Nilimma Devi is an acclaimed artist, educator, and choreographer whose career has crossed barriers and spanned the globe. She is founder and director of SIDRA, the Sutradhar Institute of Dance and Related Arts. Under her direction (1989-present), she has made the Silver Spring-based Institute into a community touchstone of classical art and culture. She currently serves on the Governor’s Arts Council.

In 2006, Devi was asked to join CID (Counseil International de la Danse), the International Dance Council of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). In 1994, Devi was a movement and cultural consultant for Paul McNally’s play “A Perfect Ganesh” at the Arena in Washington, DC. She is a former member of the Center for South Asian Studies, International Mimes, and the Congress on Research in Dance (CORD). In 1992, she presented her research on dance in the Indian immigrant community to CORD in a work entitled “The Communal Embrace.”

Devi’s work is classically rigorous yet it challenges cultural barriers. As a faculty member of the George Washington University, she teaches Gender and Classical Indian Dance. In 2006, she recorded a highly reviewed television lecture series, “Ancient Dance and Contemporary Voices,” for Osmania University in Hyderabad, India. She has been an artist-in-residence at the University of Maryland, George Mason University, and Johns Hopkins University. She has been affiliated with the Shiraz University in Iran and the University of London’s Goldsmith’s College. She choreographed a televised dance-drama in Kenya as part of the International Year of the Child.

As a recipient of a prestigious senior research grant from the American Institute of American Studies (AIAS), Devi explored creativity in hand gestures in Indian classical dance. The Twentieth-First Century grant for 2004 and 2005 by the Montgomery County Arts Council enabled Devi to design a special interdisciplinary program for elementary schools using storytelling, yoga, writing, and dance. In 1988, she was commissioned by the Smithsonian Institution to write the “Three Wise Tales,” which wove universal truths from Hinduism, Islam, and Buddhism. Running thirty shows at the Discovery Theatre, the dance drama captivated young audiences.

Devi is also the director of the Devi Dance Theater, which has performed at the Kennedy Center, Dance Place, the Smithsonian Institution, the Library of Congress, and for Voice of America. In 2002, the Choreographers Commissioning Project of the Kennedy Center awarded Devi a grant to create “Walk the Sky.” Devi’s “Poetry in Motion” was praised as “hauntingly beautiful” by the Washington Post. The work was inspired by the 12th Century radical poetess, Mahadevi Akka, and has won international accolades.