Aisha Melhem is a native Austinite who always had a passion for the performing arts. She is trained in several styles of dance, theatre and voice. Growing up Aisha loved to perform, play teacher, direct and create original performances with her friends and family. She received a Bachelor of Arts in Theatre with an emphasis in acting with honors in 2008 from St. Edward's University, Austin, Texas and a Master of Arts in Theatre with an emphasis in directing from Texas State University, San Marcos, Texas 2010. She is the Artistic Director and Founder of B*Tru Arts, a multi-faceted nonprofit company. B*Tru Arts is a multicultural organization which focuses on using the arts for the betterment of the community. It has produced an annual event, Inspiro Fest, providing a venue for performing artists from all mediums. The Academy, a division of B*Tru Arts, offers professional training in acting, dance, playwriting and film. Aisha has developed acting and dance curricula and teaches all aspects of theatre to elementary through high school students.

She is a resident artist at The Vortex in Austin, TX and has been featured in several productions, winning several awards for her performances, including Sing Muse! as Terpischore, Muse of Dance which won a B. Iden Payne Award for Outstanding Cast Performance 2013. In the summer of 2012, Aisha appeared in the 63rd year run of Unto These Hills as Anecie and Meli in the world premiere of Cherokee Family Reunion at the Mountainside Theater in Cherokee, North Carolina. Some of Aisha’s achievements include: being featured in several music videos, short films and live theatrical productions; producing, choreographing, and directing music videos, short and feature films and live theatre performances, winning awards for both performances and directing. Some of her film and theatre directing credits include: B*Tru Arts’ experimental dance film Solace Is (’15),  The Vortex Summer Youth Theatre: An Enemy of the People (’14), B*Tru Arts' full feature docu-drama Run Away Night (’12), and doc-experimental short Delusions of Despair in which she is also featured ('13), She directed Flaky Lips ('12) and An Actor's Nightmare ('11) while she was the director/teaching artist for the San Juan Diego High School Drama Club in Austin, TX., and Terminal at Texas State University ('09) as her final thesis. Aisha continues to serve as an actor, director, choreographer, collaborator, creative force and educator. 

Her work:

Aisha creates theatrical and original physically engaging performances with the ultimate goal of promoting social awareness and change.

Her practice provides a useful set of allegorical tools for maneuvering with a pseudo-minimalist approach in the world of performance: these meticulously planned works resound and resonate with images culled from the fantastical realm of imagination. With a subtle minimalistic approach, she creates work in which a fascination with the clarity of content and an uncompromising attitude towards conceptual and minimal art can be found.

Her works isolate the movements of humans and/or objects. By doing so, new sequences are created which reveal an inseparable relationship between motion and sound. 

Her works demonstrate how life extends beyond its own subjective limits and often tells a story about the effects of global cultural interaction over the latter half of the twentieth century. It challenges the binaries we continually reconstruct between Self and Other, between our own ‘cannibal’ and ‘civilized’ selves.