Many glamorous shoes have walked the Miss America stage. But at the pageant’s finals last month, a seemingly workaday pair served as a kind of dancer Bat-Signal.
During the competition’s talent portion, Regan Hutsell, Miss Texas, entered wearing black leather dance boots with three-inch heels — the kind of shoes sported by Rockettes and Broadway stars. With their height and flexibility, they both telegraph and require great expertise.
Before Hutsell even began her jazz dance routine, her shoes said what her crisp pirouettes and nose-grazing kicks soon made obvious: She knew what she was doing.
The director and choreographer Shea Sullivan, who has coached Miss America hopefuls for nearly three decades, assisted Hutsell with her solo. “For a dancer to perform in those boots and make it look effortless, like Regan does — you’ve reached the pinnacle,” Sullivan said in a video interview. “She was a joy bomb out there.” By the end of the competition, Hutsell had been crowned Miss America.
Dancers have won the title before, but a dancer of Hutsell’s pedigree is an unusual sight on a pageant stage. Hutsell, 25, grew up in Texas in a dancing family: Her older sister, Rachel, has danced with New York City Ballet and L.A. Dance Project, and her younger sister, Rosalyn, is a member of Pacific Northwest Ballet. Regan began her career in 2019 as a Radio City Rockette, then danced for three years with Birmingham Royal Ballet.
Already, she was on an unusual trajectory. To transition from kick lines and heels to the classicism of professional ballet requires extraordinary range. And her successful right turn into pageants last year was similarly impressive. Often the women vying for the Miss America crown have spent more than a decade immersed in the pageant circuit. Miss America was Hutsell’s third pageant ever.
Still, the ballet star Carlos Acosta — who has been the artistic director of Birmingham Royal Ballet since 2020 — wrote in an email that he was “not entirely surprised” by Hutsell’s win.
“She is exceptionally hard working, disciplined, resilient and ambitious,” he wrote, “and she also has a real warmth about her. It’s a powerful combination.”
The glittery appeal of the beauty pageant has dimmed in recent years, with its narrow definition of the feminine ideal coming to feel outdated. (Once a prime-time television staple, the Miss America finals became streaming only in 2021 after years of declining ratings.)
Hutsell, the first Black woman to win Miss America while wearing natural curls, is a pageant queen for the 21st century. Throughout her career, she has gracefully navigated environments that have historically been racially discriminatory, and that still require a degree of physical conformity: kick lines, classical ballet, pageants.
“I think dance taught me how to be adaptable without changing the essence of who I am,” Hutsell said. “I can do pirouettes with my back knee straight one day and my back knee bent the next day. That’s a small example, but what I mean is, your brain learns how to adjust without losing the energy and the qualities that define you.”
During the nonstop public appearances that make up Miss America’s schedule, Hutsell has put a particular emphasis on dance. She learned a routine with the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders and went kick for kick with the current star of the musical “Chicago.”
Sullivan thinks Hutsell has Broadway in her future: “I told her, ‘You’re the next Roxie Hart!’” But Hutsell, who has had multiple dance-related injuries, said she wanted to put the pageant’s scholarship prize toward a degree in physical therapy.
During a rare moment of quiet recently, Hutsell spoke in a video interview from her home in Houston about her path through and beyond the dance world. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.
Did you grow up aspiring to be a Rockette, a professional ballet dancer and Miss America?
No! My journey was very roundabout. Ballet was my first big dream. I got a scholarship to attend the Rockette summer intensive as a teenager, and it was not part of the plan. But I was like, “You know what? This will make me the sharpest corps de ballet member.” By the end of the intensive, I’d fallen in love with the women and the whole Rockette world.
I was still auditioning for ballet companies, but I wasn’t really getting anywhere. The Rockettes audition was the last one of the season. I think that job opened doors for me that I’m still walking through today.
It’s extremely rare to go from the Rockettes to a professional ballet company. How did that happen?
Usually it’s the other way, right? Dancers go from pointe shoes to heels, not heels to pointe shoes! But Covid happened after my first season as a Rockette. The world shut down, and I figured I’d do some ballet auditions virtually — just a shot in the dark. When everything feels like chaos, it takes some of the pressure off. The Zoom audition for Birmingham was the craziest experience. There were all these little boxes of people watching me on the screen, and one of them was literally labeled “Carlos Acosta.” Terrifying!
Was ballet company life what you expected?
It was all these dreams fulfilled, dancing so many wonderful ballets. But it was tumultuous, too. I was struggling with an eating disorder. I had a knee injury, and the recovery took almost a whole season. When I chose to step away [in the fall of 2024], that was a moment my relationship with dance needed some healing.
Like dance, pageants can impose strict standards on women’s bodies. Did you worry that entering would aggravate your eating disorder?
I’m stronger and healthier than I’ve ever been, even though I’m not the skinniest I’ve ever been. But like anyone who’s on the other side of an eating disorder — despite my confidence in my body now, despite the mental strategies I’ve learned to cope — I still have rough days. When my brain starts to go down those negative paths, I try to refocus on treating my body as my home.
How did you come to pageants?
In 2018 I had a family friend take me to Miss Texas week — my first time at a pageant. She’d coached lots of girls in pageants, and she said, “I think you’d be a really great Miss Texas or maybe even Miss America one day.” I was like, “Um … OK.” [laughs] But I remember thinking, “Wow, these women are so impressive.” The idea stayed at the back of my mind.
After I left Birmingham Royal Ballet, I wanted a reason to push myself. The pageant idea started to bubble up again. So I signed up for my first local pageant. I took a big dive.
You chose jazz instead of ballet for your pageant dance solo. What vibe were you going for?
I was going for maximum joy and fun. I wanted people to feel like they’d stepped into a Broadway theater for those 90 seconds. Jazz dance is making me so happy right now. Dancing in boots always makes me happy. Once the boots were on, we were really cooking with Crisco.
How did your professional dance experience help you in pageants?
A lot of what I do now as a titleholder requires me to talk — and often to talk about dance, in a way that resonates both with people who know dance and people who don’t know dance. With the Rockettes in particular, you learn how to do interviews, you learn how to pull the public into a world that they don’t know much about.
Physically it seems to make a difference, too. Even during the evening gown segment of Miss America, when you were just walking, it was clear you were a dancer.
It’s never just walking, right? There’s so much to think about. Dancers get it.
Do you see yourself returning to professional dance someday?
We’ll see. It feels like I’m in a new, open-minded place. I think in any career, we can get locked into boxes — boxes we put ourselves in, sometimes. You can find a lot of life outside of the four square walls you’ve built for yourself. And sometimes that life is what’s truest to you.
Cinematography by Zariyah Perry.
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