Sara Sierra-Garcia: Arts

For as long as she can remember, Sara Sierra-Garcia has loved the arts and expressing herself through artistic endeavors. Over the last four years, she has been able to explore its various paths and applications in her future. “I’ve always liked doing art,” she said. “As a kid, projects in school were always art based and I always liked that. What I like most about art is that you could just literally make anything, and it’s art. It’s just really easy to express yourself or a specific idea that you want to show. It’s really relaxing when you’re making something. You kind of just forget about everything else.”

As a child, she first experimented through 2D art forms, such as painting and drawing, before moving on to 3D mediums. Over time, she also became more engaged in the art community: volunteering at the Palo Alto Art Center as an apprentice and participating in the California State Summer School for the Arts. “In high school, I decided to take ceramics because I’d never tried it before,” she said. “Now, I think I prefer ceramic a lot more than painting or drawing. Doing ceramics and going to CSSSA, showed me that there are’s a lot of things that you can do.”

This year, Sierra-Garcia has explored her passion for the arts in the AP 3D Studio Art course where students are given free-range on their creative endeavors and investigate an area of interest throughout the year. “I really wanted to focus more on sculpting human-like features and human anatomy,” she said. “I also really wanted to make things that I could use daily. So that kind of made the idea of combining the two and making functional objects like cups and plates, but mixed in with body parts.”

Sierra-Garcia plans to study art history at Boston University in the fall, while keeping studio art as a hobby or minor. “Studying art history just sounds so interesting,” she said. “I’ve always loved history classes and combining that with art is the best combination for me. My dream is to work in a museum, and I think it’s so fun to work with things that are so old and so full of history.”

Yoochan An, a coveted photographer for many Bay Area news publications, has been pursuing his ardor for photography for the past decade, capturing unique and creative moments in a way that finds beauty in even the simplest of things. His passion for photography led him to explore other fields, and he eventually discovered an intriguing connection between his love for photography and his interest in marine biology. “My dream job is to do photography and scuba dive in the ocean,” An said. “That’s where I’m headed right now.”

An’s journey in high school has played a significant role in shaping his career path. He moved to the United States from Korea (where he faced stringent limitations in pursuing his photography passion). “The atmosphere of a Korean school is just study, study study.” An said. “There are really no extracurricular things happening.” However, in the United States, he was encouraged to pursue extracurricular activities, and he found photography to be