Daniel Treanor Memorial Award
The Daniel Treanor Memorial Award has been made possible through a generous grant from the MCJ Foundation. The foundation established the Daniel Treanor Memorial fund with an endowed gift to honor Daniel Treanor, a NFTE graduate who was stricken with cancer and passed away in April 2002. This fund is intended to honor current and future NFTE students who have succeeded while faced with health or physical challenges.

Rayneese Primrose
With Thy Hands Portraits
Hyattsville, Maryland

"Even though I still get afraid of losing my sight completely, I have learned to trust in my faith and not let it worry me."

Rayneese Primrose was born with astigmatism and low vision. When she was about 11 years old, she noticed that her vision was getting worse. Diagnosed to have profound visual acuity loss, she couldn’t have Lasik™ surgery because of her age. Years later, her doctor told her she could declare herself legally blind without glasses or contact lenses. “Still, I was not going to let this stop me from doing what I loved, which is drawing and creating artwork,” Rayneese says.

Rayneese completed the NFTE class at Suitland High School in 2006, and participated in the Advanced BizCamp with her business plan for With Thy Hands Portraits. Despite her vision problems, she produces hand-drawn professional portraits on commission, “in a quick turn-about time with my own signature style,” she says. Her work is very distinctive, in that she uses a technique called “rubbing” and a grid technique made famous by Leonardo da Vinci.

“With the profits from my successful business, I am now able to afford the expensive Toric™ contact lenses which give me almost 20/20 vision as well as heal my eyes,” Rayneese says. She is an art student at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York and has been featured in several gallery shows, including the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

“As my business grows, someday I plan to help other at-risk youth with vision impairments and a dream,” Rayneese says. “With my corrective lenses, I am seeing perfectly well. The difference is so heartbreaking to me, in a good way, that at times I cry, thinking of my blessings and of how some are worse off than I am.”