Mark Bretan
Visual Arts and Instrumental Music Student
by Emma Cristofani - Creative Writing '08

If you were to Google Mark Bretan, the first item on the list would be a link to the very prestigious Saatchi Gallery, a website on which London-based art collector Charles Saatchi exhibits works by under-seventeens. Pieces are selected from thousands of applicants. Eight of Mark’s graffiti drawings are displayed in this gallery, which were chosen last year when he was sixteen.

 Mark has been drawing since he was young. In the earlier half of middle school he drew anime characters, but I didn’t really care very much about it, he says. However, by the end of eighth grade, he had become more interested in art and he enrolled in the MSA program, of which his brother Mason was a student.

When I got to the class, he remembers, I saw all the more advanced artists and their works, and I thought, I want to do that! The course introduced him to painting, and he quickly became more and more dedicated. Over the past two years he has branched to creating comics and graffiti art.

His works have received notice from not only several separate contests, but from the school as well. Last year, one of Mark’s sketches graced the cover of the annual Harvest magazine, which publishes pieces from creative writing and visual arts. The poster that he created to advertise the 2007 MSA dance performance was plastered on walls throughout the school.

Outside of MSA, Mark plays trumpet in the NHS jazz band and even records his music at home, which he hopes to compile into a CD. Mark also is an outstanding runner for the cross-country and track teams, and he has won several medals, many of them gold. He can often be seen running around southern Novato, sometimes for ten miles at a time.

Mark wants to go to Academy of Art University in San Francisco for his talent, hopefully with an athletic scholarship. His aspirations include recording a CD and creating animations.

Linda Steele
MSA Dance Student
by Emma Cristofani - Creative Writing '08

As a young girl living in St. Paul, Minnesota, Linda Steele would dance to the music during the end credits of the movies she watched. Several years after her 1996 move to California, she joined Marin Ballet in San Rafael. Now living in Hamilton, Linda is a significant piece of the MSA dance class.

Linda joined the MSA dance program as a freshman. That same year she won a MSA award, and last year she won a rare and prestigious offer of a full scholarship to the Alonzo King Summer program.

When she is not completing her twenty to twenty-five hours of dance practice a week or choreographing dances for the dance extravaganzas at the end of each year, Linda loves to sing, act, read, and write prose. Somewhere in the midst of her practicing and studies, she manages an A/B grade average, and has been invited to join the National Honor Society and the Student Ambassadors of America.

A 16-year-old junior, Linda is already looking ahead toward college - Stanford, Mills, and Dominican in particular. One day she is also hoping to join Alonzo King Lines Ballet Company and tour the world.

Zac Schuman
MSA Theater Arts & Musical Theater Student
by Emma Cristofani - Creative Writing '08

Zac Schuman was first noticed by his kindergarten teacher. We did little sketches, he says, and my teacher told my parents and me that I was good. So I went to theater camp, and that’s where it started.

Now a seventeen-year-old senior, Zac has numerous performances under his belt. Not only has he performed in the MSA productions of  “Fame”, “Candide”, and “Anything Goes” in his past three years of musical theater, he has since performed in shows outside of school including “The Wizard of Oz”, “Beauty and the Beast”, “Hair”, and “Fiddler on the Roof”. This past summer he was hired to originate the character of Demetrius in the world premier of the professional musical “Socrates: Knowledge is Sexy”, in which he shared the stage with classmate Ben Campbell.

This year Zac has enrolled in both musical theater and theater arts. He relies on his uncanny capability of memorization to tackle important roles in two productions at once. I turn things into song to remember them better, he says. There was one scene in Beauty and the Beast that was giving me trouble, so I memorized it opera-style. I also try to look up when I read through my lines. I had the script printed out for me in a book on stage because I had so many lines as The Narrator in Candide, but because I looked up so much when I performed, I knew nearly the entire script by heart by the last show. When asked how often he practices performing, he replies, Every waking moment. When not practicing, he loves to read, attend professional theatrical performances, and work on his skill with magic tricks.

In his sophomore year, he received the Superior Achievement in the Art Craft Study and Spirit of Theater from his MSA director, and he earned a Best Actor award at the 2007 Lenaea Theater Festival. Last spring, he and his now-graduated classmate Corey Powers wrote a one-act entitled “Just a Thought” and performed it in the last MSA Soiree of that school year. Zac hopes to attend Juilliard next fall and plans to act both in movies and on stage. Where does he want to go after college? Anywhere where I can pursue my passion.