MEET ALUMS JESSE MARTINEZ & ELI BARNES
Jesse Martinez is a High Performance Computing technical lead at New Mexico’s Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). He manages a team of people responsible for critical operational aspects of the lab’s supercomputers. Eli Barnes is a company artist with Alberta Ballet in Canada, where he has performed in productions ranging from George Balanchine’s Allegro Brillante to Christopher Anderson’s Cinderella. They are two men excelling in radically different professions, living and working in entirely different countries. What could they possibly have in common? The answer is that they have known each other since middle school and forged a lifelong friendship during their years of participation in NDI New Mexico.
At the same time, Jesse was a student at Turquoise Trail Charter School. He and his fourth-grade classmates saw an NDI New Mexico video demonstrating its classic “Runs and Jumps” exercises. Jesse says he wasn’t particularly interested in what he saw, until the live musicians that are part of NDI New Mexico’s In-School Outreach programs began to play along. “That totally sparked my interest,” Jesse says. “It was the music that led me to dancing with NDI New Mexico.” Not long after, Jesse and a friend were asked to join SWAT. The year after that he joined the even more advanced Celebration Team.
Jesse
Eli and Jesse met at Capshaw Elementary and quickly became friends. They were both good students and also good athletes – Eli a talented football player and Jesse playing soccer. And of course, they were both dancers with NDI New Mexico.
Eli caught the dancing bug when he was a second grader at Carlos Gilbert Elementary School in Santa Fe and saw his first NDI New Mexico performance: “I had this strong visceral reaction Eli of wanting to be onstage,” he says. “We went to school together and of course “I thought to myself, ’get me in this danced together. Our families became program.’” He began taking classes at close, as well. Jesse’s family became like my NDI New Mexico as a third grader and second family,” Eli says. “I still have dreams joined its Super Wonderful Advanced Team about Jesse’s mom’s cooking.” The two men (SWAT) in the sixth grade. crack up laughing.
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