Taken With Permission From Ali Sierazy

Since her freshman year, Senior Alejandra (Ali) Sierazy has busied herself with many activities, such as Natural Helpers and the National Honors Society. In her free time, Sierazy busies herself with her self-made business, Sierazy Art, where she specializes in complex zen doodles, while also beginning to dabble in new art mediums such as oil pastels and wood burning. 

“I’ve been experimenting with different mediums like, I’ve been really enjoying wood burning, I do wood burning mushrooms a lot, those are big with people, and then I’ve been trying oil pastels recently, so I’ll have stuff like that for the Christmas market,” Senior Sierazy said. 

Sierazy’s love for art and creation began early in her life, partaking in art clubs and classes at a young age. It wasn’t until middle school that Sierazy realized she could profit from her passion when her friend was complaining about her white shoes looking too bland, which pushed Sierazy to offer to draw on them. 

“… she said they were really cool and I should start selling them, and from there I started selling shoes on Facebook and Instagram and once I did the IB art show and realized I could make stuff like stickers, I just really got into it,” Sierazy said.

Since then, Sierazy has been selling shoes, prints, stickers, tote bags, and even t-shirts with her designs on them. She has many connections within the local art community who let her use their machines to try out new ideas. One of Sierazy’s artistic focal points in her business is her customized sneakers, which she is an expert in now after working on multiple pairs over the last four years. 

Sierazy mostly sells her work through her Instagram account, @sierazyart, though she just got a website that is currently under construction. You can find a majority of her previous and upcoming pieces on her Instagram, including all of the art pieces she showed in the IB art show from last year.

“So my business revolves around my personal art that I create by myself whether it’s through IB or stuff I do at home. I have a lot of artist friends throughout the community who help me like use their machines in order to make my own stuff,” Sierazy said.

When she isn’t creating, Sierazy can be found on the track participating in both cross country and track. She doesn’t believe her extracurriculars to be a chore, but something she finds joy and calm in.

“I do it outside of school when season is out but I only have around four weeks of the entire year when I’m not in cross country, because it goes straight from cross country, two-week break, track, two-week break, then cross again. So I’m basically running all year round but once the season is over, I like to do 5ks on my own time, I want to do another half marathon soon,” Sierazy said. 

Sierazy has been running since freshman year when she found her passion for running after her mom nudged her to try it out. Her background in competitive swimming gave her some experience so she decided to try out for cross country. Now in her senior year, Sierazy is part of the varsity cross country team and was consistently the best runner on the girls cross country team. She also won three postseason accolades, All DAC, All Sectional, and All Regional, and made it to the IHSAA State Finals.

Unfortunately, Sierazy had to miss out on track season her junior year due to an injury she had since summer before freshman year. Sierazy had torn both of her hip labrums but decided to run on them for three seasons of cross and two seasons of track, then proceeded to get the surgery to fix them after her junior year cross season. Due to her recovery, she had to miss out on track season, but before her surgery, she had run a half marathon, which she credits as one of her biggest achievements.

Sierazy is beyond excited to see where the rest of her senior year takes her, as well as how her business grows and changes throughout the next year.