![Lin Arison Excellence in Writing Awardee]()
Lin Arison Excellence in Writing Awardee
2024 National YoungArts Week
In January, YoungArts hosted National YoungArts Week, a seven-day intensive training program for YoungArts competition winners with distinction: 151 of the nation’s most accomplished 15-18 year old artists. These young artists gathered in Miami to collaborate with peers across 10 disciplines and develop their craft with internationally recognized leaders in their field including opera singer architect Germane Barnes, Denyce Graves, jazz pianist and educator Bertha Hope, choreographer & dance pioneer Dianne McIntyre, interdisciplinary artist Rashaad Newsome, Tony, Grammy, and Emmy award-winning theater and film actor Billy Porter and mixed media visual artist, curator, and Tony award-nominated producer Mickalene Thomas.
During the week-long program, each artist participated in 40 hoursof classes, interdisciplinary workshops, coaching sessions,rehearsals and wellness sessions. During these sessions, artists learned discipline-specific techniques, experiencedcollaboration and had valuable one-on-one time feedback on their work with coaches and panelists.
Throughout the week, winners presented their work to live and virtual audiences through four nights of performances at New World Center in Miami Beach and an evening of writers’ readings and an exhibition opening at the YoungArts Campus in downtown Miami. 2,345 people experienced these presentations in person, with an additional 2,381 unique individuals viewing the livestream on youngarts.org.
Artist Awards
YoungArts is grateful to support artists with unrestricted awards. This spring, we were delighted to announce the following awards:
Lin Arison Excellence in Writing Award
Audie Waller has been named the recipient of the 2024 YoungArts Lin Arison Excellence in Writing Award, a $50,000 scholarship given each year to a YoungArts Award winner in Writing.
“For the 2024 YoungArts Lin Arison Excellence in Writing Award, our panel selected Audie Waller, whose fiction exhibits an extraordinary emotional intelligence, precision of language, and insight into character and human experience,” said YoungArts Writing Panelist Christopher Castellani (1990 & 1992 YoungArts Winner in Writing). “Audie’s sentences are coiled springs, achingly tense with subtext, and rendered with the mastery of an artist confident in her craft; reading them is like skating on the surface of a crystal-clear lake and knowing life—in all its richness and complexity and vibrancy—is teeming beneath you. Audie has the soul of a writer and is, more importantly, a ‘serious noticer’ with the drive and the dedication and love of process necessary to sustain a lifelong practice. We are honored to provide this support at the beginning of what will surely be a remarkable career.”
“I am honored and absolutely overjoyed,” said Audie Waller. “Sometimes when I tell people I am going into creative writing, they kind of scrunch up their faces or laugh and say, ‘good luck on the mortgage!’ or warn me considerately that art is doomed, and artificial intelligence is going to take my job. At YoungArts, however, I received nothing but encouragement—from my panelists, my peers, guest artists and resident advisors. I have never felt so supported in my dreams and my passion, and I am thrilled to enter the next phase of my life with that network of support behind me. My experience at YoungArts instilled in me, without a doubt, that I am a writer, and that we need writing, and that what we do as writers and as artists is important.”
Audie Waller is a writer from Greenville, South Carolina. Her work has been published in Cargoes literary magazine, after winning a second-place prize for the Nancy Thorp Poetry Contest, and in Crashtest literary magazine. She spends much of her time contemplating the apocalypse, the German language, and time travel.
Jorge M. Pérez Award
Diana Eusebio has been named the 2024 YoungArts Jorge M. Pérez Award winner. Eusebio, a Peruvian-Dominican multidisciplinary artist, fashion designer and a 2016 YoungArts award winner in Visual Arts and U.S. Presidential Scholar in the Arts, received an unrestricted prize of $25,000.
Eusebio employs color and textiles to research the intersections of Latinx, Black Caribbean, and Quechua Indigenous heritage. She researches natural dyed textiles from Indigenous Latin American and Afro-Caribbean traditions, recognizing their connection to nature and their role as carriers of ancestral wisdom. Eusebio’s fusion of ancestral and modern techniques, including dyeing and photography, contributes to contemporary cultural preservation and celebrates the rich heritage and Pre-Columbian knowledge embedded within these communities.
Her work has been exhibited in prestigious national and international institutions and art fairs –including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Hall of Nations at The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Gregg Museum of Art and Design, Rubell Museum, Parsons The New School of Design, Maryland Institute College of Art, School of Visual Arts, and Palazzo Dei Cartelloni, Florence, Italy.
“YoungArts has consistently supported my artistic journey, fostering a lasting connection since I became a winner nearly a decade ago. This award will provide an invaluable opportunity for me to fearlessly cultivate my textile and fashion design work,” said Diana Eusebio.
Eusebio continued, “I aim to utilize the funding for a transformative journey back to Peru, my ancestral homeland. There, I aspire to immerse myself in the ancient art of natural dyeing practiced by the Quechua communities. Through international platforms like fashion weeks in major cities, I intend to showcase and preserve those endangered textile techniques. In my hometown of Miami, I plan to host natural dyeing workshops, fostering a reconnection to Indigenous knowledge among Afro-Latinx communities in Miami and beyond.”
Established in 2018, the Jorge M. Pérez Award honors a YoungArts Visual Arts award winner who has succeeded in strengthening their community through artistic endeavors.
For mor information on these and other programs at YoungArts, please visit www.youngarts.org.
![Jorge M. Perez Awardee]()
Jorge M. Perez Awardee
Links: