Ayisha Morgan-Lee, EdD
Founder, CEO, and Artistic Director
At the age of twenty-one, Ayisha became the Founder, CEO, and Artistic Director of Hill Dance Academy Theatre (HDAT).
Ayisha received her Doctorate from the University of Pittsburgh Out of School Learning Education program. She was selected, in 2016 as one of 50 international and national leaders in the Arts to attend the yearlong program by the National Arts Strategies Chief Executive Program. In 2017, she was voted to serve on the board of The International Association of Blacks in Dance (IABD) and in 2021 she was voted to lead the organization as Board Chair. Ayisha is an adjunct faculty member at The Pittsburgh Creative and Performing Arts School where she teaches Modern Dance to student’s grades 6th-8th.
From 2009 to 2010, she served as the Education Director for Pittsburgh’s Dance Alloy, teaching dance, and developing art programs for public schools. For three years, she was a Teaching Artist with The Heinz Endowments Culturally Responsive Arts Education (CRAE) Program. From 2014 to 2018 she was an adjunct faculty member at City High School where she taught Dance to seniors.
In 2015, she received the YWCA Young Business Professional Award; in 2010, she was named as a Pittsburgh Courier’s Fab 40 young professional leader in the Arts and selected as a member of Leadership Pittsburgh LDI XXVII class. She has choreographed musicals and been a stage manager at Pittsburgh Playwrights Theater.
A 2007 Carnegie Mellon University graduate with a Master’s in Arts Management and a Magna Cum Laude graduate in 2005 receiving a BFA in Dance and Theatre from Howard University. She interned with Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre and apprenticed with August Wilson Center for African American Culture. In 2003, she performed at the Grahamstown National Arts Festival in South Africa with Kuntu Repertory Theatre in Mahalia and Lady Sings the Blues and created a documentary on Indigenous Dance in South Africa funded by a Howard University fellowship.
Ayisha is a member of Pittsburgh Alumnae Chapter Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc. and a member of the Pittsburgh Chapter of Pierian, Inc. She and her husband Eric and their daughter Aniyah are residents of Pittsburgh’s Historic Hill District community the home of August Wilson and his Ten Cycle plays. Ayisha is a member of St. Benedict the Moor Parish.
