My favorite artist is actually a medical illustrator by the name of Michele Graham. I love the fact that she uses her art as a form of education and as a way of supporting and advancing the medical field. Her art itself is soft yet still very realistic and anatomically accurate, and the style is just beautiful to me. I plan to be an animator and medical illustrator just like her one day.

instagram: @raquelmckayart I'm proud to be a bisexual woman in the community as well as an ally for others in the community. I understand what it's like to be discriminated against, and the community is one of the few places where I'm supported and loved, and I can give this love back and uplift my peers. I'm proud to be myself, to love who I love, and to know my love has no limits.

Music has given me life when I feel I've lost it. In fact, when I almost lost my life in a car accident, the only thing that kept me going was listening to music. Being unable to move a lot at the time and trying to recover, music gave me a way to process my feelings and trauma, as well as a way to move without actually moving. I feel like in a way I owe it to music, to the musicians that inspire me, and the people around me to make some music of my own - to tell stories in a different light. One of my biggest dreams is to eventually start a band inspired by different eras in history. I feel it's effective because not only do people get to explore the very specific problems of the time period people faced but also realize that we still deal with many of the same issues today. We're all the same humans, just hundreds of years apart. To me, music has helped me with my identity as a bisexual woman and as someone who is still trying to process trauma, grief, and all other aspects of life that I'm still learning, and I hope someday I will be able to give back similarly.

My biggest artistic ambition is to tell stories that will shake people to the core. There are a few ways I'd love to go about this, but especially after nearly losing my life in a car accident, I realize I want to do it through artistic visuals and animation. Animation and cartoons always inspired me growing up. As a child on the autism spectrum, I had trouble understanding and learning social norms, which cartoons helped me understand through stories and fables. But I was also attracted to how much emotion could be conveyed in such simple characters with each frame. Even the characters themselves had so much to say with something as basic as the shape of their eyes or the way they were designed. I was blown away by this art form and all the work that went into storyboarding, designing, and even writing the characters too. When I finally got the chance to learn how to animate a year ago at the School of Visual Arts' pre-college program, I really felt I had found my nice in the world. For once I was surrounded by like-minded people and learning about the same thing that made me feel comfortable as a child. Although the actual process of animating itself is incredibly tedious, time-consuming, and very hard, seeing your character come to life after hours of drawing in every frame is a feeling like no other, a true feeling of accomplishment. So with all my life experiences, from dealing with being on the spectrum and the difficulties it came with, to dealing with trauma in my senior year from a nearly fatal car accident, and much more, I want to reach out to people dealing with trauma as well. I want to remind them that not only are they not alone, but that the pain does not last forever, that there are ways to keep holding on and tough through the moment.