66 Students Win Disneyland Creativity Awards

Sixty-six Orange County high school and junior high students got a hug from Mickey and Minnie Mouse--and a trophy--in recognition of their creative talents Tuesday.

The fourth annual Disneyland Creativity Challenge Awards honored students for creative writing, speech, drama, dance, music and visual arts. Eleven students also received Disney medallions, signifying that they were the best of the six winners in their category.

April Crane, an 11th-grader at University High School in Irvine, won a Disney medallion in the solo vocal category. “The more I sang classical music, the more I enjoyed it. It’s the most challenging and I love it,” she said, explaining that she wants to be an opera singer.

Olivia Herman, who is also an 11th-grader at University High and shares an English class with Crane, won a medallion for an original music composition for the second year in a row. Her piece this year was called “Divertimento for Piano.” She said she doesn’t really know how she composes music. “It’s just like stabbing in the dark. . . . Sometimes it’s completely random.”

Jason Hernandez won a medallion in the black-and-white visual arts category for a pencil drawing that took him a month to complete. “It’s a vine that forms a rectangle with body parts of people and images that suggest concepts . . . well, you have to see it,” he said, trying to describe his work. “I want to make people think, and the piece does that.” Hernandez is an 11th-grader at Los Alamitos High School.

Unlike most of the medallion winners, Ivana Isailovic has only studied her art form for a short time. She took a photography class at Villa Park High School in Orange this year because she had finished most of her required courses for graduation.

Her winning photograph was of a man reading the classified ads on a street in Hollywood. “His expression is what was good,” she said. “He had this ‘I need a job’ expression on his face.”

Patty Martellotti, who won the solo instrumental medallion for her piano performance of Liszt’s “Hungarian Rhapsody No. 8,” is a senior at Tustin High School. She plans to continue her career in music next year at Oberlin Conservatory in Ohio.

“This is the first unreal dream that came true in (my) history,” said Mike Sadler after winning a Disney medallion for drama. The Trabuco Hills High School student, who has performed in high school productions of “Amadeus,” “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and “Little Shop of Horrors,” said he acts because “I like to have opportunities to play people other than myself.”

Patrick Simoniello, honored for his dance abilities, said dancing “has been a dream of mine forever,” especially since he was 12 and first saw Mikhail Baryshnikov dance.

Arthur Y. Whang, who won a medallion for a speech he gave on the importance of respecting cultural diversity, said, “I like that feeling of knowing that you’re making a difference by speaking.”

Other students who won Disney medallion awards were Morgan Howard of Huntington Beach High for creative writing, Jeremy Katz of Orangeview Junior High in Anaheim for three-dimensional visual arts and Jason Moskovitz of McAuliffe Middle School in Los Alamitos for color visual arts.