Emily Rae Andres

I was born in Oklahoma and do have some roots there still, but I have lived in Wilmington, North Carolina since I was four years old. By the time I graduated high school I had attended eight different schools here in Wilmington. I graduated from New Hanover High School from the Lyceum Academy in May of 2009. At this point, I had traveled to Costa Rica a few times, visiting our friends who had moved there and started a bilingual church in Dominical. We offered our help in organizing dinners and games for a few different orphanages and sermons with lunch, etc. I still consider my self mission-focused, but during this time I volunteered on a regular basis, preparing and serving dinner to the homeless shelter, my family volunteered at the Salvation Army every once in a while, went on various trips with my church to do mission work, it was a very real part of my life that impacted me greatly. By the time I graduated I had also traveled to various parts of eastern Mexico, the Grand Canyon, Nassau..

After I graduated high school I went on a trip with my family to Cairo and Giza in Egypt and the Sea of Galilee, Jerusalem and to Mount Sinai in Israel. I took up an interest in Egyptian Art and I took an art history class on Egypt after that and learned more about what I had seen there. I changed my major from Computer Science to Studio Art my junior year in college.

I was officially majoring in art with minors in Computer Science and Spanish. In the Fall of 2012 I was enrolled in my second Java course and my computer, with hours of coding work not backed-up anywhere else, was stolen out of my house. It was so late in the semester I had no choice but to drop the class, changing my second minor from computer science to digital arts. I focused in ceramics and digital/graphic arts mostly, but also in printmaking and also in combining printmaking and ceramics in my last semester. Since I have started college I have studied abroad in Chile, I have visited my parents, who resided in Kandern, Germany for a couple years volunteering for Wycliffe Bible Translators. We traveled to Bali, Indonesia from there and to Paris, Frankfurt, and other various parts of Germany and France. We traveled to Barcelona, Granada, Cordova, el Gibraltar and Malaga in Spain, and we visited Venice, Italy over Christmas break in 2012-13. This trip greatly inspired me in my Directed Independent Study in the following semester.