Each year, the Gordon Parks Foundation grants a $7,500 unrestricted cash award to one recent YoungArts award winner who represents the depth, breadth and integrity of Gordon Parks’s work. This year’s scholarship recipient is Naliyah Salahuddin (2025 Visual Arts). Salahuddin was awarded at the annual Gordon Parks Foundation awards ceremony and dinner in New York City on May 20.
Salahuddin is a mixed-media artist specializing in painting, sewing, and textiles as storytelling mediums. Born and raised in Miami, Florida, she credits her family introducing her to Black artists and educators as the foundation for her creative journey. Currently a student at the New World School of the Arts, Salahuddin creates work inspired by her deep connection to family. Fabric, central to her practice, is meditative and intentional, honoring values passed down through generations. Salahuddin’s work invites viewers to reflect on the universal threads of connection and celebrate their stories.
“I am deeply honored to receive the Gordon Parks Foundation Award. This recognition means the world to me. My work is rooted in the stories, love, and legacy of my family, and to have it acknowledged in the spirit of Gordon Parks, a master of storytelling and truth, is profoundly meaningful. This award affirms my commitment to using art as a way to honor connection, memory, and the threads that bind us all.”
Naliyah Salahuddin
About the Gordon Parks Foundation
The Gordon Parks Foundation supports and produces artistic and educational initiatives that advance the
legacy and vision of Gordon Parks—recognized as the most significant American photographer of the
20th century, as well as a writer, musician, and filmmaker, who used the arts to further “the common
search for a better life and a better world.” Through exhibitions, publications, and public programs organized in collaboration with national and international institutions at its exhibition space in Pleasantville, New York, the Foundation provides access to, and supports understanding of, the work and contributions of Gordon Parks for artists, scholars, students, and the public. Through its year-round educational programming and annual grant-making initiatives, the Foundation champions current and future generations of artists and humanitarians whose work carries on Parks’s legacy.