From becoming valedictorian at Hamilton County Collegiate High School and graduating a semester early to performing with Janet Jackson, Hannah Rollins has built up a lengthy resume, both in academia and in her budding entertainment career at just 18 years old.
She's always been a dancer. Ever since she was 2 years old, her parents told her she would only sit still to watch "Cats" and "Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat."
"I was just captivated by that kind of stuff," she said.
At 5, she won a national dance championship, "and the trophy is still taller than I am," she said.
After a while, though, her little sister Emily began performing with her, and she and her family realized dancing wasn't just a hobby. So, when she was about 8 years old, Hannah started training with The Pulse on Tour, a traveling dance convention.
"I've had so many amazing opportunities from that," she said.
In her freshman year of high school, she got to perform with Janet Jackson in Memphis and New Orleans.
"I had been training under the creative director for Janet Jackson for about six years, so when Janet came out with her 'State of the World' tour, they decided that they wanted to utilize local dancers to come on stage and do 'Rhythm Nation' with her," Rollins said.
When she got the email asking her to perform, she dropped everything.
She recalled timidly knocking on her principal's office door at Collegiate High at Chattanooga State to explain the situation and ask for some time off.
She got the OK and only missed three days of school, she said.
"I performed in Memphis; then we pulled an all-nighter and drove to New Orleans, and I performed in the concert that night, as well," she said. "We drove back home, and I took a geometry test the next day."
But that wasn't the only time Rollins was on a time crunch. She and her family live in Marion County, Tennessee, so ever since she was in kindergarten, she learned how to do her homework in the car.
"We were taking the drive over [to Chattanooga], every single day," she said. "So I quickly learned how to manage my time very well and stay on top of myself."
As she was starting high school, Rollins' sister was taking musical theater classes. And Rollins helped her pick songs for her performances and watched old musicals with her.
"I was falling back in love with this art form that I hadn't really done very much for about 10 years," she said. "And then all of a sudden, I realized that was exactly what I wanted to do."
She applied to 18 universities and was accepted into four. She ultimately chose Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, where she'll start working toward her Bachelor of Fine Arts in musical theater this fall.
Her dream is to one day perform on Broadway.
"It's truly amazing the way that Broadway musicals can take all three venues of art - basically through acting, singing and dancing - and put it together into this beautiful mosaic that affects people so intensely," she said. "I will never forget, coming out of the stage door - after the first night of 'Newsies' - we got a standing ovation after the first number. And it was just electrifying. And that's how I want to feel for the rest of my life."
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