Dance and Drama Part of Graduating Student's Journey to Med School

Jeremiah Clyburn has his eyes set on medical school, but he couldn’t resist the lure of the theater.

His role as the comically villainous Rooster Hannigan in his middle-school’s production of “Annie” cemented his love of singing and dancing. Growing up in Manassas Park, he honed his dance skills by watching YouTube videos and later choreographed musical theater productions in high school.

Still, Clyburn wondered if there would be a third act to his performing career when he arrived at the University of Virginia as a pre-med student. He assumed the demands of a neuroscience major would leave little room for performance before he discovered the UVA First Years Players theater group and took a class with Katelyn Hale Wood, associate professor of theatre history.

This weekend, Clyburn will graduate as an Echols Scholar with majors in neuroscience and drama. He will begin medical school this fall at Brown University, where he’ll begin his pursuit of a career in psychiatry.

For Clyburn, it was the experience of performing that helped him clarify that path.

“All of these things started coalescing when I got to UVA,” said Clyburn who balanced his two majors and theater performances with undergraduate research work on an Alzheimer’s disease project in a UVA School of Medicine lab. “I was so focused on being pre-med when I got here because I was already interested in psychiatry and mental health. Then when I discovered the Drama department, I was inspired by the study of performance and how we can use performance for social change.

“It was electrifying.”

Research and Performance, Side by Side

Before Clyburn even started classes his first year, he emailed Jaeda Coutinho-Budd, an assistant professor in the UVA School of Medicine’s Department of Neuroscience, to ask about joining her lab as an undergraduate researcher. The research assistant positions were already full, but Coutinho-Budd was impressed by the experience Clyburn already had on projects ranging from ecological models of predatory plants to effects of food additives on C. elegans, a type of roundworm used in biological research. She was also struck by his enthusiasm for her lab’s work investigating how a specific cellular enzyme affects support cells in the brain and their role in Alzheimer’s disease. Coutinho-Budd created a position for him.

“His love of knowledge and the spark that he carries with him is endearing and infectious, and those attributes have only amplified over the years,” Coutinho-Budd said. “Jeremiah would make a great scientist given his adaptability, tenacity, and hunger for the pursuit of knowledge, but he has remained steadfast in his determination to pursue his passion in medicine. I have no doubt that he will excel in this role as well.”

Clyburn’s experience his first year performing and serving as a dance captain for a UVA First Year Players production of “Big Fish,” along with his Engagements seminar with Professor Wood confirmed drama studies as another core part of his academic identity. He selected drama as his second major and went on to classes with Professor Kim Brooks Mata, the Department of Drama’s artistic and program director of dance. Mata’s creative work and teaching rely on her background in somatics, a field of movement studies and bodywork that emphasizes the internal physical sensations, perceptions and experiences of the body.

“It's a field of study that looks at movement as it relates to physiology,” Clyburn said. “In a lot of my other drama classes, I've thought about how you can use performance as a public health tool and a means to ground myself in arts and medicine.”

Fittingly, given his two tracks of study, Clyburn’s drama studies culminated in an independent study with Mata examining how somatic practices might support psychiatric treatment.

“Jeremiah is the kind of student who comes along once every 10 to 15 years,” Mata said. “His questions challenged and inspired not just his peers, but me as well … He’s a performer and a thinker of rare depth who brings intention and insight to everything he touches. Brown is gaining someone truly exceptional: a future physician uniquely equipped to bridge medicine, psychiatry, embodied practice, and the performing arts. I am deeply excited to see where this next step in his journey leads and the contributions he will undoubtedly make.”

Clyburn continued to work with the First Year Players as an assistant producer and lead choreographer while performing in Mata’s dance pieces, student works and Department of Drama theater productions. He developed performance-based projects for his drama courses, including a “Diva Bootcamp” and a movement-based project that engaged sound and history at UVA’s Morven Farm.

Last year, Clyburn earned the 2025 UVA Arts Council Distinguished Artist Award in Drama and a room on the Lawn for his fourth year.

“Jeremiah has been a vital member of UVA’s drama and dance community,” Wood said. “He is an exceptional artist and scholar whose work in neuroscience is not peripheral to drama and dance. He continually integrated methods and practices from both fields, and he engages deeply with other students, inspiring them while creating his own path of scholarship and creative work."

Service and a path forward

Since arriving at UVA, Clyburn also devoted significant time to UVA’s student-run HELP Line Crisis Talk Service, a free and confidential hotline for University students and the broader Albemarle County area. He began as a crisis line operator, volunteering for overnight shifts and weekend rotations. For the last two years, he served as executive head program director and helped lead outreach efforts and collaborations with local schools.

“HELP Line has actually been one of my rocks here at UVA,” Clyburn said. “It’s been so meaningful to offer support to kids and fellow students in crisis. Sometimes, you’ll get people who call back and talk about how they’ve been able to get help and how HELP Line was a great resource for them. Those are really powerful, poignant moments.”

Clyburn said he chose Brown University for medical school in part because of its role as a national innovator in medical humanities, ethics and narrative medicine — an approach that treats medicine as a scientific and creative act.

He credits Wood, Mata and other faculty mentors for helping him envision and chart the path ahead of him.

“It’s been such a collaborative process. From the beginning, I was encouraged to meld my interests and to think boldly about my future.”