Amelie Lasker, Columbia University

Growing up in suburban Massachusetts, Amelie Lasker's first art "publication" was a literary magazine she published in middle school. She illustrated covers herself, wrote journalistic and fiction content, and sent huge packets unsolicited to everyone she knew. In high school, she wrote and produced plays and made short films.

While at Columbia, Amelie has written film criticism for her part-time job, edited Columbia's film journal blog, and continued to write and produce plays. She has studied art and music history as part of Columbia's core, and recently her friends have made fun of her for playing Wagner operas loudly on her speakers while studying. One of her favorite courses at Columbia is Ancient Mesopotamian History, in which she studied the ways in which ancient kings told and illustrated their stories for future generations, as if they knew their documents would become treasures for archaeologists thousands of years later. She graduates this May with a degree in English literature and history.

Amelie has loved teaching arts and literature to younger students for all of her high school and college life. In high school, she directed Playtime Theatre, an improv troupe that performed fairy tales weekly. One summer, she designed and taught a creative writing and filmmaking summer program for students in her town. Similarly, in 2014, Amelie designed and taught a creative writing and filmmaking summer camp for 8- to 13-year-olds. And at StageCoach drama school in Cambourne, England last spring, she designed and taught weekly acting classes to age groups ranging from 5 to 14. In 2015, Amelie was also a camp counselor full-time in her hometown where counselors designed activities based on their own interests, so she naturally taught art history and astronomy. Starting this spring she will be a part-time teacher with Dearest, Inc., a new startup, for whom she will teach reading and writing one-on-one to kids up to age eight.

At Columbia, Amelie took 20th Century Art History, Art Humanities, and Music Humanities. Last year while abroad at Cambridge, she studied literature from Greek tragedy and Shakespeare to Romantic poetry, Victorian literature, and Modernism, and as part of Cambridge's course structure she learned about historical context and visual art of each time period to supplement my studies. Additionally, her history concentration is in 19th century British history, and to fulfill her breadth requirement she chose courses in early Latin American civilizations and ancient Mesopotamia (including the material culture and architecture of these civilizations).

Outside work and school, Amelie loves to write and produce plays, watch movies and write film criticism, and illustrate cards for friends and picture books for her baby cousins.

Next year Amelie is thrilled to be returning to Cambridge to pursue a Masters in American literature. After that, she hopes to work in education, either teaching arts and literacy at high school level, or hopefully pursuing a PhD in American literature.