Story by Deb Peterson | Photographed by Giovani Pop. M! Jun/Jul 2011.
Nancy Mariana Pop moved to this country from Romania as a young girl and started school speaking no English. The kids made fun of her.
“When I learned the language, the kids still made fun of me because I had an accent,” she says. “When it wasn’t the accent, it was the way I dressed. When it wasn’t that, it was something I did that they thought was weird, like reciting poetry at my first-grade talent show instead of dancing or singing. …I always thought of myself as an ugly duckling.”
Now 15 and a sophomore at Bentonville High School, this ugly duckling has not only blossomed into a beautiful swan on the outside, she has a magnificent heart, too.
“I began to realize from observing people, and from observing the way I treat people, that not everyone cares about what you look like as long as you have a kind heart,” Nancy says. “A good friend of mine, Carley Sorey, who is the most loving person on this planet, showed me that inner beauty is truly the most important thing. Helping others and showing them kindness and affection is more important to me than an extra five pounds or a few pimples.”
While she plans to apply to Marymount Manhattan College in New York in two years, where she hopes to model and study for a double major in acting and psychology, with a minor in drama therapy, Nancy isn’t waiting until then to follow her heart.
She already has starred in a short film project, “Broken, Blind,” about the civil war in Arkansas, and she’s writing a non-fiction book about a boy in post-genocide Cambodia.
“The overall theme in the book is that Love (with a capital L) is everything in life,” she says.
She hopes to donate any profits she might make, if the book is published, to The Uncultured Project, an “unplanned, unexpected, and uncultured journey to make the world a better, less hungry, place,” according to the project’s founder, Shawn Ahmed of Toronto.
She also hopes to return to Romania to “help with the orphanages there.”
Nancy plays classical piano and is adding French and German to the Romanian and English she already speaks.
Those are just a few examples of the scope of this girl’s dreams.
The daughter of Mariana Pop, a financial programmer, and Giovani Pop, a deputy sheriff, Nancy found her greatest inspiration in her 5-year-old sister, Amalia.
“As I began to mature, I realized that if I really want to pursue my dream, I’d need motivation and something in the back of my head pushing me and helping me get forward regardless of options,” Nancy says. “That something turned out to be my little sister, Amalia. Everything I do, I do to make sure she has a role model that she can look up to and admire. I want to show her that you can accomplish your dreams by starting off small. Fairy tales can happen, but she needs to understand that a fairy godmother can’t be present, but hard work and consistency can.”
The Thing About Fashion
As a young girl who loved to play dress-up and got a lot of attention for doing it, Nancy thought fashion was “just something people paid attention to.”
“Over time, I realized that modeling was more than just people looking at you,” she says now. “It’s really about making people happy. It’s not about the model. Fashion was designed to make people feel better about themselves. When people design clothes, they have you in mind. They want to create images that will make you feel like the queen you truly are! So when I do a runway show or a photoshoot, I really just have fun with it, because that is what fashion is really about.”
Nancy started her career modeling jeans for family friend Laura Ripley’s denim line, Laura Madison Premium Denim. She’s now represented by Kim Pease at Faces, Inc.
“I’m still getting over my ugly duckling stage,” Nancy says, “but I think I’m getting there!”
It looks like she’s making marvelous choices along the way.
M!
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