Madelyn Ho
Q: Can you talk a bit about how you became involved in dance professionally as well as studying in medical school? How does the medical field connect with dance for you?
For me dance and medicine are very tied and each influences the other. In school I was interested in science and my fascination with the human body came from dance. In college, I realized there is a niche field of dance medicine and I felt that this was a way to combine both of my passions and bring them all together. Medical school provided me the foundations for general medicine. The specialty I’m interested in is physical medicine and rehabilitation. There is no fellowship for dance medicine, so most people who want to study dance medicine go the sports medicine route. For me, physical medicine and rehabilitation made the most sense. Physical medicine and rehabilitation, or physiatry, focuses more on the whole person than some other fields of western medicine.
MADELYN HO, M.D. is from Sugar Land, Texas where she began dancing at Kinard Dance School and later trained with BalletForte under the artistic direction of Michael Banigan. She graduated from Harvard College with a B.A. in Chemical and Physical Biology. While there, she was awarded the Artist Development Fellowship and attended the Taylor School Winter Intensive. She was a member of Taylor 2 from 2008 to 2012 and left to attend Harvard Medical School, during which time she was a guest artist for Alison Cook Beatty Dance and performed with Urbanity Dance. She joined the Paul Taylor Dance Company in Spring 2015 and completed her Doctorate of Medicine in May 2018.