Aysha Upchurch

Aysha Upchurch, the Dancing Diplomat, is a seed planter, soil agitator, and passionate artist and educator who creates, facilitates, and designs for radical change.  As a dancer/choreographer, she is an embodied storyteller who leans on African diasporic movement to create works of joy, connection, and liberation. She has been a John F. Kennedy Center commissioned artist and Schonberg Dance Fellow at the Yard, as well as led teaching and choreographic residencies at universities across the country.  As an educator and consultant, she considers herself a DJ whose mission is to responsively and responsibly design the learning community as a cypher where everyone can build knowledge with each other, while feeling held, heard, and humanized.  Aysha has been on faculty at George Mason University, Salem University, and at Harvard University, where she spearheaded courses and initiatives on embodied learning and Hip Hop pedagogy. Named one of the nine women who shaped Hip Hop education by Upscale magazine, Aysha is committed to creating spaces to champion Hip Hop as an essential force in transformative education. To that end, she founded and directs HipHopEX, an intergenerational programming lab that uplifts Hip Hop culture, and is now housed as a research initiative at Project Zero at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.  Recently, Aysha was a Visiting Lecturer on Dance at the University of Texas Austin, where she is returning to the classroom as a doctoral student in their Performance as Public Practice program to continue to explore and expand the boundaries of scholarship so that it can embrace the knowledge and power of the cypher, Hip Hop culture, and rituals of Black cultural play.  Her commitment to living a passion-filled life in service to others via her gifts and crafts were the focus of an episode of the critically acclaimed docuseries, The Spark, and also led to her being one of the 2025 United States Artists Fellows.  Whether on stage or in a classroom, as a US State Department cultural envoy or professor, Aysha is making moves and demonstrating how to be D.O.P.E. - dismantling oppression and pushing education.

Photo by Shocphoto

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