Elle Yanez, an interior design student at Saddleback College, earned a pair of $5,000 scholarships by winning two recent design competitions.
Yanez won the national Bienenstock Library Interior Design competition, as well as the International Interior Design Association (IIDA) Southern California Chapter’s Best of Design Student Competition in the Social Relevance category. She won each competition with a design creating an art gallery space out of a former industrial area, originally done for the Bienenstock Library’s contest as part of the Saddleback Interior Design 126 Studio II classwork in Fall 2022, led by instructor Farida Gabdrakhmanova.
At Bienenstock, Yanez’s work was selected from 41 entries from leading design schools including the Savannah College of Art and Design and Virginia Tech. In addition to the $5,000, her win includes a trip to the 2023 Future Designers Summit in North Carolina, where she’ll receive a one-on-one mentorship from Barbour Spangle Design and a portfolio review. Saddleback’s Interior Design department also receives $1,000 from the Bienenstock Library.
Yanez collected her second $5,000 victory prize for her art gallery design at the IIDA Southern California Chapter’s Calibre Awards ceremony.