Episode #061 · Meghan Greenwood
A Multi-Hyphenate Moves To The Suburbs
Pittsburgh is its own world. Moving to this place myself, after living my life on the east coast, has required a whole lot of learning and adapting. That's the thing about what you're used to. Sometimes you're not even aware of what you call normal until you leave.
Meghan Greenwood is a scientist, dance company owner, and mother of two who discovered a much bigger world when she left the rural community on the outskirts of Pittsburgh where she grew up.
We talk about finding an outlet beyond your career, building friendships and community as an adult, and making decisions that are right for your family even when they mean giving up parts of a life you loved. It's a conversation about how our surroundings influence us, the trade-offs we make, and finding ways to feel like ourselves wherever we land.
Growing Up With 200 People and No Neighbors
Meghan grew up in the woods outside Pittsburgh, in a house her parents built on land chosen specifically so there would be no neighbors. The family rarely drove more than fifteen minutes from home, which meant she didn't see the "big" city of Pittsburgh itself until high school.
When she went to college at Penn State her world opened up, and then graduate school at the University of Pittsburgh widened it again, in a way she found genuinely disorienting. She describes needing a thicker skin among people who were smarter than her and far more experienced in the city.
Her graduate mentor pushed her toward articles and international conferences. Her boyfriend at the time, now her husband, was already working in the city and brought her into rooms and venues she wouldn't have found on her own. Her lab filled up with colleagues from Guatemala, Venezuela, India.
With each opportunity, she learned more about what was available to her in an urban environment. She grew to love the city—one that she admits people who grow up near don't leave. There are less than a handful of people she knows who were born in Pittsburgh who have left for good.
Realizing She Couldn't Be a One-Track Person
Hunched over her thesis, Meghan describes spiralling. A self-described control freak, she hit the point of realizing she couldn't be a one-track person, that being a scientist alone wasn't going to hold her.
Though she'd grown up dancing street style, she et it go in college. After putting together a portfolio for a dance minor and optimistically submitting it, she told, very nicely, no. Looking at the talent around her, she decided her skills didn't measure up and stopped.
Coming back to it years later in Pittsburgh meant doing it with people questioning the point. "You're going to school to be a scientist. Like, are you serious right now?" she remembers hearing. Dance stayed stress relief, something she did without anyone's expectations attached.
For a while she added aerial arts, teaching that on top of dance on top of science, until she hit the obvious wall. "This is too much. Something's got give," she recalls thinking, and carved herself back down to two paths.
Motherhood rearranged the expectations again. She had to be deliberate about where she let ambition in, describing it as having "minimal expectations on the business side because then it turns into not a joyous occasion."
How a Rented Dance Class Became a Business
Two old friends heard she was back in Pittsburgh and told her to come dance with them. She made it to one or two classes on the South Side before the whole thing folded. "I need this. This is good for me," she remembers deciding.
So she pulled them along and started renting rooms—the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust downtown, a space in Bloomfield for years, Brentwood, eventually the Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre. She invited people, and then her friends started inviting people.
Somewhere around the Cultural Trust years, her husband raised the practical question: she might want to start an LLC, because people are moving and what if they fall. She filed at least fifteen or sixteen years ago, nervous about having to think about the thing from a business perspective. Her sister came on as co-owner and they've been going ever since.
Science, meanwhile, was asking for the postdoc. She was already working seven days a week and couldn't see how that scaled alongside raising a family, so she paused academia for biotech, where the daily punch-in, punch-out rigidity turned out to be its own problem. It was then she realized she needed to give up the traditional path.
Leaving the City for Her Kids, and What It Cost
The house she lived in was a foreclosure in the inner city, and it made sense when they bought it. They owned it for almost twelve years. Then the kids got old enough to start asking what was happening in the back alley, and the school system became a question that needed an answer.
Meghan calls the move a 180, and she's clear about who it was for. "Had I thought about all the things that made me happy about the city, maybe I wouldn't have chosen what I'd chosen, but I wasn't thinking about me."
Eight or nine years on, the regrets still surface weekly. She thinks about CAPA and Lincoln Park, the performing-arts schools her youngest, the artist, could have attended. She counters with day trips — Pitt, the Strip District — multiple times a quarter.
Community has been slower. She's building it from the ground up and has to be deliberate about finding her people, which is work she wouldn't have needed had she stayed.
She also holds back, knowing all of her interests, businesses, and careers are hardly legible to others. Told over the years that she was bragging when sharing, she learned to retract. Once, she sat beside a soccer mom for an entire season whose daughter is a serious dancer and never mentioned the studio. "I couldn't bring myself to do it."
What Meghan Is Weighing Now
When I ask what feels most alive in her right now, Meghan starts with her day job. Oncology pharmaceuticals has been the thing getting her out of bed for the past two years, and she's kicking around a move into a new role at the same company. She told me she didn't mind being quoted on it: "I do feel myself growing in that current role and maybe potentially outgrowing it."
The other thing taking her energy is choreography. Two weeks before we spoke, she submitted her first independent music video film to a dance film festival — something she choreographed and filmed without appearing in it, which put her on an unfamiliar side of the camera.
She's waiting on any response at all, because she has no baseline to measure it against. "We see potential" or "No way, Jose, try again." Either one would tell her something. Being part of a dance film festival, she says, is her ultimate goal in life.
I ask where she'd be if it weren't Pittsburgh. New York, immediately. She'd have to be more minimalist, more strategic, willing to shed most of what's in her house. She describes it as a rebirth. The kids would come later, middle school age.
"I am almost there. Now I just gotta convince my husband."
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Meghan Greenwood
Meghan Greenwood, PhD is a full-time AD of Oncology Medical Writing and a mom of 2 young boys. She also co-owns BaM Choreography LLC, a dance, fitness, and choreography company that works with the community to boost health & wellness. BaM also sponsors the Support Sisters: Women's Support Group and Women's Steel Circle, a networking + movement group for business owners. She also owns Pgh Dreamer Productions LLC, which provides a Virtual Accountability Buddy program and hosts the Pgh Dreamer's Pod interviewing local women business owners. As if that weren’t enough, in her spare time she writes the My Little Dreamer Book Series introducing children to scientific careers thru simple nonfiction readers.
