For this Pitt alumna, to dance is to dream

At 16, Ayisha Morgan-Lee pirouettes to her first International Association of Blacks in Dance Conference and Festival. The event, in Denver, Colorado, places her in a room full of dancers who remind her of all the greats that she has dreamed about and whose images she has collected in a scrapbook: Katherine Dunham, Pearl Primus, Josephine Baker and more.

“I fell in love with wanting to dance on stage because I saw people who looked like me,” says Morgan-Lee. “At the conference, seeing and touching these people made a career in dance something I no longer had to dream about. It could be real life.”

The conference confirmed to her the power of dance to educate and inspire. It influenced her to make the promotion of Black dance forms and Black dance history her mission.

In pursuit of her goal, Morgan-Lee, a Pittsburgh native who began dancing at 3 years old, studied dance at Howard University and later earned a master’s in arts management at Carnegie Mellon University and a doctorate in education from Pitt (EDUC ’20G).

In between, in 2005, she founded Hill Dance Academy Theatre (HDAT), which now teaches more than 5,000 youth annually, providing them skills in Black dance traditions and a path toward a dance career. Recently, the Heinz Endowments and Ford Foundation named HDAT one of Pittsburgh’s 16 Cultural Treasures for its role in preserving and honoring Black arts.

In July 2021, hoping to give HDAT a permanent home, Morgan-Lee purchased a former Catholic church campus in Pittsburgh’s historic Hill District neighborhood to house HDAT. She calls it “sacred ground.”

That’s because before it was HDAT, Morgan-Lee’s grandmother was a cook on the campus; her father went to school there; and Morgan-Lee studied, volunteered and, as a graduate student, worked on the campus. To celebrate her ancestors, she has named the campus’ three buildings after family members.

HDAT turns 20 this year and she envisions it being not only an incubator for professional dancers, but also an engine for enterprise for the Hill District.

Morgan-Lee has hired African American vendors to maintain the grounds and facilities. The campus hosts a Black artists’ colony that includes a multimedia photographer/videographer, an Afro-Caribbean costume-textile creator, an award-winning quilt-maker, a self-care artist and more.

In perhaps its proudest, most full-circle moment, HDAT in January 2025 will co-host The International Association of Blacks in Dance (IABD) Conference and Festival in Pittsburgh. The occasion is expected to bring about 1,500 participants from around the globe to the city where Morgan-Lee performed her first pliés.

Now the board chair of IABD, Morgan-Lee is excited that the “Superbowl of Black dance” is coming to her hometown. She sees it as an opportunity to showcase to a new generation the legacy of global figures in Black dance and to elevate Pittsburgh’s rich dance history, which includes professionals such as the Shona Sharif African Dance and Drum Ensemble and Bob Johnson’s Pittsburgh Black Dance Theater Ensemble, both of which are rooted in the University of Pittsburgh’s arts traditions.

“There are so many hidden gems that have been sustaining Black dance and I think that gets overlooked,” Morgan-Lee says.

With HDAT and the conference, she’s hoping to fill the room with dancers who can look to her and others and leap into their dreams. In them, Morgan-Lee also sees future role models who will fill the scrapbooks of little girls and boys, helping them to carry the Black dance legacy into the future.