2025 Visual Art Honorees

Emma Stiffler

Emma Stiffler is a dedicated visual artist specializing in ceramic pottery at Alburnett Community School District. As an active member of the art department, she serves as a teacher assistant in both elementary and secondary art classrooms, providing support and feedback to peers. Her passion for ceramics is evident in her efforts to inspire and promote the craft to her classmates, helping them grow in their own artistic journeys. Outside the classroom, she refines her throwing and handbuilding techniques and is currently preparing for her Senior Art Thesis Showcase, where she will simulate her own pottery studio business.

Stiffler has received numerous awards, including recognition from Scholastics Art and Writing and the Tri Rivers Conference Art Festival. Aspiring to be an art teacher with a focus on ceramics, she emphasizes minimal and natural forms in her work, favoring simple glazing techniques and textures.

Beyond ceramics, Stiffler explores photography, digital art, drawing, and painting, and takes college-level art courses to expand her skills. Her dedication, work ethic, maturity and self-motivation, along with her passion for art, makes her a role model for her peers and younger students.

Emma Larson

Emma Larson has been creating art ever since they could pick up a crayon or paint brush. While having taken art classes in high school, they are mostly self-taught and have grown significantly in the past few years. Their favorite mediums are graphite, colored pencil, acrylic paint and soft pastels.

Larson’s chalking journey started at Chalk the Walk in Mount Vernon in 2013 at age 6 and has expanded every year since. Besides Iowa, they have taken part in events across Minesota, Illinois and Wisconsin. In the past two years alone, they have competed in 14 chalk events, winning awards at 10 of them. Their favorite thing to chalk is realistic dogs.

For Larson, chalking helps them to share art with people in a fun and interactive way. The pieces range from 5’x5’ up to 10’x10’ in size, taking anywhere from eight hours and as long as 26 hours to complete over the course of one to two days.

This year, Larson was honored by winning a Gold Key from Scholastic in the art category. In addition to art, they love helping people and will attend Iowa State University to study psychology.

2025 Spoken & Written Word Honorees

Annabelle Spangler

Annabelle Spangler lives in words, those of her own and of others’ fabrication. Ever since she could remember, she understood something many never do: she possessed an immense fascination with the intricacies of humanity. She quickly devoted herself to capturing the contradictory nature of the human spirit, the endless capacities of the human mind and the miracle of the human experience. Spangler began writing very young, only working in fiction. Today, she writes personal narratives, historical essays, and her favorite genre, free verse poetry. The tone she uses in her poetry is heavily inspired by Sylvia Plath near the end of her career. Among Plath, Spangler’s artistic influences include Fyodor Dostoevsky, religion, the determinism versus free will debate, the origins of evil, and world history. Her biggest artistic achievement is her 2024 National History Day website on the Salem Witch Hunt in which she explored several concepts of social psychology. Spangler wishes to live the rest of her life studying humankind and presenting her findings through writing as an anthropologist.

Macyn Davidson-Ware

Macyn Davidson-Ware has spent her whole life saying “yes” to everything she possibly could. From sports, to music, to her first production in fifth grade and beyond, Davidson-Ware has been keen to try new things.

From playing the flute to wrestling and playing basketball, Davidson-Ware has tried it all in high school. She performed at All State for improvisational acting with the Iowa High School Speech Association — amongst other improv accolades — while also excelling in acting and other performances in speech.

Since last year’s Black Excellence Assembly, Davidson-Ware has found a new passion in spoken word performance, performing in a variety of assemblies and CRCSD outlets. Additionally, she has found a groove as a leader in a choral reading production in the current speech season at Washington. Davidson-Ware finds joy in bringing her story to life and empowering others, especially younger kids, to see themselves in her, and eventually see themselves onstage.

After graduation, she hopes to attend a Historically Black College and University, or HCBU, where she plans to study radiology and continue to share her story, both in the profession and outside of it.

2025 Digital Art Honorees

Nadou Lawson

Nadou Lawson just started photography this year and instantly fell in love with it.

She’s always been an artsy person — but only with paper. Photography is like drawing or painting but with a camera and has allowed her to capture memories. Getting to explore all the different themes and subjects in photography deepened her interest in the art form. Testing out all of the independent equipment and parts of the camera made Lawson understand the mechanics of the camera, and this helped her improve her skills as a photographer.

Lawson loves to bring other art styles into her photos. She plans to continue improving her skills and exploring more styles in photography.

Nadia Mealhow

Nadia Mealhow is a sophomore at Xavier High School and has been taking sports pictures for about a year and half. During this time, she has gained a strong passion for sports photography.

Mealhow’s favorite sport to photograph is football, followed closely by baseball. She truly loves being able to express her love for sports through a form of art. Mealhow believes photography is a beautiful way to make people feel seen for their hard work and artistry as athletes. She hopes to continue to explore sports photography and videography.

In the future, Mealhow wants to continue to work and create in the sports world. She wants to show women that there’s room for them in a male-dominated industry.

2025 Performing Arts Honorees

Mya Randall

Mya Randall is a multi-talented artist who loves to paint, sculpt, act and sing. They believe that art is something which allows a person to express themselves in so many variations.

Randall draws inspiration from everywhere but admits Broadway musicals are their favorite. Having been on many stages, in school and with various other theater groups in the area, they have continued to learn and grow as an artist.

Active in music since elementary school, Randall has performed in Honor Choir, Jazz Choir, Concert Choir, Show Choir and Center Point Urbana Extravaganza as a soloist. They have also been selected for the Iowa Opus Choir, All-State Honor Choir, Meistersinger Honor Choir and the OAKE National Choir in Chicago.

This year, Randall was inducted into the Center Point Urbana Chapter of the National Honor Society and has also qualified for All State Speech in two separate categories.

Randall shows leadership and encourages and inspires many of the students at their school to “just be you!”

Even though a career in musical theater is tempting, they plan on studying medicine after high school and hope to become an epidemiologist.

Ash Wasek

Ash Wasek has been surrounded and fascinated by music and theater their entire life. Starting as early as second grade, Wasek has been involved in countless music and theater related programs and activities offered at their school.

Those include top jazz band all four years of high school playing vibraphone; a percussionist in concert band from grades 5-12; marching band all four years of high school; concert choir from grades 2-12; varsity show choir from grades 5-12; performing in, being stage manager, and student directing musicals from grades 5-12; performing in and student directing plays in grades 9-12; participating in both large group and individual speech in grades 9-12, including All-State for large group mime their junior year; and managing and being captain of a student-led glee club all four years of high school.

In their sophomore year of high school, they became interested in composing and arranging music. After taking a class and some self-teaching, they went on to arrange and compose all of the music performed by the student-led glee club they direct. They hope to one day compose a piece for a professional band or choir to perform.

Mira Gibbons

Mira Gibbons started playing solo violin shows at her great grandma’s nursing home in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan when she was 4 years old. From there, she decided to start playing at senior living centers in and around Cedar Rapids.

At age 10, Gibbons started Mira Gibbons, Violinist — her not-for-profit endeavor. Just three years later, she has a chamber trio and a larger group with the same mission, and she has played over 300 free performances at senior living centers, group homes, schools, libraries and fundraisers. Gibbons prioritizes high need/low-income facilities, but she is happy to play anywhere.

Gibbons can’t believe her little idea has come this far, and she isn’t stopping anytime soon. Her goals through high school are to continue performing and grow her reach, including more peers, and to secure a sustainable orchestra program for disadvantaged youth.

Gibbons is grateful to her family, friends and especially her Grandma Joan Zorza, Milla, Noah, Janset, Zaren and Henri for their involvement. She thanks teachers John Schultz (violin), Nikki Philbrick (fiddle) and all the staff at Washington High School who make every day amazing.

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