Aysha Upchurch, the Dancing Diplomat, is an artist and educator who creates, facilitates, and designs for radical change. As a dancer and choreographer, Upchurch is an embodied storyteller who leans on African diasporic movement to create works of joy, connection, and liberation. She has been a commissioned artist at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and a Schonberg Dance Fellow at the Yard, as well as led teaching and choreographic residencies at universities across the country. 

Upchurch considers herself a DJ whose mission is to responsively and responsibly design the learning community as a cipher where everyone can build knowledge with each other while feeling held, heard, and humanized. She has been on faculty at George Mason University, Salem University, Harvard University, and the University of Texas at Austin. Named one of the nine women who shaped hip hop education by Upscale Magazine, she is committed to creating spaces to champion hip hop as an essential force in transformative education. To that end, while at Harvard, she spearheaded HipHopEX, an intergenerational lab that placed academia and community organizations in partnership to champion the power and possibility of hip hop as a change in classrooms and beyond. Whether on stage or in a classroom, as a US State Department cultural envoy or professor, Upchurch demonstrates how to be D.O.P.E. (dismantling oppression and pushing education).