Watch: Kisha Vaughan

“Clap once if you hear me.” The dancers clap. “Clap twice if you hear me.” The dancers clap-clap.

On a cold late-winter evening, choreographer Kisha Vaughan stands in the middle of the crowd. She has gathered a dozen folks from Dope Girl Movement — her hip-hop dance crew — at Easy Street Records to rehearse for a video. The concept: groups of dancers twirling, shimmying, and leaping between the aisles of the West Seattle store (which she co-owns with her husband, Matt Vaughan) to the dulcet, smooth voice of Lionel Richie on his song “All Night Long.” All in one shot.

Throughout the practice run, Vaughan stays at the center of the action, directing the camera movement, rehearsing moves and collaborating with dancers on ideas for how to twirl through the aisles and interact. It looks less like one person ordering a group around and more like a meetup of creatives trying to make the best work possible. That’s in large part thanks to Vaughan’s leadership, her attention to detail and her willingness to experiment.

Over the past two decades, Vaughan has been a force within Seattle’s dance community, bringing her funky, laid-back flavor of hip-hop movement to the forefront with an ethos that calls for remixing, freestyling and accessibility. A consummate and dynamic performer, she’s also entrancing to watch.

If you didn’t see her as the first “Macklorette” on Macklemore and Ryan Lewis’ Thrift Shop tour in the early 2010s, perhaps you saw her getting down with her crew at the revived Bumbershoot festival, performing original material for big crowds in 2023 and 2024. Maybe you caught her at one of her immersive hip-hop shows like HOUSE PARTY, a warehouse shindig featuring pop-up dance performances, or took a boxing class with her at RowdyBox downtown. You might even have seen her serving drinks at Easy Street’s upstairs bar, where she sometimes picks up a weekend shift or two. In short: She’s everywhere.

In addition to her work as a dancer, Vaughan’s also been a choreographer and teacher over the years.

“I focus on giving fair opportunities to the dance community — including myself — to practice art and creativity in spaces visible to outside communities [who] maybe don’t know that a hip-hop community does exist in our city,” Vaughan says.

She’s coached competitive hip-hop youth crews like the Garfield High School Puppettes and the Emerald City Elite, among others, helping them compete against other hip-hop dance squads. She’s also produced scores of events designed to spread her love and knowledge of hip-hop dance to younger generations, usually through Dope Girl Movement, which functions as a production company-meets-agency-meets-crew. Her goal, always, is to give dancers a better platform.

And she manages to do all of that with her signature style. Standing 5’11”, Vaughan often dons the coolest outfits, fashioning a button-up blouse into a phone-holding dress or pink cream jumpsuit with glinty, bangly anklets and earrings. Her style adds a layer of glam to her moves, a bit of glimmer as she pops, locks and drops across dance floors.

Born in Biloxi, Miss., in 1978 and raised in Sacramento, she grew up watching Soul Train, Solid Gold and MTV music videos, mesmerized by the dancers onscreen and teaching herself groovy moves. But unlike many other movement artists, Vaughan didn’t take any dance classes as a child or young adult.

“[I had] two working parents and I was a latchkey kid,” she says. “There wasn’t a dance studio or community center that was close to me that I could take classes at.” Consequently, she says, “I was dancing for myself.”

She spent her school and college years in northern California, leaning into her athleticism and creativity via step aerobics. But she didn’t dare take an actual dance class until a job as a music marketing representative brought her to Seattle in 2003. It was then that she got “the slightest hint of courage to try something new,” she says. “Especially something new that had always been in me.”

So at the encouragement of a friend, she signed up for a hip-hop class at Westlake Dance Center in Shoreline. “It was enough of a challenge that it made me want to go back,” Vaughan says. “My muscles were making memories as I was going through the motions of this class. It definitely made me feel really proud of myself.”

That moment sparked a chain of connections and opportunities that opened the world of dance to Vaughan. After her first class, she steadily returned to strengthen her skills — and, as a 20-something, was often the oldest student in the room. But she put her head down and got used to learning choreography, performing onstage and in videos and working with a team.

“When you’re [starting at] a certain age, the possibility of dancing on point or hitting pirouettes doesn’t feel as accessible if you’ve not been training for a number of years,” she reflects. “Where[as] hip-hop did naturally feel like a part of my soul and my upbringing. It felt natural, it felt authentic. It didn’t feel like I was trying to be anything other than I was. That is a big part of my storytelling because it is a big part of my upbringing.”

In 2006, she tried out for the Seattle Storm Dance Troupe — a kind of dance-focused cheerleading team for the WNBA team — and made it. “It blew my mind open,” she says.

Then another unimaginable thing happened: In 2010, after a few years dancing full-time, a friend connected her with an up-and-coming Seattle artist who needed backup dancers on a song for a Neumos gig. “That artist ended up being Macklemore and Ryan Lewis,” Vaughan laughs. Over the next year, she and fellow dancer Anna Matuszewski morphed into the “Macklorettes,” touring with the duo across the U.S. and Canada and appearing on the Billboard Awards and Live at Conan.

She had a toddler at home at the time. The choice to go on tour was tough, but necessary. “I can’t let this child think that their mother didn’t have fight in her, that she didn’t have dreams, that she didn’t have goals,” Vaughan remembers thinking. “So I did that until I got pregnant with my daughter, my second child.”

Meanwhile, she still taught dance in various capacities, becoming the type of teacher she’d dreamed of having as a kid. Dieon White met Vaughan at Melanie’s Dance Unlimited in Normandy Park, where Vaughan taught hip-hop classes. Even as an 11-year-old, White felt moved by Vaughan’s dedication to her pupils and commitment to collaboration with them. White, now 26, went on to work with Vaughan on a number of different projects throughout her childhood and into her 20s.

“Everyone who works with her, I guarantee they can say at least one time they felt truly seen by her. People gravitate towards her because she just genuinely cares about building something bigger than herself in the Seattle community,” says White, who followed in Vaughan’s footsteps and just got off a stint dancing on Macklemore’s 2024 tour. In an industry that often defers care for its dancers, White says Vaughan “really goes above and beyond.”

In 2018 Vaughan founded Dope Girl Movement as a means of working with other hip-hop dancers in the city and to create the compensated, produced opportunities that are so hard to come by. The project ramped up after the pandemic when Bumbershoot asked her to put together an original dance piece at their 2023 festival as part of a “free-range” art program.

The “stage” — an unbounded area at Seattle Center — was the biggest Vaughan had ever choreographed for. Alongside 28 dancers from her crew, she crafted a roving, immersive site-specific performance that led the audience from the Memorial Fountain to the Armory. Wearing all-beige attire with a soundsystem-on-wheels blasting hip-hop, Vaughan and her dancers jerked, twirled and stepped across the park as Bumbershoot attendees trailed behind. The piece reflected Vaughan’s big dreams and made her realize that she had to go after everything she wants.

“You have to be unapologetic about the vision that you have and continue to allow people who believe in you to be a part of the process of creating and growing,” she says.

Vaughan and Dope Girl Movement came back to Bumbershoot in 2024 to do something even bigger — this time, with a group of 45 dancers outside the Fisher Pavilion. Over the course of 30 minutes, the crew moved seamlessly through big set pieces (to songs like “Sweet Life” by Frank Ocean and “Rock the Boat” by Aaliyah), with dancers popping out in pairs or smaller groups to strut their stuff. Throughout the performance, the dancers hyped themselves and the crowd up, clapping, yelling and cheering one another on. It was a work of deep collaboration.

“Kisha always collaborates with her dancers,” said Rebecca Kerr Christian, Dope Girl Movement’s producing director. “She’s really amazing in how she helps mentor and gives dancers who’ve always wanted to try to choreograph a chance to do it under her guidance, which is pretty incredible to watch.”

For Vaughan, the next couple of years feel ripe with possibility and chances for deeper community cultivation and investment in dancers. In 2024 she received a 2025 CityArtist Grant from the City of Seattle, which she plans to put toward developing a dance film that interprets the four seasons with different textures and movement, following four dancers over the next year.

“I want you to smell oranges in the summertime. I want you to smell pine in the winter. I want you to smell flowers in the spring. I want you to feel heat and cold,” Vaughan says of her idea. “I want all those kinds of things where you’re invited to be in the performance, like you are the fifth member of the group.”

Back at Easy Street Records, Vaughan finishes explaining the run of the rehearsal, which will see dancers move from downstairs, up to the lofted space, back downstairs through the kitchen and finally outside the record store for one final big number.

“How’s this feeling?” she asks the dancers, who respond with whoops. “I’m so excited!” Vaughan exclaims. “This is real!” She motions for the music to play. It is time to begin.