Diamond Morgan is an EdD candidate at West Chester University of Pennsylvania. She is a licensed master social worker, a higher education faculty member who has taught at multiple institutions simultaneously, a podcast host, and a Black creative who has been building spaces for community and expression her entire adult life.
She is also a North Philly girl, shaped by the New Freedom Theatre — an African-centered performance space on Broad Street that gave her, and generations of young people before and after her, a place to discover what creativity means when it is rooted in culture rather than imposed by a curriculum.
Diamond did not choose this topic. It chose her.
She grew up in North Philadelphia, where the New Freedom Theatre showed her what it looked like when Black artistic expression was centered, resourced, and celebrated. She went on to become a social worker, then an educator, and eventually a podcast host — launching a talk show during the pandemic that became a vehicle for the kind of authentic conversation she had been looking for in professional spaces and rarely finding.
When she came to the EdD program at West Chester, she came with a question already forming: why do Black and Brown creatives — people with gifts, knowledge, cultural fluency, and a fierce drive to create — so often feel unseen, constrained, and underutilized in higher education? And what would it look like if institutions actually did something about it?
The dissertation that emerged from that question became The Secret Sauce — eight podcast episodes produced at the Philly Podcast Space in collaboration with focus group participants who brought their own stories, analysis, and joy into the studio.
She is not a distant researcher studying a community she is curious about. She is a member of the community she is studying. She is:
A Black creative, shaped by theater, social work, and media
A social work educator who has redesigned her curriculum to include podcast creation
A doctoral candidate pushing the boundaries of what dissertation research can be
A podcast host who has been building digital community since before this research began
A living example of what she is studying: someone who found her voice through creative media and is using that voice to argue for institutional change
"This is my journal. This research isn't just something I'm doing — it's something I am."
— Diamond Morgan, from the first episode of The Secret Sauce