds and how I can bring my ideas to life. In the sixth grade I was asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, and I told my teacher that I wanted to be a “graphic novelist”, and that goal hasn’t changed. I want to create the books that I was hunting the shelves for as a child, and I dream of working collaboratively on creative endeavors with other like minded artists. I have so many ideas: rich fantasy worlds with complex characters and daunting adventures, short horror stories that leave you checking under your bed for some unknown terror, and autobiographical tales that I feel other people will relate to and connect with. Each class I take, each new project I create, and the more I learn, the closer I get to making these dreams a reality.

I live with Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome (also known as POTS). I developed POTS as a result of a viral infection and it began to seriously affect my life during my senior year of highschool. It’s drastically changed the way I navigate college and what I thought my college life would look like. I practice activity pacing in order to manage my symptoms and reduce flare-ups, which means that I often have to stay home while my friends go to parties and events. It can take me a long time to finish school assignments, and I have to ask friends to help me get medication or groceries because I don’t always have the ability to. Besides activity pacing I take various medications, wear compression garments, and recently started physical therapy in order to reduce my symptoms. This past academic year was very challenging physically. In the fall semester I wound up going to the ER twice, and in the spring I unfortunately caught covid which made my symptoms much worse and took awhile to recover from. Living with POTS has been difficult, I sometimes mourn the life I could’ve had without it. Surrounding myself with supportive friends, advocating for myself and my peers, and being open and honest about how I feel has been very helpful. I finished the 2022-2023 academic year with all A’s (and one unfortunate B+). I don’t necessarily like to think that I’m beating or conquering my POTS. I think I’m learning to live with and manage it, and I can live a full, joyfull, and rich life while doing that. I do still feel sad thinking about what college would’ve looked like without POTS, but I’m also very proud and happy of what my life looks like right now, even if it’s not easy. I’ve learned to plan my classes in a way that sets me up for success. In the past few years I’ve taken classes at my local community college during the summer and winter intersessions to free up time in my schedule and to get required credits out of the way. This has allowed me to register for classes early for the incoming fall semester and to explore a wider variety of classes and electives. I’m currently pursuing my colleges 4+1 program in which I can obtain a Masters of Arts in Teaching the year after I receive my BFA. I’m very passionate about art education and have taken up jobs (and an internship) both during the school year and in the past few summers that have helped me gain experience for that field. As a disabled student I want to make accessibility and equity a priority as an art education I believe that I can offer future students an educator that is invested in their whole selves. I will strive to create a safe and inclusive learning environment that promotes a growth mindset. I will make my classroom a place where students can make mistakes and learn from their experiences. My mission is to address students' individual needs and find styles of learning that work for them. As an art educator I want to make art accessible to students of all backgrounds and skill levels.

During high school I unfortunately faced a lot of bullying from my peers. I hated going to school because it was a space that felt very hostile and unwelcoming, and felt very isolated when I was there. That changed when I began taking visual arts classes. In the art wing of my school, I felt like I could momentarily let my guard down. I had always loved drawing, and that love evolved further as I had the chance to spend more time in an art focused environment. Art-making was extremely therapeutic for me. It allowed me to share my emotions and experiences in a way that didn't rely on verbal communication. Most importantly being involved in the arts gave me a real sense of community, which I had been missing for so long. In my sophomore year of high school I joined the National Arts Honors Society, and the following year I was able to serve as the chapters Vice-President. The following summer I was fortunate enough to attend a summer program where I could study visual art with other like minded peers. Art not only became a form of therapy, but it also became something that made me feel empowered, capable, and a part of something larger than myself. During my senior year of high school making art helped me endure an extremely stressful time in my life. I wound up having to switch schools and lost a lot of the support systems that I had worked so hard to build at my old high school. Even though I was taking online classes at a school where I didn’t know anybody, I could at least take art classes. Like my previous experiences, it was art that helped me find some semblance of community. The visual arts have always been there for me and I find the most joy in spaces that are dedicated to them. I believe that every student (and every person) deserves a space where they feel not only accepted but wanted and included. As an aspiring art educator, it is my role to create and facilitate that space. Last summer I had the privilege to work with youth ages 10-17 and teach them the art of printmaking, and got to witness firsthand the immensely positive impact of inclusive and accepting space-making. When given permission and freedom to be themselves people can create and accomplish more than they ever thought possible.

I usually try to avoid telling other people that my mental health issues define me as a person, for the most part, I don’t believe that they do. However, the person I am and how I view and interact with the world has been intensely informed by my experiences with mental illness. I live with OCD and PTSD, and my experience with those illnesses hasn't just been interpersonal. My mental health has touched institutions, family structures, my friends, and those around me. Through my experiences, I’ve had to learn how to advocate for myself within spaces that weren’t built to accommodate me. I also had to invest in myself and commit myself to what seemed like endless perseverance through the turmoil in both my mind and my environment. I don’t subscribe to the idea that trauma builds character or helps shape you into a stronger person. I have learned how to endure and persevere in situations that feel hopeless and I think I owe that not to the pain I have experienced, but to the time I’ve invested in healing, learning effective emotional regulation skills, and therapy. I also owe a lot of the strength I have to my mother who helped to advocate for me and had the strength in 2020 to take us out of an unhealthy living situation, which allowed me to have a safe space in which I could focus on recovery. Having a support system of people you trust and feel safe with is crucial to recovering and living with a mental illness. I never realized how bad the mental health care infrastructure was in America, until I found myself in crisis and in need of more intensive support. Experiencing inpatient mental health treatment at a young age exposed me to how ill-equipped we are as a society to help support vulnerable populations, and how people put in charge of vulnerable people will often abuse their power with no oversight. Witnessing firsthand how social biases such as racism, sexism, and homophobia made their way into the mental health system opened my eyes to the social injustice around me and made me cognisant of concepts such as intersectionality. Intersectionality, as explained by Kimberle Crenshaw (who coined the term) is “ a lens, a prism, for seeing the way in which various forms of inequality often operate together and exacerbate each other” (Steinmetz), and I saw how people’s identities, including my own, informed the way they were treated within the mental health care system. As a transgender person, my identity seemed to define the way every provider and professional treated me. Despite my mental health issues having no connection to me being transgender that part of myself was constantly centered and focused on. My current worldview has been informed by concepts such as intersectionality, and I have gained a certain level of awareness of the problems in the environments I occupy because of these experiences. My current goals in life are intangibly linked with my mental health. I’m currently pursuing my BFA in illustration with the goal of pursuing a Master of Arts in Teaching after graduation. Making art is something that helped carry me through my struggles with mental illness. When I spent time in treatment facilities I would draw and sketch my way through. The art wing of my high school is where I sought refuge from the social ostracization I was experiencing at the time, and my art teachers had an incredibly positive impact on me. They were invested in both the art I made and who I was as a student, and gave me opportunities to feel seen and validated. This is part of the reason that I chose to study art full-time in college. I believe that every student (and every person) deserves a space where they feel not only accepted but wanted and included. As a (future) art educator, it is my role to create and facilitate that space. As I mentioned in the beginning, I don’t believe that my mental illnesses define me as a person. I do believe that they have played a major role in helping to shape how I view the world around me and how I interact with that world. I want a future where people don’t have to navigate all of the negative factors in the mental health care system that I did and can focus on their own healing with support from loved ones and without societal stigma. I feel that this future can be a reality and I want to do my part to make it happen. Citations: Steinmetz, Katy. “Kimberlé Crenshaw on What Intersectionality Means Today.” Time, 20 Feb. 2020, time.com/5786710/kimberle-crenshaw-intersectionality/.

I have found that belonging and being a part of a greater community is essential in life. When I came out as transgender at the age of 13, I experienced the shock of being rejected by my peers. It was a pain I had felt before, being one of the only Jewish children in a Christian community. I grew up being pushed away by fellow classmates, and I felt incredibly isolated. There wasn’t space for someone like myself. Before I found safety among fellow queer students, my greatest place of refuge and where I still feel most comfortable will always be among artists. In high school I began taking a plethora of various visual arts classes, seeking out the comfort which art provided me. Visual art was a second language, giving me a way to express my emotions and inner dialogue when words weren’t enough to show how I felt. Through the arts I was able to serve as Vice-President of my school's National Art Honors Society, and during the summer of 2019 I was able to spend a month at Wesleyan University, enrolled in their Visual Arts program. During that experience I felt for one of the first times in my life that I was a member of a vibrant and diverse community; one that not only accepted me but embraced who I am. I knew then and there that I wanted to dedicate the rest of my life to making art and being a part of creative spaces that work to foster acceptance, inclusion, and uplift fellow creatives. Artistic and queer communities do not only work to support likeminded individuals, they work to support those outside of the community by creating spaces and work that can do more than just sit and be observed. I have been able to help others in a very real and tangible way with the support of fellow artists. In September of 2020 I began selling my art, and in under a month I was able to raise upwards of two-hundred dollars, with all proceeds going towards The Bail Project and For The Gworls. The Bail Project fights against mass incarceration by helping to pay bail for those who can’t afford it, and For the Gworls helps to fund rent and gender affirming care for Black trans folks. Being able to support others through what I create is why I cannot imagine my life without art. I have lived my life standing at the intersection of multiple marginalized identities, and because of that, I’ve had to search for my place in the world. I’ve found that place in art and in being able to help others. I look forward to what the future holds, knowing that I have the support of a community, and things in my life that I’m passionate about.