PLAYWRIGHT

Current playwriting projects include Judy & Dolly and R U N. Alisha recently finished writing Stone Soup: An Old Tale for All Times, which will be produced as part of the main-stage season at Mt. Hood Community College in November 2024. Her play Minerva: A Sketch to Tell the Story played for a year at the BYU Museum of Art in conjunction with an exhibit of American muralist Minerva Teichert’s work. Alisha’s two-part stage adaptation of Alcott’s classic novel, Little Women: Part First and Little Women: Part Second, enjoyed productions at three different college campuses. Christmas with Truman had a staged reading in early 2020 as part of Portland’s Fertile Ground Festival of New Work. During the pandemic, Alisha started work on a new collaborative piece about our time in isolation. The first part of this play was presented as Febtember for Bag & Baggage’s Sequestered Soliloquys. 

Alisha serves on the admin team for PDX Playwrights. Since 2020 Alisha has participated annually in Portland's Fertile Ground Festival of New Works as a producer, playwright, and director.  

Her plays center women's voices and experiences. 

DIRECTOR

Most recently Alisha directed Epic Shorts: Strange Burdens, a collection of seven brand new 10-minute plays written by Pacific Northwest playwrights and performed by an ensemble of seven local actors. Her current directing project is Twelfth Night for the Fall Festival of Shakespeare in Portland. She is co-directing this with a teaching artist from Portland Playhouse. It will play at both Park Academy and at the Winningstad Theatre for the Fall Festival. The ethos and aesthetic of the Fall Festival, developed by Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, Massachusetts, informs much of Alisha’s directing style and energy. In the spring of 2025 Alisha will direct Lee Blessing’s  Eleemosynary for Reader’s Theatre Gresham. Past directing highlights include The Tempest, Romeo & Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, The Addams Family: Younger@Part, and The Secret Garden Musical.

TEACHER

Alisha has teaching experience at the college, high school, middle school, and elementary level. Currently she teaches theatre classes and directs plays at Park Academy in Lake Oswego, Oregon. She’ll teach Theatre History II at Mt. Hood Community College (MHCC) in the spring of 2025.  Other MHCC courses she’s taught include Appreciating Theatre, Acting for Non-Actors, Intro to Directing, Theatre History I and Theatre History II. For BYU-I she’s taught Dramatic Structure & Analysis and Theatre History Courses. As a graduate student at BYU she taught Constructing Narratives, Theatre History courses, Narrative Structures, and TA’d for Intro to Film, Intro to Theatre, and other courses. She also teaches for fun in the summer at various camps, including her very own backyard theatre camp.

TRAINING

Alisha’s most recent training has been at the feet of Tina Packard and Kevin Coleman, together with their educational department team, at Shakespeare & Company. She’s trained with Portland Playhouse for the Fall Festival of Shakespeare and for their summer camps. Alisha is pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing: Stage & Screen at the University of Omaha Nebraska (expected completion: July 2025). She holds a Master of Arts in Theatre & Media Arts: Theatre History & Criticism from Brigham Young University. Her undergraduate degree is also in theatre, from BYU.