Nandini Manjunath

Dr Nandini Manjunath is a Lecturer in Counselling and Psychotherapy at the University of Edinburgh, and a choreographer, Kathak dancer, dance movement psychotherapist, trauma therapist, and arts-based researcher. Her work sits at the intersection of counselling and psychotherapy, arts-led research, choreography, and De/colonial feminist inquiry. 

Her research is concerned with how knowledge emerges through lived experience, embodiment, relationality, and creative process. She is particularly interested in arts-led and practice-based research, reflexive and qualitative methodologies, and ethical questions around voice, representation, and meaning-making across therapeutic, educational, and community contexts. Her doctoral thesis, Knowing-in-Being: A De/Colonial-New Materialist Collective Biography, explored de/colonial interruptions in feminist new materialist collective biography with Indian women in relation to colonial-patriarchal conditions of knowledge production. 

Alongside her university role, Nandini is Arts-led Research & Choreographic Lead at Theiyā Arts, where her practice explores the in-between spaces of the creative and the academic. Through this work, she brings together her dancer, psychotherapist, social activist, and decolonial feminist researcher selves across performance, research, and community-engaged practice. 

Her recent arts-led projects include Maiden | Mother | Whore, for which she is credited in concept, choreography, and dance, developed through partnerships including Creative Scotland, Dance Base, and the Centre for Biomedicine, Self and Society. She is also part of Theiyā’s collaboration with CBSS as an Arts Fellow, contributing to work that brings arts-based research and choreographic inquiry into dialogue with questions of health, biomedicine, and society. 

Across her teaching, research, and creative practice, she is committed to relational, critically reflexive, and culturally attentive ways of working that widen what counts as knowledge, method, and expression.

• Arts-led research

• Practice-based research

• De/colonial feminist inquiry

• Collective biography

• Reflexive qualitative and post-qualitative methodologies

• Embodiment

• Relationality

• Creative process

• Choreographic inquiry

• Performance as research

• Psychotherapy and counselling research

• Community-engaged research

Nandini's collaborative activity spans interdisciplinary work across the University of Edinburgh, Theiyā Arts, and the Centre for Biomedicine, Self and Society (CBSS). Alongside her role at the University of Edinburgh, she is Arts-led Research & Choreographic Lead at Theiyā Arts, where her work brings together choreography, arts-led research, psychotherapy-informed practice, and community-engaged inquiry.  Through Theiyā Arts’ collaboration with CBSS, she has contributed to the development of creative-research partnerships that explore questions of gender, embodiment, health, social structures, and power. This includes Maiden | Mother | Whore, an interdisciplinary multi-media performance produced by Theiyā Arts Dance Collective in collaboration with CBSS, which draws on women’s embodied experiences and narratives to open dialogue between academic, artistic, and public communities.  Theiyā Arts was welcomed as an Artistic Fellow at CBSS to consolidate and expand these collaborations, building on earlier joint work around decolonisation, gender, bodies, and storytelling.  Across these collaborations, her contribution centres on arts-led and choreographic inquiry as a mode of research, public engagement, and interdisciplinary knowledge-making.

Dr Nandini Manjunath holds a Visiting PhD Supervisor role at Queen Margaret University, where she contributes to doctoral supervision.

• Scots Whay Hae! Podcast interview on Maiden | Mother | Whore — https://www.scotswhayhae.com/post/maiden-mother-whore-the-scots-whay-hae-podcast-talks-to-theiya-arts

• The QR feature: Maiden | Mother | Whore: An Interdisciplinary Journey into Womanhood — https://theqr.co.uk/2024/10/14/maiden-mother-whore-an-interdisciplinary-journey-into-womanhood/

• CBSS videos page, including Maiden | Mother | Whore feature — https://usher.ed.ac.uk/biomedicine-self-society/videos

• CBSS blog/event coverage: Art, science, and the biosocial — https://usher.ed.ac.uk/biomedicine-self-and-society/blog/art-science-biosocial

• CBSS news feature: Welcome Theiyā Arts — https://usher.ed.ac.uk/biomedicine-self-society/news-events/news/welcome-theiya-arts