Despite being born into a family where her father managed a printing business, Yearbook Adviser Lina Densley discovered her passion for publishing later in life.
Throughout her career, Densley found herself wavering “back and forth” between her interests in arts and history, unsure of which she truly preferred. However, she eventually found her place in yearbook advising, a job she said involved all of her passions.
Upon graduating college, Densley said she did a lot of freelance design, crafting wedding invitations and business cards, which she uploaded to an art website to foster more work connections.
“Compiling your work into a portfolio and making it publicly available is a really great way to bring business towards you,” Densely said. “I had a lot of my work up on a website called Deviant Art, and I made a lot of connections through that and got a lot of work doing that. So my first job designing a book cover was through that, my first job doing a wedding invitation and things were through that.”
Before ASL, Densley worked at another school where yearbook was solely an after-school activity and not a curricular course, so she said she took the opportunity to develop the publication program.
“I had a dream,” Densley said. “I woke up in the middle of the night dreaming about teaching yearbook, and I immediately emailed my principal and said, 'Hey, I think I can do this,' ... so the next year, I took over the program and developed a proper yearbook program from scratch.”
Densley joined ASL in 2019, as a social studies teacher. The Yearbook Adviser position became available for the 2022-2023 school year, and Densley said she jumped to apply.
“When it came up, I immediately applied because as much as I love history, and as much as I miss the social sciences department, yearbook is my jam, right? It's my favorite thing to teach,” Densley said.
“What's really fun is to see kids grow over time and to have a student that comes in the beginning thinking, 'Oh, I'm here because I like working in InDesign' and then they discover along the way that 'Actually what I really have a love for is photography' or they start out thinking 'Well, I don't like writing. I just am not a good writer,' then as we practice, they start realizing, 'Oh, actually, I can really get a kick out of this writing thing. I can do this really really well.' So that's really fun,” Densley said.
Densley said yearbook effectively expresses her interdisciplinary interests and skills.
“[Yearbook] just kind of marries all of my loves,” Densley said. “It's a little bit of a historical record, right? So there's my social science piece. We've got the business aspects of it, too, and thinking about how we get statistics and data and then, of course, the art and design. So yeah, it's just the best of all worlds.”