Devon Healey

Devon Healey is an Assistant Professor of Disability Studies at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the 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, 2021). Devon is an award-winning actor and the co-founder of, Peripheral Theatre. In 2020 she was awarded a commission by Outside the March (Dora award-winning Toronto theatre company) to both write and perform in, Rainbow on Mars, a sensory reclamation of blindness. This play marks the creation and development of, Immersive Descriptive Audio (IDA), an artistic practice that, through blindness, understands accessibility as an integral part of the creative process and theatrical experience. In 2023, Devon was awarded the Connaught New Researcher Award to support her research project titled, ‘Ways of Seeing: An Exploration of Blindness as a form of Perception.’ Her publications include “Eye Contact and the Performative Touch of Blindness” in Performance Research (2022); “The Accessibility of the language of blindness and its rapport with sight: Immersive descriptive audio and Rainbow on Mars’ in PUBLIC: Art, culture, ideas (2022); “Sighted blindness consultants and the manyness of blindness ” in Finding Blindness: International Constructions and Deconstructions (Bolt, 2022); as well as a paper co-written with Tanya Titchkosky and Michalko titled, “Understanding blindness simulation and the culture of sight,” the international Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies. 

Keywords: Disability Studies, Blindness, Theatre and Drama, Perception, Autoethnography.  

Links:
Twitter - @DevonKHealey
Peripheral Theatre 
Academia.edu  
Research Gate   
LinkedIn