Alysia Michelle James is a composer, choreographer and character aerialist based in California. Her background is in ballet, hip-hop, contemporary, African, character, as well as synchronized swimming and springboard diving in her youth. For five years she attended Orange County School of the Arts where she majored in Creative Writing and won “Best Songwriter” of her graduating class. In college, she started training aerial acrobatics and performed at Berzercus, The Isla Vista circus and her senior recital. She received her Bachelor of Arts in Music Composition from UCSB’s College of Creative Studies in 2010. She then pursued a niche career as a composer-aerialist.

After her undergraduate studies, she began performing as an aerialist with Lucent Dossier, then joined William Close and the Earth Harp Collective. Over the next few years, she composed original music for the Earth Harp and toured with The Earth Harp Collective as an aerialist, dancer, composer and instrumentalist, playing several of Mr. Close’s harps. She toured internationally with Cirque Montage, a circus built for the stage, then joined Pirates Dinner Adventure in Buena Park in 2014, where she was the lead aerialist, aerial trainer, choreographer, assistant manager, and composer of two original songs for the show. Around this time, she composed original music for Not Man Apart Physical Theater Company’s feminist rendition of “Paradise Lost” by John Milton. Three years later, she left performing at Pirates and became the lead aerialist in Pirates’ sister show, Teatro Martini, and the Aerial Coordinator for both shows. In 2016, she joined the cast at the Queen Mary’s Dark Harbor, later becoming the Aerial Coordinator for the event and was inducted into the hall of fame in 2019. Other character work includes Comic-Con’s Blade Runner 2049 activation, Fallout 76’s live activation at E3, Blizzcon’s talent competition and numerous private parties throughout southern California.

During these years, James taught advanced aerial arts performance classes and workshops at Elite Kids USA from 2011 – 2017. She composed a full length show for Elite Kids USA in 2014. She taught adult aerial classes at OC Pole Fitness and Embody Alternative Fitness from 2015 to 2020. As her leadership experience grew, James started to collect and develop musical analysis exercises for aerialists and dancers which she would incorporate into her advanced aerial performance classes. In 2017, she was accepted to Cal State Long Beach’s music department, where she composed for dance, researched the connection between music and dance extensively and created her Aerial Music workshop, a music analysis course for aerialists, which she premiered in the summer of 2019. She graduated CSULB in 2020 with a Master of Music Composition and Theory.

In 2021, she premiered “the body in\verse” at Currents New Media Festival with her collaborators Mark-David Hosale and Alan Macy. This piece is an interactive online performance which showcases the performer’s physiological responses to the conversation she is having with participants, then uses this data to alter the sound and visual picture, while the audience’s response to the script is assessed by AI and displayed as derivative poetry created by the AI.

Alysia Michelle James composes for dance, theater, film, videogames and interdisciplinary projects. She began teaching in the Department of Theater and Dance at UCSB in January of 2021.