Prof. Dr. Urmimala Sarkar Munsi, retired Dean and Professor of dance studies of at the School of Arts and Aesthetics of Jawaharlal Nehru University, India is currently a Senior Fellow of the Prime Ministers’ Museum and Library. She is a social anthropologist / performance studies scholar and a trained dancer- choreographer, with research interest in socio-political assertions of identity through cultural practices and interdisciplinary research on corporeality. 

Urmimala is a member of the editorial board of the journal of the Indian Anthropological Society (JIAS), Journal of South Asian Dance Intersections (SADI) and Springer book series “Performance Studies and Cultural Discourse in South Asia”. 

Her recent publications include her co-edited (with Aishika Chakraborty) book The Dancing Body: Labour, Livelihood and Leisure (Routledge. 2025); Mapping Critical Dance Studies in India (Springer, 2024); Dancing Modernity: Uday Shankar and his Transcultural Experimentations (Palgrave, 2022), “Alice Boner Across Geographies and Arts”, (Rietberg Museum, 2021). 

She is the immediate past President of WDAAP and the Founding Editor of the Journal of Emerging Dance Scholarship (JEDS).