Health Humanities Grand Rounds with Shilpa Darivemula, MD, MS

Come join HHIVE Lab on April 13, 2023 from 4 to 5pm at Bondurant Hall, Rm 2035 or on Zoom.

Performing Culturally Embodied Narrative Medicine: A Case for Kuchipudi Indian Dance

Dance has been a vehicle for cultural communication and socialization for centuries—a medium where action and understanding meet, and cultural rites, such as birth, death, and marriage for example, are celebrated and passed on generation to generation. This talk will explore the power of using cultural dances, specifically Kuchipudi Dance from Andhra Pradesh, India, as a medium to teach embodiment in medical education and to transform our understanding of ‘cross-cultural communication’.

The speaker: Shilpa Darivemula is a General Research Fellow in Obstetrics and Gynecology at UNC and former creative director of the Aseemkala Initiative. Shilpa began training in Kuchipudi at the age of 8 at the Academy of Kuchipudi Dance and performed her solo debut recital—her Rangapravesham—in 2011 at the Kalanidhi Dance school. Shilpa served as AMWA National Artist-in-Residence in 2016, studied traditional dance as women’s medicine as a Thomas Watson Fellow in 2013, and studied art as a vehicle to teach cervical cancer awareness as a ASTMH Kean Fellow in 2018. Her articles have been published in the AMA Journal of Ethics, Empiric Bioethics, BMJ Blogs, and in-House. She continues to perform medical narratives, conduct research, run workshops exploring cultural humility and justice in healthcare through her work with the Aseemkala Initiative.