Five Spartans Win Big in National and International Arts Competitions

Five St. Stephen’s students have recently earned top Fine Arts awards for their talented skills across a variety of genres that include playwriting, painting, book cover design, ceramics and photography. 

 

Ella Kim ‘25 recently won First Prize in Princeton University's Lewis Center of the Arts 2024 Ten Minute Play Contest, an annual contest open to 11th grade students. Kim says the winning play, “I Apologize for My Husband,” was prompted by an assignment in Mr. Aceves' Advanced Creative Writing class. 

 

“I was shocked when I received the news that I'd won! I hadn't been too confident in my playwriting abilities—I normally veer toward short fiction, screenwriting, or creative nonfiction—but recognition from the judges encouraged me to continue exploring the comedy genre,” says Kim.

 

Kim, who received a $500 prize, wrote the initial version while flying back to Austin from the East Coast. It details a fictional exchange on live television between a young, nervous local news reporter covering an apartment fire and a married couple who lived in the apartment complex where the fire is happening. Kim says much of the fiction writing she has done in the past can be described as dramatic, ironic and sometimes dark.

 

“At the time, I happened to be reading “Live From New York,” an oral history of Saturday Night Live, and was inspired by its stories of sketch writers' processes and of characters in absurd scenarios,” says Kim. “I tried to strike a similar balance between comedy and real life.”

 

 

Each year, a guest playwright serves as the contest judge for the Princetown competition. Acclaimed playwrights Jiehae Park, Anya Pearson, Dipika Guha and others have judged the contest in recent years. Kim also entered the play into the 2024 Eugene O’Neill Young Playwrights Festival, and she made the shortlist as a semifinalist. 

 

She has starred in numerous theater productions and musicals during her time at St. Stephen’s. Recently, Kim has been reading more contemporary plays for inspiration and is currently working on another piece. Stay tuned!

 

Four students in the St. Stephen’s Episcopal School Visual Arts program won a total of five national medals for their artwork in the 2024 Scholastic Art & Writing Awards competition. Gracie Morton ’25 won two National Scholastic Gold Medals, and Jasmine Li ’24, Isabella Messina ’24 and Jolie Stough ’25 each received a National Scholastic Silver Medal. More than 100,000 students entered nearly 340,000 original works of art and writing to the 2024 Scholastic Awards. Fewer than 2,500 works received a national medal, which places these Spartans within the top 8% of all submissions.

 

“It is super exciting when one student from our school wins a national honor for their artwork, but to have four students in one year — that is just remarkable!” said Elizabeth Zepeda, Upper School Visual Studies instructor and Scanlan Gallery Director. “It speaks volumes to the dedication and guidance of our art faculty and the art students' engagement with their creative pursuits going above and beyond!”

The student’s work, which included the art disciplines of painting, ceramics, design and photography was selected by some of the foremost leaders in the visual and literary arts for excellence in originality, skill and the emergence of a personal voice or vision. 

The national awards stem from the regional Scholastic Arts & Writing Awards show earlier this year, which St. Stephen’s has proudly hosted since the 1990s. The Gold award winners advanced to the national competition in NYC this past summer. The works of hundreds of public, private and homeschool students in grades 7-12 in Travis, Williamson and Hays Counties are judged and the Gold Key winning entries are displayed in the Scanlan Gallery on campus.

Since 1923, the Awards have celebrated teen artists and writers from across the country. This year’s award recipients are now part of that legacy, joining the ranks of notable past winners, including Tschabalala Self, Stephen King, Kay WalkingStick, Charles White, Joyce Carol Oates and Andy Warhol — all of whom won Scholastic Awards when they were teens. 

Read below to learn more about each of St. Stephen’s national award winners: 

 

Artist Statement: Expressing the absurdist philosophy I feel Gen Z is adopting as we grow up hearing about our planet on the path to ruin. Our generation embraces self-expression and filling spaces with art, however, we do this with an inevitable apocalypse in the back of our minds. In the midst of all the color and beauty our generation works to create, there is a stamp of doom slid that persists. I represented this stamp with a stenciled skull on top of my color-drowned painting.  

Artist Statement: Through Fetch I explore rejecting a performance of femininity I've found expected of me in my teenage hood and how that rejection only leads to further confusion amongst the multitudes of female archetypes that are now fed to teenage girls through modern media. Do teenage girls have the ability to create and understand their true selves? Or have our basic conceptions of ourselves been tarnished by the millions of influences we embrace on social media.  

Artist Statement: This cover design is based on Lewis Carol’s “Alice in Wonderland”, depicting not only the protagonist Alice, but also the Mad Hatter, the March Hare, and the Red Queen. These illustrations are entirely original, with the front cover referencing the tea party and the back cover referencing the rose garden in Carol’s story.  

Artist Statement: This piece is a hand built stoneware sculpture, glazed with white salt, depicting 3 human figures arranged around one central figure. Each individual form fights its own losing battle, asking the viewer, "what really makes us different?" Its ambiguous forms challenge the viewer to re-examine their views on empathy; to consider the emotions drawn out by the figures and find similarities in their own lives and the lives of others.  

Artist Statement: The feeling you get on your birthday: being the center of attention, expected to put on a face — to be the entertainer and to put on a show.