Isabella Boylston, Power Mom en Pointe

If mothers are forged through physical labor and ballerinas through decades of training, a woman who is both is a particular kind of force. That certainly seems to be the case for Isabella Boylston, a principal with American Ballet Theatre, who is due in June.

“Becoming a mom is so abstract until you are one,” she tells me over the phone in late March. The 39-year-old had just finished lunch after spending the first part of the day teaching, a recent addition to her ABT work schedule that replaces the hours she would have spent rehearsing for the Spring 2026 season. “I still feel like I can’t totally conceptualize what it’s going to be like, but I definitely want to continue dancing for many years," she says. Like any woman, there’s a see-how-you-feel element to when she’ll be back to firing on all cylinders, but there’s no doubt in her mind that she’ll return to the stage. (Her best guess: this year’s Nutcracker season.)

“I have a vision of myself with my baby strapped in a Baby Bjorn while I’m doing barre,” she laughs, the vision capturing a balletic version of working motherhood. “I’d love to fit my kid into my life as much as possible, [though] I'm sure there are a ton of compromises.” A strong relationship with her financier-husband Daniel Shin—“he’s such a solid partner”—should make the transition feel easier, especially if he turns out to be the father she’s expecting. “I see how he is with our cat, and he is the best cat dad. I know it’s different, but I think he’ll be the best dad.”

Family planning is all about timing: tracked ovulation cycles, careful calendar-checking, and milestones measured in weeks and months. Yet for all its obsession with timing, the process makes one thing clear: there’s no such thing as the “right time.” That’s a catch-22 that many professional woman can well understand—but how much trickier must it feel when your job depends on your body performing as a highly calibrated machine?

“The barometer of the right time was when I felt like I had zero regrets and zero fear about missing anything. This past week I was watching the spring season at ABT, and it was so beautiful. I felt totally at peace with being a spectator,” she says. “I’ve had such an amazing career already. Everything that I dreamed of I have pretty much gotten to do, and I still feel like I have so much to give. Hopefully when I come back I'll have the perspective that everything I'm doing is a bonus.”

Born in Sun Valley, Idaho, Boylston started her serious ballet training in Colorado before boarding at Boca Raton’s prestigious Harid Conservatory. She made things official with ABT in 2006, joining the company as an apprentice at 19 and becoming a principal—the highest level in professional ballet—in 2014. Her casting within the company has included some of the starriest roles available to primas (Swan Lake’s Odette/Odile and the title roles in Giselle and Romeo & Juliet), and she’s guested internationally with the likes of the Royal Danish Ballet and St. Petersburg’s Mariinsky Ballet.

That professional track—join a major company and work to be promoted through its ranks—has plenty of well-worn pathways to follow. But role models for women who have merged motherhood with professional ballet is a much smaller club. In the 20 years she’s spent dancing with ABT, she can remember three or four. Luckily, the brightest examples are women she calls friends.

“Gillian Murphy and Misty Copeland both had kids while they were still dancing, and they’ve been extremely supportive,” Boylston says, adding that she shared her news early with both. For Boylston, there was also “a fear of people seeing me differently, or writing me off,” but her fellow dance stars have quieted those nerves. “They’re still totally themselves and have continued to expand their careers in so many other ways since becoming moms. There is probably a lot of power that you gain from becoming a mother—crazy reserves of strength that we don’t even know we have until we’re moms.”

It’s worth remembering how different things were for the primas of the past. For much of ballet’s history, motherhood wasn’t just discouraged—it was seen as a distraction from the work. George Balanchine, the man credited with advancing American ballet to the level of its European counterparts, was famously unsupportive of dancers marrying, much less procreating. That attitude feels worlds away from the one American Ballet Theatre has embraced during Boylston’s journey.

“My pregnancy has been so celebrated by every single person at ABT. It’s the best feeling,” she shares, pointing to the colleagues she’s with “all day, every day. With the intensity of our job, we’re so bonded together. I feel like they’re all my extended family—and this baby is going to have the best aunts and uncles.”

It’s not just her fellow dancers that have embraced her with warmth during this stage of life, either. Boylston’s boss, ABT Artistic Director Susan Jaffe, has been “the best—so supportive,” and the company’s policy around modifying the workload of expectant mothers has given her opportunities to do more within the organization. The “alternate work” starts when the dancer decides they need to pull back on rehearsing and performing (for Boylston, that was around 18 weeks). It’s meant “coaching, teaching at the school, and working with the development team a little. It’s pick-your-own-adventure,” she explains. “You express what you’re interested in doing, and the company helps pair you up with the correct people in the organization. It’s really cool, and I’m learning a lot.”

The company has made special accommodations for her as well, rescheduling her 20th anniversary performance—originally set for this summer—for 2027. The career-defining moment originally had her considering delaying pregnancy; instead, ABT moved the date, and the original slot now falls serendipitously close to her June due date.

While the athlete has benefitted from close dancer friends with parenting experience to share and a company that’s shown itself to be wonderfully supportive, she has had to deal with a more modern frustration: the internet. As with everything Instagram, it’s a double-edged sword. On one end, it allows for a behind-the-scenes look at company classes, rehearsals, and the personal lives of stars we would previously only know from tutu’ed appearances beneath the stage lights. It’s also somehow an open invitation for commentary—especially during something like pregnancy.

“There are well-meaning people who give you their unsolicited opinions, and then there are trolls. Some people seem really offended by a pregnant woman continuing to do a lot of physical activity,” Boylston says. “People go on rants about how irresponsible it is for me to still be dancing. Someone was really pissed I did The Nutcracker.” (She danced the rigorous show while in her first trimester.)

She ignores most of it, deleting or blocking only if the abuse becomes repetitive or the comment creeps into anti-medical, conspiracy territory (“I don’t want people getting fake pseudo science on my page”). There’s an amazement in her voice when she relates some of it. You can hear how surprised she is that anyone would think an elite athlete in lockstep with their body would possibly be doing anything mindlessly.

“What I’d want to say to the trolls is, ‘Do you actually think you have more concern for the health and safety of my baby than I do? Because I don't.’ Everything I do is in consultation with my doctor, and I listen to my body first and foremost.” The videos she’s shared with her nearly 700,000 followers are magical to watch: a dancer with a clearly round belly gracefully sweeping across the floor and moving through routines just like the non-expecting colleagues around her.

“One of the most surprising things about pregnancy for me is how good it feels to continue dancing,” she says, pointing to fouettes (a notoriously tricky series of turns) she’d recently done at 25 weeks. “It felt the same as before, weirdly, though some things are getting a lot harder, like arabesques—and jumping. It’s getting harder and harder to get off the ground.”

She’s in the midst of figuring out what feels right, physically and otherwise, for how she’ll define motherhood. But she has already aced one of the biggest hurdles parents face: ignoring the outside chatter.

“I have a very strong conviction in my own intuition, so I really trust and believe in myself. I’m ready for change and a perspective shift. I feel so ready,” Boylston says, “even though I’m not ready at all because I don’t know what’s coming.”

She’ll figure it out the way she figures everything out: in motion.

Photographer Maddy Rotman