Two students won YoungArts awards, a national competition for visual, literary and performing artists. 

Late last semester junior Rylee Stanton, a student in the Media Arts Program, received recognition in the Film/Experimental category for her video poem “In Blackwater Woods,” and senior Chloe Lee won an award in the Classical Music/Violin category.

This year, YoungArts selected 695 students out of more than 9,000 applicants across 10 artistic disciplines.  

Stanton said she first heard of the competition while attending summer camp at California State Summer School for the Arts (CSSSA).

“Some of my friends [at CSSSA] had won the award last year. They were planning on submitting again, so I figured it wouldn’t hurt to submit as well,” she said.

Stanton’s project, “In Blackwater Woods,” was a MAP project made alongside juniors Diya Kapoor and Annaliese Shab. It is an enactment of a Mary Oliver’s poem of the same name that explored how to deal with loss. Kapoor and Shab did not receive awards as they did not submit the project alongside Stanton.

The video poem incorporated multimedia elements such as greyscale, warm and cool toned effects to demonstrate the mood of the characters and different aspect ratios to show passages of time. 

“I was very excited when I got the results because it was confirmation that my hard work paid off,” Stanton said. “Getting recognized on a national level made me realize that I may have a chance at potentially having a job in this field.”