Alisha Gupta Is Rewriting What the “Second Shift” Looks Like

The phrase “second shift” is usually a quiet confession—what happens once the emails stop, the meetings end, and the laptop finally closes. For Alisha Gupta, it has become something bigger: a way of thinking about the parts of ourselves that continue working long after the traditional workday ends.

Based in Chicago, Gupta works as a strategy consultant in AI while building a life that moves between dance, entrepreneurship, production, and education. Through her company Beauty and Balance, she created The Second Shift, a multidisciplinary show that recently took over New York Fashion Week and is quickly becoming something larger than a single night. At its center are artists and athletes who spend their days working or studying and their evenings building something of their own.

“The Second Shift is like our love letter to the artists and athletes in our community,” Gupta says. “Our mission is to make creativity profitable.”

Building Beauty and Balance

Beauty and Balance grew from Gupta’s belief that creativity deserves more than admiration—it deserves structure, community, and a path toward sustainability. The company brings artists and athletes together through community events, fireside conversations with industry leaders, personal branding curriculum, and programming that connects creatives with brands. The Second Shift became a natural extension of that work: a physical space where the people behind those after-hours passions could be seen.

Many of the creatives involved are already living some version of the life Gupta describes. They have full-time jobs, academic commitments, or other responsibilities, while continuing to make time for the work that feels most connected to who they are.

The distinction, for Gupta, is not whether that creative work happens after hours. It is whether the person doing it has begun to take it seriously.

“Five to nine is quite literally your second shift,” she explains. “Once you log off, you’re not logged off.”

The idea sounds straightforward, but the reality behind it is more complicated. A second shift requires time, energy, and a willingness to keep showing up even when there is no guarantee that the work will immediately lead somewhere. It is that tension—between a stable career and an uncertain creative pursuit—that sits at the heart of what Gupta is building.

From a Historic Ask to a Traveling Movement

The origins of The Second Shift can be traced back to Chicago, where Gupta was already deeply involved in the city’s creative community. While building Beauty and Balance, she spent time at fashion events, music shows, and community gatherings when a message arrived from the Chicago Fashion Coalition: Chicago Fashion Week had never had a South Asian spotlight.

A fashion show was not part of the plan. At the time, Beauty and Balance was focused heavily on programming, including a curriculum Gupta was taking to universities across the country. Her first instinct was to say no.

“I remember thinking, ‘I don’t do fashion shows,’” she recalls.

But the invitation stayed with her. There was something significant about being asked to create a space that had not existed before, particularly one tied to South Asian visibility. The question became less about whether she produced fashion shows and more about whether she could take this opportunity without losing the larger purpose of Beauty and Balance.

That mattered because Beauty and Balance had never been intended as a South Asian-only community. Although many of its members are South Asian, Gupta had always envisioned a space for multi-hyphenate creatives more broadly.

Eventually, she began to see the fashion show not as a departure from that mission, but as another way of expressing it. The first iteration of The Second Shift debuted during Chicago Fashion Week, bringing together South Asian creatives around a shared experience: maintaining a full-time career while taking a creative practice seriously.

From there, the concept began to travel.

New York came next when a venue reached out about hosting the show. Rather than treating the move as a one-time expansion, Gupta began thinking about what it meant for The Second Shift to exist in different places and, eventually, different creative industries.

“The idea is to take The Second Shift as a movement,” she says, “and bring it to other cities and mediums.”

Los Angeles has become a frequent request, while early conversations have begun to explore what the Second Shift framework could look like beyond fashion, including spaces like sports and entertainment.

A Life Between Studio Mirrors and Strategy Decks

Gupta’s approach to The Second Shift is rooted in a lifelong relationship with dance. She has been dancing since early childhood, moving through high school teams, company work, college cheer, competitive Bollywood fusion and hip-hop crews, and now a heels team in Chicago that performs at both paid gigs and competitions. Across each stage, dance has remained a constant—not something separate from her professional life, but a part of how she has always understood herself.

“Dance has never left my life,” she says. “It’s my main passion, my main love, my sport.”

After graduating from the University of Texas at Austin a semester early at just 21, Gupta found herself with something she had rarely had before: time. She already had a consulting job secured, but several months stood between graduation and her corporate start date. For the first time, there were no classes or full-time job competing for her attention, leaving her to consider what she could do with that freedom.

Instead of simply waiting for her career to begin, Gupta decided to treat her creative ambitions with the same intentionality she brought to her professional life. She created an international four-month dance tour from the ground up, reaching out to studios, choreographing routines, collaborating with DJs on mixes, selling tickets, and organizing a ten-city run that began in India before continuing across the United States. She had no established reputation as a choreographer and no existing infrastructure behind the project. What she did have was the willingness to figure it out.

The experience became a turning point. The tour showed Gupta that her creative and professional instincts did not have to exist in separate worlds. The strategic thinking, organization, and problem-solving she had developed through business could be applied just as meaningfully to something as personal as dance. In building the tour, she was not simply pursuing a passion; she was learning what it could look like to build a life around multiple ambitions at once.

That realization led to a larger question: what happens to people who want to take their passions seriously while still maintaining a full-time career? Gupta began thinking about the realities behind that question—how people navigate their schedules, workplace expectations, creative goals, and the pressure to sustain it all over time. Those conversations eventually became part of the foundation for what would grow into Beauty and Balance and, later, The Second Shift.

Today, Gupta’s own life reflects the idea at the heart of her work. Her nine-to-five centers on strategy consulting and AI, while her second shift encompasses Beauty and Balance, The Second Shift, university talks, brand activations, influencer events, and curriculum design. But she is careful not to present that life as perfectly balanced.

“Balance happens in seasons,” she explains. “You can’t be doing everything all the time.”

For Gupta, the point is not to divide life neatly between a career and a passion. It is to recognize that both can have a place—and that what that balance looks like can change over time.

To follow more of Alisha’s work, dance, and creative projects, find her on Instagram.

To learn more about Beauty and Balance and its work with multi-hyphenate creatives, visit Beauty and Balance.