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Miami Palmetto High School rising senior Isabella Diez is the Executive Director of the student run non-profit Pinecrest City Music Project. She started in that role in January. Last year she was the Operations Director and the associate to the director.
“Next year we are expanding the number of schools we do programming at,” she says.
“Next year we will be at six schools. We’ve been speaking about expanding more than performing arts. Possibly visual arts.”
Expansion plans may also include adding band instruction instead of just orchestra and starting dance as well.
Her job requires her to work with the finance department, applying for grants.
“The grants help us put on ArtsFest,” she says.
PCMP has received funding from Miami-Dade County, the National Endowment for the Arts, community grants and youth enrichment programs.
Although Diez does not currently play an instrument, she grew up in an artistic family that supports the arts. She played violin and sang in chorus in elementary school, and she is now a dancer. She is captain of Variations, the Palmetto dance team. She has taken classes and volunteered at Vice City Dance Company.
She took a break from dancing at the studio for her junior year to focus on academics.
However, she is helping at the dance studio this summer, teaching classes during the week.
She does jazz, contemporary and hip hop in addition to technique classes. She works with the younger girls, from three- and four-year-olds to the five- to nine-year-old girls. She also teaches combo classes to pre-teens.
Diez says she loves teaching.
“As stressful as it can be when they don’t listen, it’s nice to teach kids moves that I loved learning,” she says.
She’s been teaching at the studio’s summer camp but this year she’ll be teaching classes that are not a part of the summer camp program.
She may have taken time off from the studio, but she continued to dance on the Palmetto dance team, Variations.
She started her sophomore year and learned quickly. Her junior year she was one of the junior officers.
Outside of dance, Diez is a member of the Student Council Special Events Board.
“I was Special Events Chair this year,” she says.
Next year she’ll be one of the Chiefs of Senate, so she’ll manage all the groups that manage school activities.
Diez will be Editor-in-Chief of the yearbook for the 2023-24 school year. This year she was the Design Editor.
“Next year I want to make more design pages to showcase the work of the editors,” she says.
She was a Vice President of Induction for the National Honor Society. She’s a member of the Science National Honor Society.
“Last year I competed with a group of friends in Innovate to Mitigate,” she says.
They submitted plans to help mitigate climate change.
She’s in the Social Studies National Honor Society and competes on a History Bowl team.
Last summer she went to UCLA for the Summer Discovery program. She took classes in the Leadership and Entrepreneurship Academy, focusing on technology.
“They have a leadership and entrepreneurship course, and you could pick whether it was in technology or social media,” she says.
She hopes to spend time this summer observing doctors at Baptist Hospital. She wants to become a doctor, so she wants to shadow them to see if she’s on the right path.
“I have always had an interest in Neurology,” she says. “The brain has always fascinated me, the way it works and changes over time.”
She’s considering applying to USC and UCLA, Columbia, and the University of North Carolina.
Linda Rodriguez Bernfeld
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