Scholar-in-Residence

Dr. Devon Healey is the FFDN inaugural Scholar-in-Residence 2025-2027

How to describe myself? In this picture, as always, my brown hair is swept up into a puffy bun that sits high atop my head – my signature do! I am semi-reclined in a plush red velvet seat in the audience of Hart House Theatre at the University of Toronto. My legs are outstretched, and my feet are crossed resting on the back of the seat in front of me. A chandelier hangs, glowing, in the background. I have just removed my dark sunglasses; they are in my right hand with one of the arms of the glasses pressed between my lips. As I sat in this empty theatre, I thought about all the stories that had been told on this stage and, of the people that had sat in this seat before me and all that would after me. A smile began to travel across my face as my blue-eyes moved to the left. SNAP! The photographer captured me in this moment as my thoughts turned to blindness and all the stories to come…

FFDN is partnering with Dr. Devon Healey on a three year Scholar-in-Residence exploration of how blindness can enhance perception of dance. 

Devon’s academic work on Immersive Descriptive Audio (IDA) for dance has developed through an ongoing collaboration with FFDN Artistic Director Robert Binet. With questions and curiosity, she dives deeply into the physical expressive intent of dance artists and dancemakers. She joins their intent with her experience of movement through her own blindness to create a poetic text that accompanies the performance. 

Across her three years with FFDN, Devon will open applications of IDA to a broad range of choreographers and dance forms. New developments in her work will be presented as part of the FFDN 2025 closing programme.

Devon Healey is an Assistant Professor of Disability Studies at OISE, University of Toronto. All of her work is grounded in her experience as a blind woman guided by a desire to show how blindness, specifically, and disability more broadly, can be understood as offering an alternate form of perception and is thus, a valuable and creative way of experiencing and knowing the world. She is the author of, Dramatizing Blindness: Disability Studies as Critical Creative Narrative (Palgrave Macmillan). Devon is an award-winning actor and the co-founder of Peripheral Theatre. Her new play, Rainbow on Mars, co-produced with Outside the March and the National Ballet of Canada premiers August 2025 in Toronto.