Warren Churchill remembers the moment vividly. As a first grader in upstate New York, he sat transfixed during a school assembly, watching older children perform contemporary pop music.
“I was overwhelmed that somebody could actually perform like that — I wanted to be up there,” he recalls. Later, he stumbled upon a jazz band rehearsal. The musicians stopped mid-song and asked if he wanted to come on up. Though too shy to accept, something crystallized in that invitation. “I didn't want to do it then, but I wanted to be up there someday, playing on that stage.”
That childhood dream propelled Churchill through a remarkable career spanning 35 years. Today, as Senior Lecturer of Music at NYU Abu Dhabi, he's reshaping how educators think about music, disability, and who belongs in the classroom.
A passion for performance
Growing up in a house full of music, Churchill chased every opportunity to perform. He started playing the clarinet in sixth grade, later switching to the saxophone, and then taught himself additional instruments. He moved between the massive contra-alto clarinet in ensemble and other instruments for solo competitions, sang in choir, acted in school musicals, and ultimately earned a place at the Crane School of Music.
But a routine doctor's appointment nearly derailed everything. Churchill had experienced hearing difficulties since childhood, and before starting college, he sought advice about hearing aids. The doctor's response was stark. “Young man, have you thought about what you'd like to do with your life?” When Churchill explained his college acceptance, the doctor looked at him flatly: “Don't do it. You'll never survive.”
Churchill went anyway. After graduating, he taught for four years at a private school in St. Croix in the Caribbean, then spent 16 years in New York City public schools. Throughout, he resisted hearing aids, finding the technology of the time unhelpful for music-making. “They're designed for speech," he explains. "They're not super helpful musically.”
Discovering new musical communities
His perspective shifted during graduate studies at Teachers College, Columbia University. Enrolling in a course on psychosocial issues for Deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals, he expected to explore his own experiences. Instead, he found himself in a class taught by a Deaf professor, where he quickly realized his signing skills weren't as developed as he'd thought. When asked why he was there, he explained he was a hard-of-hearing music teacher. The professor's response transformed his thinking: “Are you aware of groups like Beethoven's Nightmare?”
Beethoven's Nightmare — a rock band comprised of Deaf musicians — was a revelation, pointing him toward a thriving community of Deaf artists creating music on their own terms.
Throughout his studies and teaching career, Churchill encountered a spectrum of musical practices that challenged conventional assumptions. One Deaf sound artist, for example, recorded everyday noises from buses to street sounds, and played them through subwoofers in her studio, placing objects on top to transform the vibrations into visual and tactile energy. “For her, the story was really about reclaiming sound as her property,” Churchill says.
His research revealed that musicality isn't defined by audiological charts but by cultural affiliation and individual expression. He sees a similar shift in how we might think about teaching. “We often think of teaching as delivering content,” he reflects. “I think of teaching as relational. It's more focused on human interactions.”
Rethinking music and inclusion in education
This philosophy now shapes his work at NYUAD, where he arrived in 2015. Teaching students from across the globe, Churchill has witnessed how diverse cultural frameworks enrich disability studies. His students bring varied perspectives to their research, from exploring spirituality and healing practices to examining folkloric traditions through a disability lens, expanding the field's possibilities in unexpected ways.
Churchill recently co-authored research with a Tamayyuz Fellowship recipient from Sri Lanka, examining social-emotional development through non-Western frameworks. He also serves as associate editor of TOPICS: A Journal of the MayDay Group and sits on the planning board for the Disability Studies and Music Education conference, which he hopes to host in Abu Dhabi.
His forthcoming book looks at teaching as a relational practice and asks how educational structures might evolve when difference is understood as a source of insight rather than a problem to solve.
“Education is always evolving, and we need to keep thinking carefully about how it works,” Churchill says. “Students are navigating systems that are still learning how to support them.”
His larger argument is that disability studies can enrich education as a whole. “If education is relational, then everyone needs support at different moments,” he says. “This isn’t just about inclusion. It’s about how disability studies can help us imagine education more broadly.
“The real question isn’t just whether you can enter a space. It’s what becomes possible for you once you’re inside.”
