Dr. Ilana Morgan earned her BFA in Dance from Ohio University in 2000. She began her career in Santa Barbara, California, where she spent seven years as a Resident Artist with The Children’s Creative Project, teaching creative movement and dance in K–12 public schools and securing grants for interdisciplinary collaborations with local artists.

She completed her MA (2009) and PhD (2015) at Texas Woman’s University. Her doctoral research explored undergraduate dance students’ perceptions of online learning spaces in relation to identity, dance education, and future career pathways, with a focus on the corporeality of the technologically extended body.

In 2015, Dr. Morgan joined the faculty at Texas Woman’s University, where she coordinated both the BA in Dance with Texas Teacher Certification and the MA in Dance with a Concentration in Education.

Since 2017, Dr. Morgan has partnered with the Denton County Post-Adjudication Program, a long-term residential facility for justice-involved youth, where she developed and led dance and choreography classes. Her community-based work was featured in Dance Teacher magazine in 2019 and earned her a 2023 National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Research Grant in the Arts to study the impact of dance on the social-emotional well-being of youth in detention.

Her research has been published in the Journal of Dance Education and the Journal of Emerging Dance Scholarship, and she has contributed chapters to Dance Education and Responsible Citizenship: Promoting Civic Engagement through Effective Dance Pedagogies and Dance Education Methodologies: Ethics, Orientations, and Practices (Routledge).

Dr. Morgan was appointed Director of the School of Theatre and Dance at James Madison University in July 2025.