Intimacy Director

Scholar

Writer

Vocalist

Dr. Ayshia is a performance studies scholar, intimacy director, vocalist, and award-winning writer from Brooklyn, NY. With an MFA from CalArts and a PhD from UMass Amherst, she uses performance and media to investigate race, sexuality, and human rights. She has been writing and directing Black theatre for twenty years and is the founder of “racial justice” theatre. As an interdisciplinary theatre artist, her critical and creative work appears in Theatre Topics, Howlround, Research in Drama Education, Black Camera, Qualitative Inquiry, Boston University Press, and the International Review of Qualitative Research. Dr. Ayshia’s most recent publication, Intimacy Directing for Theatre: Creating a Culture of Consent in the Classroom and Beyond, was released by Routledge in August 2023 and is the first intimacy directing textbook for teachers. Her second textbook forthcoming July 2026, Teaching Racial Justice Theatre & Performance: the One Love Method, offers a racial justice teaching method for the theatre and performance classroom based upon West African indigenous philosophy and United Nations Human Rights. Her plays have been produced Off-Broadway, nationally, and internationally, including Jewel Box Theatre in NYC, Midtown International Theatre Festival in NYC, The DC Black Theatre & Arts Festival, UMass Amherst Fine Arts Center, Davis Square Theatre, and Seoul Players of South Korea, among others. Dr. Ayshia has intimacy directed and/or led workshops for productions at Brown’s Trinity Repertory Company, The Huntington, Fresh Ink Theatre, Emerson Stage, LSU, Northeastern, Company One Theatre, and Stage Source.