Dr. Akhila Vimal Chenicheri is a trained dancer, and a Performance and Disability Studies scholar. She completed her PhD in Theater and Performance Studies at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her thesis was titled ‘Performing Disfiguration: Pain, Affect and Staging of Relationalities in Classical and Ritual-Healing Performances of Kerala’. She obtained her master’s and M Phil degrees from the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, in 2012 and 2014 respectively, and has a B A (English) from Maharajas College, Ernakulam, Kerala .
As a trained dancer who identifies as disabled, owing to partial and recurrent vision loss, Dr. Chenicheri’s research is located at the intersection of performance and disability and disabled dance pedagogy. Methodologically, she is committed to ‘Practice as Research’ and her research interests include disfiguration, relationality of disability, gender, and caste in the Indian textual and performance practices and ritual performances. This research has appeared in peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes. In 2021, she received the inaugural International Federation of Theatre Research New Scholars Award in Disability Performance. Akhila has been a fellow at the prestigious Mellon School of Theater and Performance Research funded by the Andrew Mellon Foundation at Harvard University in 2016.
Her Fulbright-Nehru Postdoctoral Research project is to develop a practice- led dance pedagogy for blind and low- vision performers. The pedagogy aims to collectively initiate collaborative learning through somatic engagement with blind and low- vision performers, including the cultural unlearning of the expectations that come with dance training and sensibility.