Miami Palmetto Senior High School rising senior Ava Lemos is spending four weeks this summer at New York University. She’s attending the New Studio on Broadway program for Musical Theater which is part of the Tisch Summer High School Program. She was one of 300 applicants and one of the 42 students chosen.
“I’m very excited,” she said before leaving.
Lemos is a member of Palmetto’s drama program. She was a member of the small group musical that sang Only Remembered, a song from War Horse that won a Critic’s Choice at the district level and superiors at the state level.
Her freshman year she was in the production of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang as part of the ensemble. Her sophomore year, she was on the stage crew for the award winning one act play, I Hate Hamlet. That same year she played Granny in Into the Woods. She was also the assistant director and Foley artist for that production. Last school year she played Hippolyta in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. She was in the ensemble for the Drowsy Chaperone.
She’s taken Advanced Placement Music Theory. She sings because it’s part of the musical theater realm. She also takes private lessons outside of school and participated in a pre-professional program with Julie Pappas-Smith. She’s also taken lessons in jazz dance and ballet.
“I definitely think musical theater is going to be a part of my life for the rest of my life,” she says. “I’m torn between musical theater and psychology.”
She expects to major in either musical theater or psychology and minor in the other.
She’s interested in attending a college or university with a wide variety of available majors. She laughs and says she’s such an academic at heart she can’t see attending a conservatory type school because she doesn’t want to focus exclusively on theater. She is interested in colleges that allow non-theater majors to participate in theater productions.
Speaking of theater, Lemos was grateful that she was able to participate in the Holocaust Impact Theater her freshman year.
“It didn’t work into my schedule after freshman year,” she says. “It’s such an incredible organization that anyone who can do it, should participate.”
She likes how the shows put on by Impact Theater spark conversations about social issues in the community.
In the show that year, she played the character Lydia. Lydia was married, and her wife was the carrier of their child. When the wife died, Lydia didn’t have the right to her own child, who ended up in the foster system.
“So many issues that we talked about that year are more challenged now,” she says.
At school, she is copy editor for the yearbook and will be president of the English Honor Society.
“I’m planning on engaging community more by doing projects like free libraries,” she says.
Lemos hopes to set up a Little Free Library at school and at the Pinecrest Farmer’s Market and near-by parks.
At English Honor Society meetings, the students talk about the various forms in which the English language can be powerful.
“This year we talked about poetry and different styles of poetry,” she says. “I also want to expand it to other medium. Plays, scripts, even song lyrics. I want to explore other way in which to do that.”
This past year she has been working on her own poetry. This school year she wants to submit her work to more contests.
At the April awards ceremony, Lemos won the Outstanding Junior in English Language Arts award.
Linda Rodriguez Bernfeld
