Madison Rose Bristol
UW Honors Graduates
Madison Rose Bristol

Dance, Environmental Science & Terrestrial Resource Management
Marine Biology
Designation: Departmental Honors
Honors Grads 2018/2019
Proudest Moment: Presenting my thesis to both a performing arts audience and an education/ecology audience at the Mary Gates Research Symposium. Because of the interdisciplinary nature of this work, I witnessed how people on both sides were able to see their disciplines in a new light--and envision the potential for this type of work to really make an impact through application to an array of disciplines.
Thesis: Environmental Dance: Unearthing How Dance Can Advance the Environmental Movement
madison.r.bristol@gmail.comMadison Rose Bristol is graduating this summer with degrees in Environmental Science and Terrestrial Resource Management (BS, Honors), Dance (BA, Honors), and Marine Biology (minor). In retrospect, these past four years have been her joy because she has been able to pursue her passion for environmental justice in tandem with being actively involved in the UW and Seattle dance communities. Madison has performed in 17 UW associated shows, has choreographed 8 pieces within the UW Dance Department and for the Seattle International Dance Festival, and has taught at local dance studios. On the environmental science side, Madison has explored a wide range of social and biophysical sciences during her undergraduate experience. For one summer, during a class on marine birds and mammals at Friday Harbor Labs, she conducted field research on the distribution and behavior of shorebirds at Argyle Lagoon, San Juan Island. This class reaffirmed her love for coastal organisms and environments, but also helped guide her in the direction of more anthropocentric work. She proceeded to teach and then become a site lead for the Pipeline Project's Environmental Alternative Spring Break Program, where she traveled to Oroville in Eastern Washington for two years in a row. Teaching environmental science to these middle schoolers made her want to incorporate community-based work into her professional career. This in some ways became a reality for her when she became an Oregon Sea Grant Summer Scholar in June 2018. She was placed with the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife's Marine Reserves Program. Madison spent the summer assessing the socioeconomic impacts of marine reserves implementation through direct, one-on-one conversations with commercial and charter fishermen. This experience set her up with the skills to pursue further human dimensions research, and to envision herself as someone who could bridge understanding between communities in the future in the pursuance of environmental action.
During her senior thesis, Madison was driven by her curiosity about what could happen when her two passions collided. At first, she used choreography as her outlet, creating works implicitly and explicitly about the human response to environmental degradation. However, she also wanted to connect with and learn from a small community of emerging movement artists in Seattle who were using dance as a means to connect people emotionally to environmental issues. As a result, she conducted interdepartmental research on the multiplicity of ways in which dance can contribute to the environmental movement. Now at the end of her capstone experience, it has been entirely fulfilling for her to see how members of the Seattle dance community have been employing dance--a practice embedded in community, empathy, social connection, and alternate modes of communication--to compel environmental action. Be that through movement healing sessions to transform eco-anxiety into action steps, movement fundraisers, visceral dance performances, or sustainability through the arts, these people are entrepreneuring novel ways of evoking emotion to invoke action.
On the near horizon, Madison will be traveling to Taiwan to study environmental and social resilience, and after her travels she hopes to engage in political activism, dance projects that are environmentally and socially relevant, and work for environmental groups. She will be returning to school in the next year or so--perhaps in pursuance of a dual Master's through the Evans School of Public Policy and the School of Marine and Environmental Affairs-- to study environmental policy. With this professional education, she hopes to achieve her goal of leading societal change through creative and innovative management approaches and community-based engagement.