Alejandra Salazar

Alejandra “Ale” Salazar, 16, attends Communications Arts High School, a magnet school housed at Taft High School. Salazar will be yearbook editor, class secretary and the National Honor Society historian during her senior year this fall.

She is very involved with the San Antonio-based after school art program SAY Sí in the media arts program. There, she focuses on photography, videography and graphic design.

This wanderlust girl has been to Italy, China and Mexico and wants to continue traveling around the world while documenting her travels with photography. The next two places she would like to go are England and Brazil.

At home, Salazar spends her time working on the computer using Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator and Dreamweaver to create Web pages and graphics. “An Adobe CS addict” is what she calls herself. She also volunteers with Helping Hands, a Comm Arts-based school club.

Her volunteer work with Helping Hands consists of anything from buying and wrapping presents for homeless shelters during Christmas, to making Valentines for the Battered Women and Children’s Shelter in San Antonio. Salazar also volunteers at the McNay Art Museum as a teen art guide, and at SAY Sí she mentors middle school media arts students.

She likes to devote her spare time to taking pictures. She’s usually shooting “straight or street photography” with her Canon T3i, named Henri after her favorite photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson.

Still undecided, Salazar would like to attend the University of Texas at Austin and double major in communications and computer science, and hopes to work for Google in web design or advertising.