It wasn’t quite the same as becoming the next Miss America, but Kelly Bartlett, senior in performing arts, is still amazed.

“I wake up every morning and wonder how the hell I won,” said Kelly Bartlett, senior in performing arts.

Bartlett recently won one of two $2500 Irene Ryan Scholarships given at the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival (KCACTF) acting competition. Bartlett was nominated for the award for her performance in “Crimes of the Heart” earlier this year.

After receiving her nomination, Bartlett performed at a regional competition in Lincoln, Neb.

“The more and more I’ve gone through it, it’s really a lot like a pageant,” Bartlett said.

At regionals, Bartlett was one of 16 selected to advance to nationals in Washington, D.C.

“It’s funny because it [nationals] didn’t really seem like a competition,” Bartlett said. “We were flown to the Kennedy Center for a week of workshops and sessions with professionals like Tony award-winning actors, directors and internationally renowned fight combat artists.”

For the audition, Bartlett presented the required five minutes of work including a monologue and a short scene with her scene partner, Ryan Walrod.

“I’ve always found it strange that Kelly and I work so well together,” said Walrod, senior in performing arts. “We each approach theatre from radically different viewpoints. I think what makes it work is that we had a very good and common training from a former faculty member, Gregg Henry, who is now the Artistic Director of KCACTF.”

Bartlett said she was nervous prior to the trip to Washington D.C.

“A lot of finalists and people that end up advancing to nationals come from really large programs and a lot of them tend to be graduate students,” she explained. “They’re really good. I don’t consider myself to be a poor actress, but I’ve never put myself in that caliber. And I’m a very small fish in a very huge ocean of actors, so I was really nervous wondering what I was getting myself into.”

Once she got a chance to meet the other actors, Bartlett’s fears were calmed.

“It was really amazing how friendly and polite and accommodating everyone was, which was nice because by the time the end of the week came, it wasn’t a competition,” Bartlett said.

Bartlett acknowledged that Walrod, her scene partner, is an important part of her performance.

“I tend to think that eighty-five percent of the reason I got as far as I did was because of the scene and the scene worked so well because I had a really wonderful scene partner,” Bartlett said. “My scene partner and I, we got off the stage [at nationals] and I gave him the biggest hug. The laughs were there, the timing was good, we didn’t go over time. It felt really good and what was nice about that feeling was even if I wouldn’t have won, even if I’d gotten nothing out of it, I knew I’d done it well and the audience laughed and they enjoyed themselves.”

Bartlett also said she is somewhat superstitious about her performances.

“In my scene I have a bag because I have props that the scene involves,” Bartlett said. “When I was at regionals, I had a picture of my boyfriend and I had a card that one of our friends gave me and I had mementos in there. And when I won regionals, I made sure that at nationals I had all the same stuff in my bag. I wore the exact same outfit, the exact same bra, I did my hair the same way.”

People close to Bartlett are impressed and proud of the way she has handled winning.

“She’s been generous about sharing the credit and feels as though she’s winning for Iowa State, not `Look what I did.’ She’s been excited about it, glowing but not gloating,” said Laurie Sanda, professor of health and human performance and Bartlett’s adviser. “She’s surprised and happy but not carried away with it.”

“I think it takes a certain kind of courage to grow and not everyone has it, but she does. We’re all very proud of her,” Sanda added.

Bartlett, who originally came to Iowa State to study dance, has only been participating in theater for three and a half years. Gregg Henry, former ISU theater department chair, discovered Bartlett and encouraged her to develop her talent.

“He saw me dance my freshman year in Barjche, which is the modern concert we have at Fisher Theater, because I was a dance major here,” Bartlett said. “He saw me dance and at the end of the concert he came up to me and told me he wanted me to take his Acting I class, which was foreign to me. I’d never done theater.”

In the future, Bartlett plans to obtain her master’s degree in compositional dance.

“I’d like to be a professor. I’d like to teach people that want to pursue this,” Bartlett said. “I really love to teach.”