Devon Healey

Devon Healey is an Assistant Professor of Disability Studies at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto. Her work is grounded in her experience as a blind woman and is guided by a desire to show how blindness and disability 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).

Her recent work engages disability studies and theatre and performance studies to explore how blind perception reveals new ways of creating, accessing, and experiencing theatre and dance. Her first play, Rainbow on Mars (Outside the March/National Ballet of Canada/Peripheral Theatre, 2025) is a sensory reclamation of blindness and marks the creation and development of Immersive Descriptive Audio (IDA) – an accessible stagecraft practice that, through blindness, understands accessibility as an integral part of the creative process and theatrical experience.

Devon is the Scholar in Residence at Toronto’s Fall for Dance North Festival. In collaboration with choreographer Robert Binet, her work on blind perception has been featured by The Royal Ballet (UK), the Queensland Ballet (Australia), Vienna State Opera (Austria), and the National Ballet of Canada. Her publications include 'Eye Contact and the Performative Touch of Blindness' in Performance Research, 'The Accessibility of the language of blindness and its rapport with sight: Immersive descriptive audio and Rainbow on Mars’ in PUBLIC: Art, culture, ideas, 'Sighted blindness consultants and the ever-lasting station of blindness' in Finding Blindness: International Constructions and Deconstructions and paper co-written with Tanya Titchkosky and Rod Michalko titled, 'Understanding blindness simulation and the culture of sight' in the international Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies.