Access in Art and Design Presents: Petra Kuppers

Access in Art and Design Presents: Petra Kuppers

Join us for a talk by Petra Kuppers, acclaimed disability culture activist, community performance artist, and wheelchair dancer. For more than 30 years, she has fostered collaborative, connective community spaces where delicious bodymindspirit movement and beauty of all kinds are explored and celebrated. She uses social somatics, performance, and speculative writing to engage audiences toward more socially just and enjoyable futures. 

In this talk, Petra will discuss her current project, Planting Disabled Futures, which examines how virtual/extended reality (VR/XR) technologies can address questions of access, community, sensuality, environmental poetics, and the futures of queer/crip play. 

The project uses live performance approaches and VR/XR technologies to share energy, liveliness, ongoingness, crip joy and experiences of pain. Planting Disabled Futures asks: How can VR allow us to celebrate difference, rather than engage in hyper-mobile fantasies of overcoming and of disembodied life? How can our disabled bodymindspirits develop non-extractive intimacies, in energetic touch, using VR as a tool toward connecting with plants, with the world, even in pain, in climate emergency, in our ongoing COVID world? 

Petra Kuppers is the Anita Gonzalez Collegiate Professor of Performance Studies and Disability Culture at the University of Michigan. She is the recipient of a 2024 Camargo Foundation fellowship, a 2023 Guggenheim fellowship, a 2022 Dance/USA Artist fellowship, the American Society for Theatre Research’s best dance/theatre book award, and the National Women’s Caucus for Art Award for Arts and Activism. She is currently a Just Tech Fellow (2024-2026), a project of the Social Science Research Council. 

This lecture is hosted by Access in Art and Design, a Tyler initiative presenting programming on accessibility and inclusivity in creative fields. This event is supported by the Temple University General Activities Fund.