These Knicks Dancers Are Brainiacs By Day, Bootylicious By Night
By Kirsten Fleming
The New York Post
Knicks City Dancers Amy Trader (left) and Ana De Matos lead a double-life off the court.
When the Knicks City Dancers take the floor for the Knicks home opener at Madison Square Garden Wednesday night, they will gyrate, shimmy and shake their booties in skin-tight orange get ups. But two of the beautiful women rousing the crowd have a lot more than sexy moves and a barely-there dance outfit to brag about.
Amy Trader, 23, and Ana de Matos, 27, both boast engineering degrees and impressive academic resumes.
“I have a degree in biomedical engineering, and a minor in computational neuroscience,” says first-year dancer, Amy Trader, breaking out into a shy giggle. She admits most people look incredulous when she reveals her credentials: “Yeah, I kind of get that expression from most people when I say that.”
First-year dancer Amy Trader holds a degree in biomedical engineering.
Trader graduated cum laude from the University of Missouri in May and, while there, she helped invent a device for the human back that now has a patent pending on it.
Her teammate de Matos, a Knicks City Dancer for four years now, holds a mechanical engineering degree from Duke and a full-time job as a management consultant working with government and academic institutions.
Occasionally her booty shaking collides with the buttoned-up world of business. “Sometimes clients will go to games and say, ‘I saw you on the Jumbotron.’ They had no idea. When I am at work, I am not putting myself out there. I am not walking around in my Knicks jersey. I try to keep it low key.”
When Trader was on her college dance team, she didn’t let her pirouettes push academics aside.
“I focused on school a lot, but dance was always there,” says Trader, who now lives in the Financial District. “My parents told me as long as I went to college and got a degree, I could pursue whatever I wanted when I graduated.”
Ana de Matos, graduated with a mechanical engineering degree from Duke.
The pretty blonde — who was known in her Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority as an “Enginerd”— developed a silicone bag to mimic a real back disc in her senior year with two other students. Her professor realized there was nothing else like it, and so they applied for a patent. “It was really cool,” says the single Missouri native. “[But] the end goal is to produce it and get it manufactured.”
She moved to the Big Apple to pursue her dance passion after graduation and landed a spot on the Knicks squad this summer.
In grade school, De Matos, who moved to the US when she was 10, taught herself Spanish and English along with her native Portuguese, then moved into advanced math and science classes — all while learning every type of dance, including ballet, samba, tap and jazz.
“I always loved to perform, but [teachers] started to notice my ability for math and sciences when I was about 10,” she says.
Later on, during the recession, she became one of only three graduates hired from Duke to work for her global consulting firm (during a normal year, the company, which she asked not to be named, typically hires 20 to 30 students).
“I got to New York because of my job, but once I got here, I was determined to pursue my passion and dreams of dancing,” says the single Upper East Sider.
As one of the few Knicks City Dancers with a full-time job, she uses a meticulous, color-coded calendar to keep herself on track.
“Normally my days are from 8 a.m. until 2 a.m.,” De Matos says. With the little free time she has left, she is studying for the GMAT in the hopes of getting her masters and eventually starting her own business.
“People are surprised [at my double life] because it’s not the most typical combination, but it’s very definitely me,” says De Matos whose favorite book is “Psycho Cybernetics,” a self-help tome that, she says, has helped her visualize her success.
Trader, who saved up so she could put her career on hold while dancing, hopes to eventually return to biomedical engineering and develop implantable devices for people with knee injuries.
In the meantime, though, she’s happy to work it on the dance floor — and surprise people along the way.
“When people ask me what I do, I say I dance for the Knicks. And then somehow it comes around to them asking what I went to school for. They will say that it doesn’t match up,” Trader says, giggling again. “But I am proud of that. I love getting that reaction. I like breaking stereotypes.”
