From The Studio to The Stage to The Met | Student Spotlight: Ezra ‘27

“I want each person to have their own relationship with the work rather than forcing one fixed interpretation,” Ezra explains with a smile, saying he feels the piece resonates with the School and the Meetinghouse.

Across his work, Ezra uses photography, painting, poetry, and personal memoir to explore identity, memory, self-perception, and feeling. His pieces often bring together experimentation and reflection, with a strong interest in how inner life can take visual form. His talents span cooking, baking, sculpture, ceramics, performing arts, and graphic design, making full use of what the School offers and making those experiences his own.

This year, Ezra is taking Painting with Morgan Acheson, Middle and Upper School Visual Arts Teacher, where he has been experimenting with image transfers using gel medium, moving beyond wood to surfaces like fabric, and exploring gelli plate transfers. The work is layered in both process and meaning, enthusiastically described as “prints on prints on transfers.”

Morgan has known Ezra since Grade 5 and describes him as “a true force in the studio.” What stands out most, she explains, is that Ezra “is not an artist who stays comfortable,” but someone who “actively seeks out new possibilities and explores the unknown” while remaining grounded in his own point of view. In class and in the studio, that means he is often “answering questions through art making, documenting his process, reflecting on it, and using each project as a way to push into something new. For Morgan, teaching Ezra has felt less like a one-way exchange and more like “a true partnership.”

Ezra has also gathered a great deal of inspiration from Art History: Pop to Present, taught by Upper School Visual Arts Teacher Jesse Pasca. Jesse has seen that same willingness to think beyond a finished object and into the larger questions art can raise. Ezra recently presented a performance project proposal titled Mirror, a five-week, around-the-clock installation imagined as a metaphor for codependency. In the proposal, Ezra would mirror a participant’s every action, giving up his own autonomy to examine the invisible burdens people can place on one another in society.

The project drew on artists he had studied in class, including Marina Abramović and Tehching Hsieh, whose work asks what happens when time, vulnerability, and the body become part of the art itself. Ezra ended his presentation with a question for the room: “If you held someone’s survival in your hands, would you nourish them or exhaust them?”

That same openness and maturity led Ezra to The Mountain School in Vershire, Vermont, a farm-based semester program where Upper School students live close to the land, study sustainability and food systems, and build community through shared work. There, he captured Goodbye, a photograph of the art studio on a misty day, with one warm light glowing from inside. The Gold Key-winning piece holds two ideas at once: finding light through art and learning how to live with loss. He had considered calling it “I’ll leave the light on” or “I’ll leave the door open,” a phrase that holds the possibility that “you can always come back.”

In The Hanged Man, Ezra turns movement into a single, layered image. The piece began as a 15-minute video of him changing outfits, shifting positions, and moving through a room. He then composed the footage into a photo collage, placing around 12 versions of himself in the same space. For Ezra, the work reflects “different parts of me that coexist.” The piece recently received a Gold Medal in Experimental Photography from the Scholastic Awards and was selected to be displayed at the Scholastic Inc. building.

His creative reach has also extended into the Brooklyn Museum’s Creative Practice program, where he taught weekend classes in the children’s photography group, supporting younger students as they explored image-making. The experience gave him another way into art—not only as something to create, but as something to share, explain, and help others discover.

It also led directly back to his own work. While helping with the class, Ezra came across a group of old film slides from the Museum’s archives that he became especially drawn to. He brought some home, taped them together into a sheet, and used light to project the images across his body. In the final photograph, the slides appear almost like a dress. Ezra describes the piece as being about time and space, since the slides hold memories captured by someone else, yet in the moment of the photograph they are literally projected onto him. Titled Chronos, the piece became another Scholastic award winner this year.

Continuing his relationship with the Brooklyn Museum, last May two of his works, Am I to Reap What My Father Has Sown? and Self-Study // Reflections on Childhood, were featured in the exhibit Legacy: How Will You Leave Your Mark? His work tackled inheritance, self-perception, memory, and identity.

Back at Friends, Ezra plans to take Advanced Studio next year, the Visual Arts Department’s capstone course, designed for motivated students interested in any artistic discipline—including photography, film, painting, drawing, sculpture, ceramics, printmaking, and fiber—and eager to fully explore their creative potential.

Since sophomore year, Ezra has taken ChoreoLab, a choreography and composition course where students study the craft of dance creation. He plans to continue the course through senior year and is also deeply involved in performing arts. This year, he was one of the leads in Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play, and he designed the poster for the production—a fitting example of the way his creative work moves across the School, from the studio to the stage and back again.

What makes Ezra’s evolving portfolio so compelling is not only his talent, but the way he keeps reaching, staying curious and open to new possibilities. He remains empathetic, asks questions of others and himself, and lets each part of his academic career influence the next: the studio, the stage, the classroom, the Meetinghouse, and the wider world.