A Gold Medal Portfolio Award is the highest honor students can receive in the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards. Jurors choose portfolios by high school seniors whose works best represent the Scholastic Awards’ judging criteria: originality, skill, and the emergence of a personal vision or voice. These remarkable artists and writers will each receive a $12,500 scholarship.
For the next few weeks, we’ll be profiling the 2025 Gold Medal Portfolio recipients! First up are artist Austin Cohen and writer Emily Liu.
Austin Cohen
Arison Arts Foundation Art Portfolio Award
Addison, TX
The Food Folder
This portfolio is a tribute to my brother’s courage and resilience following his diagnosis of Crohn’s disease, a lifelong illness that aggressively attacks the intestines, at just 14 years of age. Despite the hardships, he has shown amazing mental and emotional fortitude as he pushes himself to stay fully engaged and not allow this disease to limit him to being only a spectator. I hope that through these images, viewers can gain a deeper understanding of Crohn’s disease’s physical and emotional toll on the body and that despite its perpetuation, there is a path forward. I aim to honor his experience and shed light on the realities of living with a chronic illness, hoping to foster empathy and awareness.
My brother’s journey is one of quiet strength and determination. Through this body of work, his story will hopefully advocate for and inspire others who must suffer in silence. I have documented the physical and emotional challenges my brother has endured, starting from the significant weight loss to the abrupt need to change schools. The collages offer a visual narrative of transformation—the deterioration and gradual rebuilding of his strength and physical appearance. I compiled these pieces with notations and photos from the endless documentation my mother maintained as she attempted to help Jacob navigate this lifelong hardship. They reflect the moments at his doctor’s office, his search for answers, and the superficial relief from a condition that can erupt without provocation or notice—whenever, wherever—indefinitely.
Emily Liu
Command Companies Writing Portfolio Award
San Mateo, CA
In selecting the works for this portfolio, I aimed to capture my experience growing up in a Chinese immigrant household—how culture, language, and identity are constantly in flux. These works explore the quiet struggles of belonging, the ache of inheritance, and the weight of displacement, themes that are woven into my family’s migration story and the generational rift that follows. I chose pieces that speak to the tension of trying to hold onto a heritage that slips through your fingers, while also learning to navigate a world that feels foreign and insistent in its demands.
Through these stories and poems, I want readers to feel the weight and wonder of what it means to inherit a culture. To see the beauty and struggle in the small acts of survival that keep us tethered to a past that grows dimmer with each passing day. These are tales of loss, yes—but also of fierce love. Of holding on, no matter how hard the world tries to pull us apart. Because in the end, what matters most are the pieces we refuse to let go, even when it feels like everything else is slipping away.
A Letter to the Voices I Could Not Speak
When I was little, silence was my punishment. It was the unspoken pause between my mother’s words, sharp as the edge of a cleaver. It was my father’s sigh after I brought home another B on a math test, his disappointment louder than any scolding. Silence pressed against me like a second skin, and I wore it with shame, thinking it meant I had failed, that I hadn’t said or done the right thing.
My grandmother’s silence was different. She hummed when she cooked, her voice threading through the clatter of the wok, the hiss of garlic hitting oil. She didn’t need words to tell me when to bring the soy sauce or how to fold the dumplings. Her hands spoke in gestures—small, precise—and her silence was thick with understanding. I never questioned it; I only mirrored it, mimicking the way her fingers moved, the way she paused between folds as if to let the dough breathe.
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To see more Gold Medal Portfolio recipients, past and present, visit our Eyes on the Prize series.