Dan Brown
Wakefield High School

Dan Brown is looking at black-and-white images on his laptop. A glance at the screen finds a ghostly, Ophelia-esque face peering out of a dark pool of water. The depiction is somewhat photo-realistic—it’s based on a photo he snapped of a puddle in his neighbor’s yard—but in lieu of getting his friend soaked, he digitally superimposed her likeness over the water. “I want to make a different sort of world that could exist, but may or may not,” explains the 18-year-old artist and photographer.

Brown was awarded two golden keys and a golden portfolio in the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards regional competition before he graduated from Wakefield High School this spring—an impressive feat, given that he fell in love with art only two years ago while taking an AP art history class. “I got inspired,” recalls Brown, who took AP Studio Art his senior year. “My motivations became different.”

His other academics hardly suffered for his art. Ranked second in his graduating class, Brown is a National Achievement Scholar, a National Urban League Scholarship recipient and a member of the National Honor Society. He also served as president of Wakefield’s Model U.N. and was one of the founders of Project Upstanders, the school’s anti-bullying initiative.

“To call him a good student is really not doing him justice. He, quite frankly, is a good citizen,” says Wakefield art department chair Jina Davidson. “He’s the true 21st-century Renaissance man.”

Fluent in French and Arabic, Brown is also a third-degree tae kwon do black belt and served as captain of his high school track team. This fall, he hopes to walk on as a decathlete at Stanford University, where he plans to double-major in international relations and product design engineering.

After that? “I’m sure there’s something out there,” says Brown, who’d like to build a career that combines some of his interests, such as foreign policy and engineering. “I just don’t know what it is yet.”

—Kris Coronado (photo by Erick Gibson)