About Me!
Hi! My name is Natalie Emerson, and I was a Film student at Freestyle Academy from 2022-2024. My love for art and desire for creative freedom in my academic environment first pushed me to join Freestyle. Throughout my time at Freestyle, I gained a myriad of once-in-a-lifetime experiences that are impossible to overstate. The technical and creative skills I learned at Freestyle gave me a new lens to see the world through, one where I could capture the beauty I saw and preserve it through film and writing. Additionally, Freestyle taught me the importance of protecting this lens. It enabled me to take creative risks and to be unafraid of making mistakes.
Outside of Freestyle, I enjoy writing, history, music, IMAX movies, community engagement, and sharing bags of popcorn with my friends. I also enjoy reading. Joan Didion, Ocean Vuong, and Toni Morrison are several of my favorite authors with perspectives that I admire and hope to achieve for myself one day. I am passionate about advocacy for survivors of sexual assault and have worked with Mountain View High Schools Me Too club to curate school-wide speaking events and pioneer several informational help resources through MVLA’s Title IX website using the communication and technical skills I have learned here. I hope to continue this work long after high school. Freestyle was formative to the way I thought of my abilities and of my future, and allowed me to push myself further than I ever thought I could.
As I enter the world as an adult and leave Freestyle behind, I know that part of me will always be here. I truly believe that life is what you make of it, and Freestyle has given me not only the skills and work ethic, but the community, the creativity, and the intrepidity to leap blindly into the dark and run until I find the light of the stars. Freestyle has been and always will be my magic broomstick, my four leaf clover, and my hat of tricks that I would never be the same without.
– Joan Didion “Play As it Lays”
“I know what “nothing” means, and keep on playing.“