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Alessandra Peña is Gulliver Prep’s Silver Knight nominee in Music and Dance. Peña has been dancing since she was two. She’s been in Gulliver’s dance program since middle school and is team captain.
“We do three different competitions per year,” she says. “One at the state level and two at the national level. We just did our competitive Latin dance, where we won state champs.”
Outside of school, she dances jazz and is the assistant choreographer at the non-profit Inclusion Theater Project (ITP). There she works with 20-30 adults and children with developmental, physical, and emotional disabilities.
“I help create the dances that they dance at the shows,” she says. “We do two a year.”
She’s volunteered at ITP for about seven years now. After a couple of years they asked her to become the assistant choreographer.
“I introduce them to two to three dances,” she says. “It takes two-three months to learn. Those numbers are usually the large production numbers.”
What makes Peña’s work as a choreographer so impressive is that she’s self-taught. She’s been choreographing since fifth grade.
She hopes to continue her volunteer work when she is in college.
“It changed me and shaped me into who I am,” she says. “That’s something I don’t want to lose when I leave.”
Peña also volunteers at beach clean-ups. She works with a nonprofit called Fill-a-Bag, cleaning beaches on Key Biscayne – both Crandon Park and Bill Baggs State Park.
Her community work includes doing research on personal protective equipment for Nicklaus Children’s Hospital.
“We created a questionnaire,” she says. “When they would check in, they would fill out the paperwork. If they were exposed to any sickness, they would go to Zone One. Doctors would come in with PPE to protect themselves.”
When she started volunteering her freshman year, she worked with the IV equipment, delivering them, and working on programming the equipment.
“Covid hit in the middle of my freshman year, and they said we couldn’t come in,” she says.
With her family, Peña volunteers for Hermanos de la Calle.
“We help support homeless individuals and help them get back on their feet,” she says. “I participated in the Thanksgiving dinner celebration.”
For Christmas, the volunteers went to one of the houses and shelters they have and gave gifts.
At Gulliver, Peña is vice president of the student body.
“I started a tradition, around national holidays,” she says. “Holidays such as National Pancake Day or National Ring Pop Day is a way for the student body to have more school spirit.”
She is also president of Operation Smile and Future Society of Women Engineers.
“We co-founded this club as a way to build a career in a male dominated field,” she says.
“We go down to the middle school and get girls involved in engineering at a young age.”
Next year Peña heads to Duke University to major in mechanical engineering. She wants to create more functional wheelchairs for dancing and movement in general.
“I want to bring both of my passions into what I want to do in the future,” she says.
Her junior year she worked on a project that reached the finals of the local Conrad challenge that would help individuals with orthostatic hypertension.
“You wear it on your wrist, you press it, it would take your blood pressure or oxygen level and tell you if it is okay for you to stand up,” she says. “It could be useful at an assisted living facility.”
She’s on the First Robotics team that made it to the recent World Championships.
Linda Rodriguez Bernfeld
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