Taysha Marie Canales, a junior Acting major at Arcadia University, and a resident of Bronx, N.Y., was awarded a Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival for Region II Certificate of Merit for Excellence in Ensemble Acting. Canales was chosen for her part in the Arcadia Theater production of Home, which was an invited production at the Region II festival on Jan. 14.

Canales also was named an Irene Ryan Scholarship semi-finalist, and at the festival she was cast in a play, The Orphan Train, which was written by a participating graduate student, Julie Tosh.

“Participating in this festival was definitely the experience of a lifetime,” says Canales. “To receive the tremendous amount of praise and recognition for our production Home was incredibly overwhelming but very humbling. My school pride has definitely strengthened through this experience, and I also am honored to be able to accomplish so much in my junior year. I am very proud to attend Arcadia University and to be surrounded by extremely intelligent and knowledgeable professors. And I also am proud to represent the Bronx community, my hometown.”

After she graduates, Canales said she “would love to stay in Philadelphia for a few years and try to expose myself to the theater community; however, I am also majoring in Education (right now focusing on Early Childhood Education) and know that teaching will be a part of my future, whether it be teaching theater to those who do not normally have access to it, or educating in New York City public schools to reach out to children similar to myself. I’m actually working with Epic Theatre Ensemble in NYC, having been affiliated with them since high school, and am right now in the process of creating a political theater company with other young adults called Epic Next, where we are trying to educate young adults on political and social issues of our society and how these issues affect our own existence.”