Disability Arts & Culture

Sins Invalid

Sins Invalid, sponsored by Dancers’ Group, is a disability justice based performance project that includes and celebrates artists with disabilities, centering artists of color and LGBTQ+/gender variant artists. Sins Invalid aims to challenge norms of what is “sexy” or “beautiful” and show that beauty is diverse and inclusive. Sins Invalid offers workshops, presents live and online multidisciplinary performances, and a podcast. 

Code of the Freaks

This is a brief article about Code of the Freaks (2020), a feature length documentary centered on reframing disabled characters in film. Code of the Freaks is an attempt to intervene in Hollywood’s promotion of harmful disability cliches and stereotypes. The documentary features a cast of disabled artists, scholars, and activists dissecting hundreds of movie clips. 

Rebirth Garments

Rebirth Garment’s mission is to create gender non-conforming wearables and accessories for queer and trans disabled folks of all sizes and ages. The line creates a community where all people can confidently express their individuality and identity. Our identity is that of Queer, Mad and Disabled, which encompasses queer, gender nonconforming identities and apparent/ non-apparent disabilities/ disorders—physical, mental, psychological, intellectual, developmental, emotional, etc. In particular, our trans and disabled communities have very particular clothing needs that are not adequately served by mainstream clothing designers. Instead of being centered on cisgender, heterosexual, white, thin people, Rebirth Garments is centered on Queer and Disabled people.

We Move Together

This book serves as a celebration of individual differences and shows how different people navigate the spaces around them every day. 

The Disability Collective

TThe Disability Collective is a not-for-profit organization and community of disabled artists dedicated to celebrating and showcasing disability in the arts. TDC strives to de-stigmatize disability and challenge perceptions of disability through promoting disabled artists in a variety of forms.

Salty Brown Femme

Salty Brown Femme creates artwork in the form of textiles, clothing, and jewelry. They identify as a “queer immigrant crip” and seek to build a world free from punishment and to live in sustainable small communities. 

Alice Sheppard

Alice Sheppard is a disabled choreographer and dancer from Britain. Sheppard started her career first as a professor, teaching English and Comparative Literature. After attending a conference on disability studies, she saw Homer Avila performed and was inspired.

Wheelchair Sports Camp

Fronted by Kalyn Rose Heffernan - a wheelchair using, profanely queer and tiny rapper, with a very distinctly high pitched sense of humor. The noisey experiment was birthed by the DIY, combining beats with shredding face live. Playing shows in every place they could, the band has since stretched into theatre, performance art, public television, politics, prison tours, permanent installations, and who knows what's next....

Maysoon Zayid

Maysoon Zayid is a comedian, actress, writer, and disability advocate. 

Christine Sun Kim

Christine Sun Kim is an American artist based in Berlin. Kim’s practice considers how sound operates in society, deconstructing the politics of sound and exploring how oral languages operate as social currency. Musical notation, written language, infographics, American Sign Language (ASL), the use of the body, and strategically deployed humor are all recurring elements in her practice. Working across drawing, performance, video and large scale murals, Kim explores her relationship to spoken languages, to her built and social environments, and to the world at large.

Gaelynn Lea

Gaelynn Lea is a disabled violinist who is amazing! I love her music. She embodies the art of music making with history. She does not highlight disability one way or another but rather highlights her amazing gift as a musician. She has a weekly ‘concert’ online that folks can attend to hear her talents.

Bodies of Work

Bodies of Work (BOW), was founded in 2002 and is an association of different programs in Chicago through UIC, the Art Institute, and Access Living, with the mission to illuminate the disability experience and a commitment to center disability art, academics, and activism. They first produced an international disability art and culture festival in 2006 and have gone on to produce many events, partner to provide arts residency programs, and other programming.

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

In their fourth collection of poetry, Lambda Literary Award-winning poet and writer Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha continues her excavation of working-class queer brown femme survivorhood and desire.