USU duo represents at Miss Amazing
After competing in the National Miss Amazing pageant for women with disabilities, Utah State University students Anastasia Wein and Hannah Hart are determined to advocate for disability rights and continue to help others.
Wein represented Utah and left the pageant in Chicago as the runner-up in the 2025 Junior Miss Amazing category.
“It’s about giving them the confidence to shine on stage,” Wein said of the pageant.
Wein previously competed in other pageants but was disappointed by the pressure to fit into the stereotypical beauty queen mold. She felt without veneers, hair extensions and spray tans, there was no hope of winning.
“They just choose the same person every time,” she said. “I wanted to find a pageant that was fair. The judges rarely choose someone with autism. If they have a prosthetic — if they’re visually impaired or hard of hearing — the judges will say, ‘Oh well, they’re not going to win this pageant.’”
Wein said “disability” is often treated like a bad word, but in Miss Amazing, it’s something to be celebrated. “It just means that we’re different and that we have different ideas, which is what the world needs.”
Hannah Hart represented Florida in this year’s pageant and has been competing since she was 19. Each year, she says she gets a little more confident and is able to use the lessons she’s learned throughout the year to improve her performance. Public speaking and her talent, a vocal performance of the song “Happily Ever After” inspired by her time working at Walt Disney World, pushed her the furthest out of her comfort zone.
Hart said she’s also pushing herself at home.
“Standing up for myself is something that I’ve worked on a lot this year,” she said.
Hart started an Instagram page where she talks about autism awareness, disability history, blindness, visual impairment and a wide range of other topics.
“I want to do things that people with disabilities are told they can’t do and show that on my social media to say, ‘Hey, I’m doing this, and I’m not going to let anything get in my way,’” Hart said.
Both Wein and Hart, friends since starting school at Utah State, said their favorite part of the pageant was doing it together.
“I definitely want to remember all the growth that I’ve seen in myself and seen in Hannah — seeing her advocate for the title and then get up on that stage,” Wein said. “That takes a lot of guts. To see her do that and just blow it away like it was nothing — that was honestly the highlight of the whole trip.”
For her talent, Wein, dressed in a custom cowboy outfit topped with pink chaps, sang a country song called “Bigger.”
“The song’s about not letting other people get you down, whether you have a disability or not, because you’re bigger than them,” Wein said.
Wein has spent the last three summers working at the National Ability Center in Park City, which offers adaptive sports and recreation.
“Other people might say, ‘You can’t rock climb, your legs don’t work’ or ’You can’t go biking because you’re blind,’” Wein said. “I really like seeing the smiles on their faces after they’ve accomplished something. A lot of the time, they don’t think they can do it, and then I see them get to the top of the rock wall or the end of a challenge course.”
The highlight of her summer at NAC was watching a girl who hadn’t ridden a tricycle in five years go from being nervous to riding up huge hills by herself. Wein said she plans to return to NAC every year she’s in Utah.
Hart and Wein are ready to apply the lessons they’ve learned through Miss Amazing and their own advocacy. They hope to see accessibility improve on campus, especially in the older buildings.
“One of my friends wanted to have her friend over who was in a wheelchair, and Richards Hall didn’t have an elevator or a ramp,” Wein said. “We’re all the same, we just need different accommodations.”
As representatives of the Miss Amazing program, Hart and Wein continue to teach other people with and without disabilities about Miss Amazing and the need for inclusion.
“It’s not about what we can’t do. It’s about what we can do,” Hart said.