This summer, Marlborough art students participated in creative opportunities across the country.
Maya Napoli-Grover ’25 took her filmmaking skills to Leavenworth, Washington. On a farm there, she studied with a small group of high school-aged filmmakers at the program Prodigy Camp.
Napoli-Grover came to Prodigy with a written script that she had been revising with an assigned mentor for the prior five months, which would be shot over the week that she was there. However, after the first night, she scrapped the script she brought and wrote an entirely new one.
She only had three short hours to shoot her film. Though this prospect was stressful, she said she found the exercise helpful because it forced her to make quick decisions and not overthink things. She said it also allowed her to have a more direct connection with her actors.
The tight-knit nature of Prodigy was also greatly beneficial in her filmmaking journey.
“When I look at this project that I made at this place it highlighted the importance of drawing from vulnerability,” Napoli-Grover said, ‘[that] is what creates something that really connects with other people.”
Meanwhile, Anabel Adams ’25 interned at Brassland Records, a record label co-founded by Alec Hanley Bemis and twin brothers, Aaron and Bryce Dessner, in Brooklyn, New York. At the internship, Adams got to sit in on meetings with a team of creatives from the label to promote the release of a self-titled debut record for Pegg.
Pegg is the project of the New York-based musician Xander Duell. Duell wrote this record during COVID and recorded and produced it last year with artists such as Bartees Strange.
Adams sat in and contributed to meetings, making decisions on the project as well as planning the performance art piece for the release of the record.
“It was really cool to be allowed to contribute creatively and to be in a room with a bunch of adult men who actually wanted to hear my ideas and considered my additions valuable,” Adams said.
The job also included going around the city and giving copies of the record and posters to record stores and bookstores all over New York City.
“It was fun to be given free rein to go all over the city and meet new people and make all these connections,” Adams said.
