Anna Grace Lewis
T
he decision to take a political science class her freshman year was hardly the stuff of crisis. Anna Grace Lewis had come to Florida State University on a joint dance and academic scholarship. Classically trained since elementary school in Asheville, North Carolina, she lived ballet most of the time. That was as it should be. FSU’s School of Dance is one of the coun-
F E AT U R E try’s most respected academies. Poli Sci brought an opportunity to study public policy in Australia. Why not, she reasoned. The course sounded exciting. And it wasn’t like a few months abroad would cause her to miss Florida, a landscape she associated with Disney World and not much else. But something happened in Australia. Lewis was mesmerized by world politics, affairs she hadn’t always fol-
lowed before. She is a tactile learner who lays out the newspaper like a smorgasbord, a lifelong reader who needs to hold cloth or paperback books. Once the information gets into her head, it stays there. On her return, a hackneyed motivational question suddenly irritated her: “What do you want to be doing five years from now?” The answer: Not dancing. This was not a sad realization. “I was so excited and so ready for something new because for so long when you’re dancing 30 hours a week, you don’t have time to do anything else,” she said. “You might be interested in politics. You might be interested in learning to play tennis but you can’t, you can’t do any of that. You might want to volunteer on the weekends, but you have rehearsal.” Lewis gave up the dance portion of her scholarship and relied on the academic part. She took comparative government and international affairs. She volunteered with Big Brothers and Big Sisters and began mentoring a young girl. In the meantime, Lewis realized she wanted to absorb everything she could about Florida and its politics and that she even loved Tallahassee and the FSU campus. She was in her first semester of her senior year in 2020 when the Florida Chamber of Commerce, where she had previously interned, offered her a position. Lewis could fill in for the chamber’s government policy coordinator, who was going to law school, so long as she would be free for the coming Legislative Session. That meant Lewis would have to graduate in December and not in May. “I called my parents and I was like, ‘I don’t know what to do,’” she said. Among other things, she had anticipated winding up her senior year in a pleasant way and was deeply involved in student government. “And my parents said, ‘It’s the opportunity of a lifetime.’” Lewis took the offer, and at 23 is now the Florida Chamber’s policy director. “I have been working toward this,” she said. “It came sooner than I thought it would.” Going with this flow worked out similarly well as leaving her dance scholarship. “Walking out that door, 10 more doors opened,” she said of that decision. “I have not looked back.” In December, Lewis took her little sister mentee to a Tallahassee Ballet production of “The Nutcracker.” While the stage lights still trigger her nerves — an ingrained fear of missing a step, a transition, a cue, a fear of forgetting — she knows traits such as endurance and resilience honed over those same years will never really leave her. “That said,” Lewis acknowledged, “there is nothing like the feeling of accomplishment a ballerina has after a show.”
Winter 2022
INFLUENCE
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