GoldieBlox teamed up with the If/Then Initiative to bring you the YouTube series Fast Forward Girls. The show follows the journey of young women as they learn about STEM in the real world by immersing themselves in it with the help of leading female innovators. In the Fast Forward Girls Spotlight, we take a moment to get to know those innovators a little bit better.

Did you know that you can have a career as a dance technologist? Yamilée Toussaint Beach, Founder, and CEO of STEM From Dance sat down with us to talk about her nonprofit, how she believes that dance and complementary STEM education will help underrepresented minority high school girls pursue STEM undergraduate education and how you can use STEM as your superpower.

Yamilée graduated from MIT with a mechanical engineering degree and danced for 21 years before teaching high school algebra in Brooklyn as part of Teach for America, where she experienced firsthand the opportunities that students in her community didn’t have access to. She knew there was a way to provide something greater and more meaningful to the students than what the school system was providing, so she set out to start her own program: STEM From Dance. Students in the program incorporate technology into their dance performances and learn how to do all of the technological elements involved such as wiring circuits.

She believes that you don’t have to choose between either the dance path or the STEM path and that the overlap allows you to create things that wouldn’t exist otherwise. Check out this spotlight to learn about how Yamilée is paving the way for girls that have interests in being dancers and technologists and tune into Fast Forward Girls: Nicole Laeno Dances with Lights to see her work in action!