Gabriela C. Yepes-Rossel has received a Dissertation Innovation Fellowship from the Mellon Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS). Her scholarship focuses on women theater and dance performers from the Southern Peruvian Andes who infuse their cultural traditions with new values and purposes to challenge normalized practices of intersectional inequity and violence.
Yepes-Rossel, a PhD student in Interdisciplinary Theatre Studies from Lima, Peru, has spent two summers following the stories of women theater and dance performers in the Cusco region.
“I investigate how these women, guided by a feminist perspective rooted in intuition, individual experience, and self-reflection, transform their performative repertoires—encompassing dance, ritual, play, costumes, and masks—into disruptive scenarios that create and enact alternative ways of living, relating, and organizing society,” Yepes-Rossel said.
She is interested in analyzing both the sanctioned and the disruptive strategies women use to create space for themselves during collective ritual celebrations, known as fiestas, and how these strategies have evolved over the past two generations. While the women Yepes-Rossel follows do not speak of feminism in a Western, scholarly sense, they embody “intuitive feminism,” a term coined by Bolivian artivist María Galindo to describe a form of awareness rooted in individual experience and personal reflection.
The fellowship will support Yepes-Rossel in dedicating more time this summer and in the 2025-2026 academic year to analyzing these women’s strategies. Some of them are easier to identify, as they are socially sanctioned—such as those that take place within women-only dances. The more disruptive strategies are less socially permissible, occurring under the radar and making them more challenging to trace. A notable example Gabriela has followed is that of a young performer seeking acceptance into a male-only dance group while facing harassment and rejection.
Additionally, Yepes-Rossel will examine theatrical projects that reinterpret the meaning of these fiestas, transforming the stage into a site for feminist expression and liberation. For example, she has followed the story of a theater artist who has written, acted in, and directed a play about a fiesta in which she would never be permitted to participate.
At the same time, Yepes-Rossel’s work explores theoretical questions about the potential and limitations of these performance practices to challenge multiple forms of inequality, patriarchal discipline, and gender violence.
“I aim to demonstrate how performance and theater expose unresolved contradictions within Andean cultural traditions while creating opportunities to change cultural practices from within,” she said. She will employ an innovative approach in her theoretical framework, bringing two seemingly distinct bodies of knowledge—Indigenous decolonial feminist theory and Andean intercultural theatre practice-based research—into dialogue.
Additionally, Yepes-Rossel plans to create a visual repository of women performers as part of her dissertation work. She noted that existing images and videos usually center on male performers, featuring the more well-known, exuberant dances typically performed by men. Her interest in creating an archive focused on women and new generations of women dancing and performing seeks to bring their stories into the spotlight.
“Cusco is a region with very high levels of social inequality and gender violence, some of which have become normalized and are accepted as part of the tradition,” she said. “I intend to show how Indigenous female theater artists and dance performers defy these practices through micro-acts of resistance and disobedience, changing the meanings attached to the dances, rituals, plays, songs, costumes, and gestures they perform to enact more just and livable worlds and alternative ways of seeing, feeling, and being in the world.”
Mellon/ACLS fellowship “a unique opportunity”
The Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowship program supports humanities and social sciences doctoral students whose scholarship promises to lead their fields in exciting new directions, particularly those whose dissertations introduce new methodologies, formats, or areas of inquiry.
When preparing her application, Yepes-Rossel said she found it helpful to read research summaries of past fellowship recipients’ work, including those posted on the Graduate School’s website and the Mellon/ACLS website. She also participated in Funding Forward workshops and visited the Writing Center, where a writing instructor reviewed her application.
Yepes-Rossel is excited to have more time to spend in the field following performers’ stories with the support of the fellowship, as well as more time to focus on writing her dissertation.
“It is a unique opportunity, especially now, when funding sources are becoming increasingly scarce and difficult to obtain,” Yepes-Rossel said. “It is truly a gift.”