Wimal Dissanayake, a Sri Lankan communication scholar who helped establish university-level mass communication education and developed Asian approaches to communication and cinema, died Aug. 7, 2026, at 86, according to Newswire.
In 1973, Dissanayake was a founding lecturer when the University of Kelaniya introduced mass communication as an undergraduate discipline. The program brought the study of media and public communication into Sri Lanka’s university system and gave the field an institutional base.
In the 1980s, Dissanayake helped develop Asian communication theory, arguing that Eastern communication traditions should be studied rather than relying exclusively on Western models. The approach drew on Asian histories, philosophies and cultural practices. From 1986 to 1994, he led the East-West Film Journal, an Asia-Pacific publication that provided a forum for work on Asian and Western cinemas and brought regional film discussion to a wider English-language audience.
He extended this comparative approach in two books on Asian and Sri Lankan cinema. In 1994, he edited Colonialism and Nationalism in Asian Cinema, a collection examining how films across Asia represented nationhood, history and identity. In 2000, he and Ashley Ratnavibhushana published Profiling Sri Lankan Cinema, which examined Sri Lankan films through economics, style, national identity and links to other arts. Together, the books placed cinema within political and cultural history.
In 2021, he received the AMIC Asia Communication Award for Disruptive Inquiry for articulating an Asian perspective in communication studies and linking communication with culture. He edited the revised 2022 edition of Communication Theory: The Asian Perspective, launched Dec. 4, 2021. The volume brought together Asian approaches to communication, challenged dominant scholarship and consolidated the Asian communication theory he had developed over decades.
