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Alissa grew up in Wilmington, Delaware, the daughter of Chinese immigrants who taught her that hard work and dreaming big were not mutually exclusive. She started dancing at three. By her teens, she was training with the intensity of an Olympic athlete, building a foundation of discipline, precision, and structure that would shape everything that came after.
At 17, the rejections from ballet companies came in one by one. She had done everything right. It still was not enough.
That moment taught her something no studio could: when the steps stop working, you do not quit. You choreograph new moves.
While at Princeton, she discovered modern dance and never looked back. After graduating, she was selected to join an international tour with the Limón Dance Company and launched her professional dance career. She went on to dance with Ralph Lemon Company, where she worked closely with the acclaimed choreographer and performed on some of the world’s most prestigious stages, including Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center, and the Cannes Dance Festival. She spent six years touring extensively across Europe, South America, and the United States.
With Lemon, she learned to build from nothing. To iterate. To shape work collaboratively while staying in motion. To get comfortable being uncomfortable.
She did not know it yet, but she was developing the muscle she would rely on for the next 25 years.
It is what you know and what you have lived. Your values, discipline, experience, and the frameworks that ground your decisions. It provides stability and clarity in motion.
It is creativity, innovation, risk-taking, and the courage to trust yourself when the path is not fully defined. It creates space to experiment and move forward through uncertainty.
That dynamic tension sits at the heart of Alissa’s Leadership Dance framework and everything she teaches.
Great leadership is not choosing one or the other. It is knowing how to hold both and when to lean into each.
Alissa now brings her singular combination of artistic discipline and executive experience to leadership teams navigating transformation, innovation and disruption.
She serves on the boards of The Honest Company (NASDAQ: HNST), Topcon Corporation, and American Ballet Theatre. She is a Henry Crown Fellow at The Aspen Institute and an Executive in Residence at Columbia Business School.
As a keynote speaker, she has taken the stage at UBS, Columbia Business School, Johnson & Johnson, Johns Hopkins Medicine, Stanford, Yale School of Management, McKinsey, and HLTH, among others.
Her podcast, The Leadership Dance, brings the same ethos to weekly conversations with the trailblazers who built remarkable careers by refusing to follow someone else's choreography.
© 2026 The Leadership Dance
