Ashley L. Tate is a director, choreographer, educator, and performer from Saint Louis, Missouri. She is an assistant professor of dance at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, an affiliate faculty member in the Department of Africana Studies, and the founder and artistic director of Ashleyliane Dance Company (ADC). She is also the founder of the UNC Charlotte To The Beat Y’all: A Hip Hop Symposium and serves as Vice-President of Communications for the North Carolina chapter of the National Dance Education Organization. Tate earned a BS in Computer Information Science from Texas Christian University and an MFA in Dance from Washington University in St. Louis, where she received the Spencer T. & Ann W. Olin Fellowship for Women in Graduate Study.

Her creative and scholarly work has been supported by grants and fellowships from the Mecklenburg County Arts and Sciences Council, the North Carolina Arts Council, UNC Charlotte, and the St. Louis Regional Arts Commission. She has taught as an adjunct professor of dance at Saint Louis University, Washington University in St. Louis, Webster University, and Southeast Missouri State University, and previously chaired the dance department at Grand Center Arts Academy. Audiences have seen her choreography in venues across the country, including New York City, Baltimore, Las Vegas, Chicago, Boulder, Greensboro, Charlotte, and Santa Monica. Tate’s current research centers on how African diasporic dance education, practice, and performance function as pathways for social justice, and she has presented this work at national and international conferences, including the European Hip Hop Studies Network Conference in Cork, Ireland, and the Dance Studies Association conference in Washington, D.C. She is one of three artists selected to receive the 2025–26 North Carolina Choreographic Fellowship at Trillium Arts, with her residency taking place in June 2026.