|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
Miami Palmetto High School senior Daniela (Dani) Hernandez is in the drama program at school. She is also a professional actor represented by a Florida based talent agency.
“I do outside acting work,” she says. “I did a Baptist health commercial.”
She also acted in a short film directed by an MFA student at Columbia University. That film required two months of rehearsing and filming. It was entered in four film festivals. The first one was the Palm Springs International Short Festival.
“I got to go to the Miami Film Festival and watch it in the theater,” she says.
She also performed in a Shakespeare play.
“We did A Comedy of Errors,” she says.
Hernandez started her high school career at Our Lady of Lourdes but transferred to Palmetto at the start of her sophomore year.
“In Lourdes – freshman year – we did an original play,” she says. “I was the lead. I was the green crayon. I remember arguing with all the other crayons.”
Since transferring to Palmetto, she’s been involved in drama as the membership chair of Thespians, the drama honor society. She’s reaching out to students, recruiting underclassmen to join drama. She also works on social media engagement.
“We’re going to transition from Instagram,” she says. “We’re going to try and use Tik Tok.”
The pandemic and the construction program that closed down the auditorium required the drama program to be creative last year. Instead of the norm of presenting plays or musicals in front of an audience, the program went virtual.
“I think we did three online shows,” she says. “I’ve done all the online shows.”
Going online meant the students relied on technology to keep things going and learned new skills. The students learned to edit videos they filmed after school.
“That was the only way we could get any content out,” she says.
This year, Palmetto thespians have new spaces to perform in.
“We have a black box theater,” she says. “There’s supposed to be an outdoor space. With COVID it will be good for social distancing. The outdoor one will be for individual people to perform or smaller pieces.”
Hernandez is also the historian of the Improv Club.
“We did an improv battle,” she says. “We got many people involved and divided into teams. I enjoyed it a lot. We did a rap battle, too.”
Outside of drama, Hernandez is a member of two activist groups.
“One is for climate change,” she says. “It’s called GenCLEO.”
A friend recommended the program to her.
Hernandez spoke at a program at ZooMiami, to spread awareness about climate change.
“We gave out plants to people. I told them about what’s going on locally, and legislatively,” she says. “There were two bills. One was specifically targeted toward protesting. We were all upset. We were getting people to sign petitions or join the club.”
The other bill dealt with rolling back programs on climate change.
“I like doing things like this,” she says.
The other activist organization is Students Demand Action.
“I joined the leadership board earlier this year for the Miami Chapter,” she says.
This fall, Hernandez is applying to Syracuse University, American University, Emory University, DePaul University, Loyola Chicago University, Boston University, Florida State, Florida International University, the University of Boulder and UCLA.
She plans to major in Acting and will minor in Journalism or something like Political Science, depending on which college she attends.
“I have an interest in activism and political science, or broadcast journalism,” she says.
Linda Bernfeld Rodriguez
