A Gold Medal Portfolio Award is the highest honor teens 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.
Naisha Simon
Miami, FL
Arison Arts Foundation Portfolio Award
My portfolio explores how home is built, remembered, and reimagined through my Haitian heritage and the experience of growing up in Miami. Each work reflects the layers that make up my sense of belonging—memories of my family, the language spoken around me, and the rhythm of daily life that ties everything together. I selected these six pieces because they each hold a fragment of that story.
The series starts with pieces like To Naisha: A Letter from Home and Nan Lakou Manmanm, which focus on memory and care. Through cyanotype, sewing, and collage, I piece together images the way memories are held, stitched, faded, and layered with time. Works like Li Bon nan Bouch Ou Wi and Toujou Gen Bri Lakay shift toward sound and language, showing how home is not only a place, but a feeling created through noise, food, and conversation. Finally, Playgrounds and Welcome to the Streets expand outward, connecting my personal experiences to the neighborhoods that raised me.
Across the portfolio, I worked with cyanotype, painting, digital layering, and found materials to mirror the overlap between physical and emotional space. Together, the works form an archive of moments—reminders that home exists not as one place, but through memories and people who continue to shape it.
View works from Home, Naisha’s award-winning portfolio, via our online gallery.
Karmiah Smith
West Palm Beach, FL
Harry and Betty Quadracci Portfolio Award
According to a Wikipedia article, “in mathematics and science, a nonlinear system is a system in which the change of the output is not proportional to the change of the input.”
Nonlinear is the word I would use to describe my high school experience. Throughout my four years, I have experienced exponential growth (and a fair amount of setbacks) not only as a person but also as an artist. I have had the privilege to nurture my creativity and talents by weaving my life experiences into my poetry and spoken word.
My portfolio, Nonlinear Systems of Life includes poetry varying in stanza length, experimental techniques, and topics, but they all serve to showcase one thing: my nonlinear journey as a human being, which include the lessons I’ve learned, the mistakes I have made along the way, and the connections I have been able to maintain.
I believe that everything happens for a reason and each event or feeling in my life has helped shape who I am now. My worldview is one that only I can experience with my own eyes; the people I come across and the challenges or achievements I face are all opportunities to see how I react and the lessons I take from them as a result.
I hope to convey through my portfolio the importance of individuality by showing you a collection of my thoughts and emotions I create from my everyday life. In my poetry, my thoughts and self-reflection are left on display authentically and plainly. My pieces about life lessons I have learned and pieces about my own mistakes and shortcomings carry the same importance.
View works from Nonlinear Systems of Life, Karmiah’s award-winning portfolio, via our online gallery.
To see more Gold Medal Portfolio recipients, past and present, visit our Eyes on the Prize series.
Featured image: Naisha Simon, Welcome to the Streets, Mixed Media. Grade 12, New World School of the Arts, Miami, FL. Jenny Gifford, Educator; Miami-Dade County Public Schools, Affiliate. Gold Medal Portfolio, Arison Arts Foundation Portfolio Award