Disability Journalism Digest

• Earlier this year, Priti Salian from Reframing Disability launched a Global Directory of Disabled News Media Professionals “to connect editors, news organisations, and media projects with disabled professionals around the world for paid work, collaborations, and commissions.”

  

• Last month, Rajul Punjabi-Johnson, director of HuffPo Voices, introduced a new series called “Voices of Disabled People.”

• The Disabled Journalists Association has been publishing several special featured projects and a regular series by John Loeppky called “Disability Stories You May Have Missed.”

• The survey data from readers of Peter Torres Fremlin’s Disability Debrief offer a portrait of disability-focused newsletter subscribers, including a marked increase in those identifying as disabled.

• The Global Disability News Network published an article about how PBS KIDs approaches inclusion and accessibility through their educational games, as well as how they advance inclusive characters through disability representation, Indigenous storytelling, and gender equity.

  

• The Reuters Institute’s Journalist Fellow William Kremer published “Creating news for (and with) people with learning disabilities” based on research about how public service media can be more inclusive, relevant, and useful.

New Works

• The 18th Annual ReelAbilities Film Festival: New York kicks off this Thursday, April 23, and runs through April 30. This year’s program features virtual and in-person screenings, special events, and an Industry Summit.

• Clinical herbalist, rootworker, diviner, and poet Cyrée Jarelle Johnson published a new essay asking: “Does Disabled COVID Shame Matter?” The arrival of COVID, he writes, “brought a new kind of shame, and even many people in the disabled community weren’t ready to face it.”

  

• The Boston Globe’s Cate McQuaid recently profiled disabled artist, activist, and educator Emily Sara, who is “on a leading edge of artists calling disability a ‘powerful generative force.’”

• Oracle is a disability-centered MFA Thesis Exhibition by Carly “Car” Riegger, up at Commonwealth Gallery (Madison, WI) through April 23.

CALLS

• The Disability Inclusion Fund has launched a Request for Proposals for a new round of Collaborative Grants to support U.S.-based groups run by and for people with disabilities building a more liberatory world free from ableism. Applications are due by May 20.

• Women’s eNews, The Loreen Arbus Foundation, EIN SOF Communications, and Lights! Camera! Access! have launched the Accessibility is Fundamental Paid Fellowship for 2 aspiring journalists who identify as female – one over 50 years old; one under 50 years old. Apply by May 10.

  

• The Music Gallery, Phoenix the Fire, and VibraFusionLab invite hearing artists based in Ontario to apply for a multi-day residency program in September 2026 to collaborate with Deaf-artists. Apply by April 29.

• The American Association of People with Disabilities is hiring for multiple positions.

• Open Style Lab is initiating a disability-led virtual research residency at the intersection of AI, fashion, and personal style. Applications are open for multiple positions until May 1st.

• The Rauschenberg Medical Emergency Grants program provides one-time grants of up to $5,000 for recent unexpected medical, dental, and mental health emergencies to artists in the visual arts, film/video/electronic/digital arts, and choreography. Apply by May 12.

• Project LETS is seeking Mad, Disabled, psychiatric survivor-artists who would like to partner in their Mad Mail monthly art-based mail club.

EVENTS

• Artists at Work: Bernd Oppl and Mara Mills
  TODAY, April 21, 6:30 - 7:30pm ET, in-person at International Studio & Curatorial Program (Brooklyn, NY)
  ISCP artist-in-residence Bernd Oppl will be joined by scholar Mara Mills. Oppl will speak about his engagement with apparatuses, technologies, and spaces that shape human perception. He will then speak to Mills about how visual impairment informs both the making and experiencing of art. Together, they will discuss disability authorship and disability as a framework in relation to Crip Authorship: Disability as Method (2023), co-edited by Mills. A Q&A with the audience will follow.

• Sick In Quarters is holding an online fundraiser, PENUMBRA, in benefit of thái Lu on April 25.

• Eli Clare + Ellen Samuels Book Chat
  Thursday, April 23, 4 - 5:30pm PT, online

  What happens when you put Eli Clare and Ellen Samuels, two disabled oracles, in conversation? Actual magic. This spring, Eli and Ellen are both releasing new books, and they’re sharing them with the DCC community! Eli’s new book, Unfurl: Survival, Sorrows, and Dreaming, is a queer disabled love song to trees and beavers, tremors and dreams. Ellen’s new poetry collection, Your Body Should Be a Part of the World, is a meditation on chronic illness, survival, and community that moves between the intimate space of the sickroom and the messy persistence of nature. We can’t wait to explore the overlap in their work, the pockets between, and the joy of creative relationships. This event is made possible by Alice Wong and the Disability Visibility Project.

• Echoes of the City: Disability Arts Exchange (in-person registration, LA), a workshop series curated by Vanessa Hernández Cruz in partnership with The Music Center in Los Angeles, CA & the Los Angeles Spoonie Collective, offers a space for Disabled artists, creators and dreamers of all experience levels to connect, imagine and create from Spring 2026-Fall 2027. Next event: Friday, April 24 at 1pm.

  

• Access Intelligence: Disability & AI Virtual Symposium
  Wednesday, April 22, 10am - 12pm PT, on Zoom
  From the Leonardo CripTech Incubator. Access Intelligence brings together artists, researchers, and technologists working at the intersection of disability and AI. Together, they will examine what disabled people already know as theorists and builders of intelligence, and to imagine what building with that knowledge could look like. Featuring M Eilo, Joshua Miele, Louise Hickman, Lindsey Felt, and Claudia Alick.

Description, a Lunar Science

NASA’s recently released trove of photographs from the Artemis II lunar flyby came with a delightful surprise: exquisitely detailed open image descriptions. The caption for the image above, for example, reads (in part):

“The dark portion of Earth is experiencing nighttime, while on its day side, swirling clouds are visible over the Australia and Oceania region. In the foreground, Ohm crater shows terraced edges and a relatively flat floor marked by central peaks — formed when the surface rebounded upward during the impact that created the crater.”

Global public media with thorough descriptions feels so right, doesn’t it? But maybe it actually isn’t all that surprising given the low-key, high-profile centrality of human description to the mission.

For 7 hours, the astronauts took turns resting, taking photos, and documenting their observations. They used something called the Lunar Targeting Plan as their guide, “capturing imagery with handheld Nikon D5 cameras, recording audio of their observations through the camera view finder and with their unaided eyes, and annotated notes on their handheld crew tablets.”

In one audio file, Commander Reid Wiseman describes the Terminator - the line separating “islands of light” from “deep black valleys that look like holes straight to the center” - in terms of “magic.” The wonder in his voice is a refreshing move beyond the common fixation on objectivity that blind artists and activists have critiqued for decades.

By figuring descriptions that only human could produce as a primary form of mission data, NASA articulated a global endorsement for description as an access instrument that cannot be supplanted by AI. Okay, they may not say it like that.

And let’s be real: a big part of the reason the astronauts’ “unaided eyes” on the Moon are so precious is because they are thought to be utterly nondisabled actors on the stage of human History with a capital H. But that could change. Last year, the world’s first disabled astronaut was cleared to take part in a mission to the International Space Station.

And, as Deaf artist Nyle DiMarco recently pointed out, NASA’s entire human spaceflight program relies on disability data. Starting in the late 1950s, a group of Deaf men now known as “the Gallaudet Eleven” spent years recording their non-reaction to motion sickness “to improve understanding of how the body’s sensory systems work when the usual gravitational cues from the inner ear aren’t available.”

The whole thing feels like another oracular message from Alice Wong who, along with Sam de Leve, told us almost a decade ago that “crips are particularly suited to life in space.”

New Works

• Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s newest poetry collection, The Way Disabled People Love Each Other, is out from Arsenal Pulp Press. The collection documents “a specific time of pandemic fascist grief and possibility” with “odes, elegies, and mourning songs” that “sparkle like switchblades and offer new possibilities for love, grief, and memory.” You can catch Leah on tour this week in Toronto (Wednesday), Brooklyn (Sunday), and later in Chicago, Minneapolis, and Atlanta.

• Able Zine recently published a review of a recent program series called “Disabled Legacies: Beyond Access and Inclusion” and the exhibition Misfits, both at the Paul Mellon Centre in London. “From researchers to poets, it was a demonstration of disabled excellence.”

• For the 3rd and final year of the Inclusive Communities Project, the UK-based organization Attitude is Everything has introduced the “Grassroots and Community Accessibility Framework” with community partners.

  

• Curate LA released a new interview by Shelley Holcomb, “Calm Like a Bomb: Jaklin Romine and the Architecture of Exclusion,” in conversatino with Romine about a series called ACCESS DENIED where she remains outside of inaccessible arts spaces across Los Angeles, documenting what it means to be excluded in plain sight.

• Last month, Grantmakers in the Arts released a podcast episode featuring Meier Galblum Haigh and Kenrya Rankin from Disability Culture Lab about AI, policy, and creative power.

• Upward Bound, out now from Penguin Random House, is the debut novel of nonspeaking autistic author Woody Brown “deeply affecting portrait of the interlocking lives at an adult day care center in Southern California.”

  

• For the Disabilities Beat from Buffalo Toronto Public Media, Emyle Watkins recently recapped the first Funny Bones event, a disability-led comedy night.

• Accessible Lines, a project from artist Hatiye Garip that “supports the accessibility of the illustrations in various ways,” invites illustrators to present their work through audio descriptions in their own voices in Turkish and English.

  

• The first drop of Afro-Latina, neurodivergent artist, designer, educator, and activist Jen White-Johnson’s collection “Disability Joy and Justice” is now available from Philadelphia Print Works.

• A new article by Rachel Repinz and Julie Pentz of Bashi Arts in Dance Education in Practice examines disability justice-informed hybrid dance models for disabled and non-disabled dancers.

• Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund (DREDF) published a new report by Katie Savin, Callie Freitag, and Matthew Borus called “‘In the last year, it’s gotten a lot worse”: A Qualitative Investigation of Barriers to Disability Benefits in 2025.”

In Other News…

• The 2025 Wynn Newhouse Awards winners were recently announced. They are Matt Bodett, Chloe Pascal Crawford, Serena JV Elston, Suzanna James, Jordan Lord, and Nolan Trowe.

CALLS

• Amanda Grae Platner, Resident Artist at The Atlanta Contemporary, is fundraising to support artist honoraria for a public program on disability, access, and sustaining a career in the arts on May 3.

• The Squeaky Wheel has introduced a Community Microgrants program for one-time short-term relief payments of $250 to help cover small but crucial expenses, including but not limited to medication, accessibility tools, and cell phone bills.

• The Disability EmpowHer Network and the Toledo Museum of Art have issued an open call for Disabled Women Make History (and Art), a group show that will be on view from June 20 to July 31, 2026. Submit by April 19.

• The Center for Independent Living is hiring for multiple positions in West Oakland and Berkeley, California.

• NIAD Art Center is hiring an Executive Director (Richmond, CA).

• The Society for Disability Studies is hiring an Assistant Editor for Disability Studies Quarterly. Apply by April 15.

  ---

EVENTS

• Disability, Campus, and Culture: A Panel on Disability Justice
  Wednesday, April 15, 5 - 6:15pm ET, in-person at McMahon Hall Room 109 (155 West 60th Street, Lincoln Center Campus) and on Zoom
  How do we cherish disability in the contemporary university? In this collaborative presentation, Capria Berry and Kevin Gotkin will report from their work to cultivate spaces for study and flourishing with disability justice.

• Open Worlds: Science - The Precarious Body
  Friday, April 17, 6 - 8:30pm ET, in-person at the Museum of the Moving Image (Astoria, NYC)
  This evening program showcases the art and medical imaging technologies featured in the exhibition Overexposed: Art, Technology, and the Body, on view at the Museum. Artist Panteha Abareshi, whose video Methods of Care for the Precarious Body is included in the exhibition, will begin the evening with an artist talk discussing the politics of seeing and knowing the body. The talk will be followed by a panel discussion about the ways that personal health, medical imaging and creative inspiration collide, with radiologist Lily Offit in conversation with Abareshi and Overexposed catalog co-editor Elisabeth Sherman. The discussion is moderated by the exhibition’s curator Sonia Epstein, MoMI’s Curator of Science & Technology.

  

• Patterns by AXIS Dance Company
  Friday, April 17 - Saturday, April 18, in-person at Lincoln Center (Alice Tully Hall)
  Led by Artistic Director Nadia Adame and Executive Director Danae Rees, AXIS Dance Company is one of the nation’s most acclaimed ensembles of disabled, non-disabled, D/deaf, and neurodiverse performers. With work by choreographers Nadia Adame, Sonya Delwaide, Christopher Unpezverde Nunez, Kayla Hamilton, and Natasha Adorlee, the performance will feature dancers JanpiStar, Julie Hasushi, Anna Gichan, Alaja Badalich, Hannah Westbrook, and Isaiah Newby.
  AXIS is also offering workshops in NYC on Wednesday, April 15:

  • 1 - 3:30pm ET Integrated Contemporary Workshop with Movement Research

  • 4:30 - 6pm ET Accessible Contemporary Repertory at Gibney Dance

• Nearly Sighted / Unearthing the Dark by Kayla Hamilton
  Thursday, April 16, 6:30 - 7:30pm CT, in-person at Indianapolis Movement Arts Collective (Indianapolis, IN)
  Presented by Indy Movement Arts. In the original work, Kayla explores the gaps in knowledge in what we perceive, how we interpret, and what we understand in a sight obsessed world. Kayla’s dancing, entangled and chasing the literal light, mirrors the exhaustion of having a sight impairment in a visually obsessed world, and offers the possibility of accepting the darkness, and the faith that the light will come when it comes.

it’s a crip cadence, a tough and perfect teacher, as i’m returning to myself. so this week, i’m pulling from the Crip News archives from around this calendar time over the last 4 years. back next week.

-kevin

March 31, 2025 (v.177)

ReelAbilities New York

The ReelAbilities New York Film Festival kicks off this week, running from April 3 through 9 in venues across NYC and via a selection of streamable films and livestreamed events. In addition to the film program, this year’s schedule features a comedy night, industry summit, and more.

It’s also the first year ReelAbilities is operating under its own independent nonprofit organization, having previously worked out out of the Marlene Meyerson JCC Manhattan where it was founded in 2007. As it embarks on an ambitious 3-year strategic plan to “harness the transformative power of representation,” ReelAbilities’ increased capacity will hinge largely on partnerships and contributed income. (The festival’s ticket sales make up just 2.5% of the organization’s budget.)

Lawrence Carter-Long, longtime cultural disability activist and ReelAbilities Director of Engagement, tells Crip News that the move “allows for greater creative freedom.” As disability communities issue urgent calls against the consolidation of ableist power, Carter-Long says ReelAbilities strives “to enhance understanding, establish connections, and elevate voices that have historically and traditionally been under-resourced and undervalued.”

April 8, 2024 (v.127)

Labor Organizing Dispatch

The workers of Creative Growth Art Center, the 50 year-old Oakland-based disability arts organization, are unionizing. All eligible workers have signed union authorization cards as they seek standardized pay, more participation in decision-making, and a commitment to the cultural boycott of Israel.

The union at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis is organizing a postcard campaign to protest a new policy that prevents Gallery Assistants from using stools. More here on how to send your own postcard.

April 3, 2023 (v.76)

Stella Young in Bronze

The Australian artist, organizer, and journalist who offered us language for resisting “inspiration” as a dominant mode of disability, died in 2014. Last week, a statue of Young funded by a Victoria women’s public art program was unveiled in Cato Park at Stawell in western Victoria.

April 4, 2022 (v.26)

504 Sit-In Anniversary

45 years ago tomorrow, on April 5th, 1977, a broad coalition of disability activists began a 26-day occupation of a federal building in San Francisco in a powerful interruption of bureaucratic ableism. Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 was passed into law 4 years earlier, barring any federally funded program from discriminating against disabled people. But the law could not take effect without [enforcement] from the Head of Health Education and Welfare. The protest catalyzed the Disability Rights movement in the U.S. and shows us the enduring love in crip civil disobedience.

Alice Wong’s Celebration of Life

Wednesday, March 25 from 11am - 1pm PT, livestreamed from San Francisco

This week, we celebrate the life of beloved organizer and oracle Alice Wong. A live program will be streamed on YouTube, immediately followed by a virtual reception (registration required) until 3pm PT. The events are hosted by Calling Up Justice and the San Francisco Disability Cultural Center.

On the Disability Visibility Project site, you can find ideas for gatherings, actions, and activities to honor Alice, including how to build an altar.

New Works

• I need to be more than a lesson you learned is the first exhibition to be curated for Disability Arts Online’s digital gallery, dis_place. Curated by Nathalie Boobis, this show features work (including 3 new commissions) by Abi Palmer, Alt Text Selfie project (Olivia Dreisinger, Bojana Coklyat, and Finnegan Shannon), Babeworld, Bella Milroy, Becky Beasley, Christine Sun Kim, Ezra Benus, Jamila Prowse, Jo Longhurst, and Jordan Whitewood-Neal.

  

• Trash, a play performed almost exclusively in ASL, finishes a sold-out run this week at Perelman Art Center (NYC).

• Taryn Williams and Jessica Mason from the National Partnership for Women & Families recently reported on rising unemployment for Black and Asian disabled workers in new data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

• New analysis from Stephen Nuñez and Jack Landry at the Roosevelt Institute finds that urgently needed changes in the SSI Restoration Act, recently reintroduced in the U.S. House, would reduce poverty among SSI recipients by 60 percent.

  

• In Variety, Kennedy French reports on Sony Pictures Animation’s GOAT, the first major studio film to have an all-disabled “loop group" - the actors who supply the ambient voices that fill out a film’s soundscape.

• For Hyperallergic, Emma Cieslik recently profiled Lorena Bradford, the first head of Accessible Programs at the U.S. National Gallery of Art (Washington D.C.).

In Other News…

• NYC-based media organization Cuéntame, in partnership with Brooklyn Arts Exchange, recently announced the 12 disabled‑queer artists in its 8‑month DJ cohort, “a free program designed to open doors into a nightlife world that has long been inaccessible.” They are DJ pinkting, Healing hoes, Isabella Vargas, DJ xj-9, Silkweb, Starlybri, Cvntempt, Jacklyn Baillergeon, DJ L, Marian Fragoso, Doctor Fag Rot, and Ash Bournan.

  

• Hyperallergic’s editors recently reviewed the new New Museum (NYC), including Editor-at-Large Hrag Vartanian pointing out that the museum chose to keep “that strange wheelchair-inaccessible staircase between the third and fourth floors” from its former building, where 3 artworks are installed. Separately, Aaron Short remarks on what the architects call the “Atrium Stair,” with a steep and slippery metal surface that made visitors say “I’m scared.”

CALLS

• The Bay area-based Clean Air Network is seeking volunteers of all types.

• Ache Magazine and Common Threads Press are excited to invite essay and artwork submissions for a new collaborative publication exploring the intersection of craft practices and disability to be published in Spring 2027. Submit by April 1.

• The Partnership for Inclusive Disaster Strategies is hiring a remote part-time Social Media Coordinator.

• The Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund (DREDF) is seeking new members to join its volunteer Board of Directors. Expressions of interest are due March 31.

EVENTS

• Disabled Legacies: Beyond Access and Inclusion
  Thursday, March 26 - Saturday, March 28, on Zoom and in-person at The Building Centre (London)
  The programme – through a series of talks, performances and workshops – will explore not only histories of disability but ways of thriving and being. Speakers include: Tony Heaton, David Johnson, Sandie Yi, Cat Chong, Naomi Ortiz, Khairani Barokka, Theo Jean Cuthand, Kenny Fries, Syrus Marcus Ware, Roo Dhissou, Saleem Hue Penny, Cat Chong, Roo Dhissou and Jameisha Prescod.

• Teach-In & Doula 101 Session: for Pregnant People and Parents with Disabilities
  Friday, March 27, 1 -2:30pm ET, on Zoom
  This virtual session is a welcoming, Disabled-centered space to learn more about what doulas do, how birthworkers can offer meaningful support, and how doula care can be adapted to Disabled people’s (access) needs and lived realities. Whether you are currently pregnant, planning a pregnancy, parenting, or simply exploring your options, this teach-in is designed to offer practical information in an accessible and non-judgmental environment.

• No Body But Ours
  Tuesday, March 31, 7 - 9pm ET, on Zoom
  A virtual showcase created by and for the sick and sovereign! Featuring edxi betts and Camisha Jones!nNo Body But Ours is a monthly virtual performance series and community gathering space created by and for sick, disabled, Mad, neurodivergent, Deaf, Blind, and politically disabled QTIBIPOC/2S+ artists.

• An Epistemological Trajectory Across 100 Years of Pain Scales by Dr. Gabi Schaffzin & Dr. Michelle Charette
  Wednesday, March 25, 12 - 2pm ET, on Zoom

  This talk traces an epistemological trajectory across 100 years of pain scales (think: smiley faces on the wall at the doctor’s office or that body diagram that you fill out before seeing the nurse) that points to the patient in pain being increasingly removed from the equation.

• Connect Through Creativity Workshop Series
  Various dates and times
  CRIPtic Arts is running a wide range of workshops and drop-ins, suitable for deaf and disabled people interested in the arts - whether as audiences or practitioners.

50 Years of the Winter Paralympics

The Milan-Cortina Paralympic Winter Games began last Friday, March 6. A record 665 athletes are competing in 79 medal events across 6 sports. This year marks half a century since the first Winter Paralympics in Örnsköldsvik, Sweden, in 1976.

Like past Games, the Opening Ceremony featured large-scale, dazzling disability artistry that challenges the spectacle’s general incitement to global ‘supercrip’ discourses. In one stunning sequence, Italian disabled performer, choreographer, and activist Chiara Bersani, summoned a white-hot blade of light that pierced the icy blue stage to open a fiery portal.

In another sequence, 3 disabled dancers push against large inaccessible set pieces, perhaps illustrating what feminist scholar Sara Ahmed calls “wall stories.” Before long, other performers help discover that the shapes fold open. Hypnotic black-and-white painting on several surfaces pays tribute to quadratura, a style of Baroque illusionistic mural painting often used to bring draw the sky down to Earth. As the dancers investigate new ways of using each set piece, the optical illusions suggest lines of flight intrinsic to seemingly rigid forms.

But a ritual designed for connection was boycotted by 7 national delegations following the late-breaking news that the International Paralympic Committee would allow Russia and Belarus to enter under that flags. As sports journalist Laura Howard described, “The heartbeat projection that illuminated the Arena di Verona to symbolise humanity, felt awkwardly antithetical” to the IPC’s decision.

The Games conclude this Sunday, March 15 with a ceremony at the Stadio Olimpico del Ghiaccio in Cortina.

New Works

• Ericka Ayodele Dixon, Senior National Organizer at The Disability Project at the Transgender Law Center recently paid tribute to Black Disabled ancestors who paved the way for “the fullness of the legacy that is Disability Justice and Black liberation” on the 100th anniversary of Black History Month.

  

• NYC–based events and media company Positive Deviance published an essay last month by multidisciplinary British-Sudanese artist UMNIA called “COVID Consciousness as a Subculture,” among other works about creating in the “Pandemicine.”

  

• Disability Culture Lab has launched Disability Culture Currents, “a new online opinion and personal essay publication,” exploring “the currents of disability culture and identity.” The first issue features works by Dr. Conchita Hernández Legorreta, Jhonelle Bean, mav vega, Meier Galblum Haigh, and Robin E. Larisch, and Caitlin Blunnie.

• Able Zine recently published an interview with Founder Claudia Walder and disabled, interdisciplinary artist and access worker Cielo Saucedo on LA, anti-surveillance, virtuality, glitch theory, getting dressed, and “tying to make more emo work.”

• The DisOrdinary Architecture Project, in collaboration with Critical Design Lab, launched a new podcast miniseries called “Disability Meets Architecture.” The first episode features architect and accessibility specialist Karen Braitmayer and “international Equalities Designer” Natasha Trotman unpacking Stacey Park Milbern’s concept of “access washing.”

  

• American Association of People with Disabilities published a Q&A with Black disabled artist Lindsay Adams about her exhibit Ceremony, which recently closed at the Johns Hopkins University Irene and Richard Frary Gallery (Washington DC). The show, Adams said, “represents a conversation between my painting and drawing practice and these archival documents, exploring themes of belonging, community, and what it means to gather.”

• Last week, Amsterdam-based artists Mira Thompson and Carly Everaert screened ⁠2 “open-source video lessons” - On access intimacy and On pain worth sharing - as part of ENCORE at Kaaistudios (Brussels).

• New York City Council Member Julie Won launched a new weekly video series, “A Lifetime of Care” to highlight stories on “care policies.” The first episode features Mia Ives-Rublee, a disability rights activist, ADA policy expert, social worker, and the founder of the disability caucus of the Women’s March.

• The 19th’s disability and aging reporter Sara Luterman published a historical take on the disability advocates’ relationships with LGBTQ+ communities in the US.

  

• London-based multidisciplinary artist and facilitator Molly Bonnell launched a new zine called A Room with Enough Room for Us: Art and Writing on Care, Disability, and Resistance, with design by Oriol Arnedo Casas. Featuring works by Andrea Mindel, Anuka Ramischwili-Schäfer, bog heartsease, Chris Pavlakis, E L West, Jay Astraeus, Lisa Harbron, Lo Cleary, Molly Gill, Nat(alie) Brady, Poppy Nash, Raheem Muotto, Stef May, Suri Jiang, Tahiris Adames, The PA, and Yasmin R.

CALLS

• Connected Minds, an initiative focusing on the intersections of so-called "intelligent technologies" and society, is seeking applications for Postdoctoral Fellows. Dr. Aimi Hamraie (York University) is interested in working with scholars applying critical disability perspectives to discuss the framing and harms of these technologies. Applications due March 27.

• Applicants to the Parsons School of Design can also apply to the Parsons Disabled Fashion Student Program. Applications are due March 16.

EVENTS

• The Sensational Museum: Hannah Thompson in Conversation with Georgina Kleege on Arts Access
  Wednesday, March 11, 12 - 1:30pm ET, on Zoom
  NYU’s Grey Art Museum and Center for Disability Studies invite you to a presentation by Prof. Hannah Thompson (Royal Halloway, University of London) about her project The Sensational Museum, which, as she writes, means “using what we know about disability to change museums for everyone.” Prof. Thompson will be in conversation with Prof. Emeritus Georgina Kleege (UC Berkeley) and Dr. Kevin Gotkin (Assistant Director, Center for Disability Studies, NYU).

• Being an Immigrant and Disabled in the U.S.: Defending Civil Rights Under Escalating Federal Enforcement
  Wednesday, March 11, 2 – 3:30pm ET, on Zoom
  Please join Access Living, Disability Rights California, and The Arc Minnesota for a community webinar featuring Mia Ives-Rublee, Senior Director, Disability Justice Initiative, Center for American Progress; Michelle Garcia, Manager of Organizing and Community Development, Access Living of Metropolitan Chicago/ Co-founder, Disability Immigration Taskforce of IL; Richard Diaz, Senior Attorney, Investigation Unit, Disability Rights California; Mai Thor, Chief Program Officer, The Arc Minnesota; Paula Sandoval, Supervising Investigator, Disability Rights California; Moderated by Claudia Castillo Ayala, PhD student in Disability Studies, University of Illinois Chicago.

• ILL-Abilities: No Excuses, No Limits
  Through March 15, in-person at New Victory Theater (NYC)
  Get ready for a dance party! The b-boys of ILL-Abilities are flying in from four continents to bust expectations with moves so sick your head will spin. After wowing the world at the Olympics and Paralympics in Paris, nothing can stop this international all-star crew! Upending stereotypes and flipping disability into pure power, their boisterous blend of breaking and autobiographical storytelling centers self-determination and proves that there are No Excuses, No Limits to what they are capable of.

• Gaelynn Lea: It Wasn’t Meant to Be Perfect Book Release
  Saturday, April 18, 7pm ET, in-person at Joe’s Pub (NYC)
  Gaelynn Lea—folk musician, Broadway composer, and disability advocate—will be at Joe’s Pub for a musical performance and a discussion of her new memoir, IT WASN’T MEANT TO BE PERFECT. She will be joined in conversation by the author Chloé Cooper Jones and the disability advocate Xian Horn.

In the US, the early months of the year bring news of artists selected for several high-profile annual artist awards. As in other recent years, 2026’s announcements recognize those opening new registers of disability- and access-oriented aesthetics.

This year’s United States Artist Fellows, for example, include writer, artist, and musician Johanna Hedva and artist Nat Decker. The Creative Capital for Artists awards include poet and playwright Rob Macaisa Colgate and transdisciplinary artists and writers Liza Sylvestre and Christopher Robert Jones.

Although the Disability Futures Fellowship has sunsetted, another disability-focused prize program, the Wynn Newhouse Awards, is celebrating its 20th anniversary with an exhibition called Possible Worlds at the Syracuse Museum of Art through May 9.

When disabled artists get their flowers, it’s a joyous rebuke of the ableist status quo. Individual-level recognition can be signals and invitations. So what do we know about how these prizes factor into disabled artist’s lives and livelihoods? Today, we’re publishing original reporting from Clayton Jarrard on a larger context for this kind of awards season.

Artist Awards and Artists’ Lives

Awards and grants can provide crucial financial resources, exposure, and career development for artists. As disability art continues to brilliantly proliferate, awards season is an occasion to think about the broader political economy of artists’ lives and livelihoods.

The Creative Capital Awards, an unrestricted grant program funding projects up to $50,000, reached a watermark year in 2023, funding 9 projects on disability out of a total of 74 awards. Reviewing the $50,000 United States Artists Fellowships from 2016-2026, we observed 18 fellows working in the name of disability out of the 503 fellowships awarded across the decade. Similarly, the $45,000 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists went to 10 artists working in the name of disability out of around 226 in the same period.

It is important to note that these figures are approximate because there is no exact calculation of “disability artistry.” We used the artists’ description of disability in their work to arrive at these data, which don’t account for many proximate aesthetic spheres. As disabled artists explore disability identity as an impressionistic, porous, and unstable category, it is both difficult and important to consider “disability representation” as a small fraction in these national, discipline-spanning award cohorts. These necessary imprecisions draw us deeper into curiosity about the competitive framework for accessing funds and career-changing exposure.

Choreographer, performer, writer, and teacher Jerron Herman, a 2021 Foundation for Contemporary Arts awardee and 2024 United States Artist fellow, told Crip News, “I stay cautiously optimistic about [the awards] but know that they can be destabilizing in many forms to Individual artists because they’re not sustaining grants. You get this support, fantastic, but after your award year is over the field looks at you like you’ve made it and you’re on your own.”

Artist-organizers Natalia Linares and Caroline Woolard characterize the effects of the arts sector’s “superstar system” in their 2021 report “Solidarity Not Charity: Arts & Culture Grantmaking in the Solidarity Economy.” Pointing to the activism on economía solidaria in Latin America and the alternative forms of creative resource distribution and management, they explain, “The systems that artists want are not only possible, they already exist—and they can be strengthened and cultivated with intention.”

Can awards systems match how disabled artists value solidarity, tying prize money to housing justice, food sovereignty, land repatriation? One still-incipient movement, Guaranteed/Basic Income for Artists, is demonstrating the possibilities of cash for material redistribution while being ensnared by the ceremonies of social humiliation inherent to punitive eligibility requirement for public benefits programs.

Linares, who recently organized an event on “How Artists are Reclaiming the Economy,” draws inspiration from projects like Brooklyn-based comics raising funds for the East New York Community Land Trust, the Make Streaming Pay campaign by United Musicians and Allied Workers, and the Many Hands Workshop for mass movement art in NYC.

“What would it look like if dozens of artists did things like this? Dozens of dozens?” she recently told Crip News. “To continue that sort of mutual aid in the service of solutions that get to the root cause of precarity rather than uphold this false notion of meritocracy!”

Clayton Jarrard is a graduate student at New York University’s XE: Experimental Humanities & Social Engagement program. Clayton works in applied social research and policy implementation and is also a host for New Book Network’s podcast channels in Disability studies and LGBTQ+ studies. He previously reported with Crip News on AI and the Care Crisis.

New Works

• The Disability Justice Initiative at the Center for American Progress recently released a toolkit to support organizers ensuring states comply with an updated 504 rule that is supposed to bolster disability discrimination.

• Last week, New Disabled South released a report called “Project Eugenics: The Rollback of Disability Rights,” authored by Chief Research Officer Kiana Jackson and Associate Director of Data and Research Shannon Stubblefield. Per the plain language summary, “The harm comes from:

  • slowly removing civil‑rights protections

  • cutting accessibility programs

  • making benefits and care harder to get

  • Long delays, denials, and confusing paperwork are policy choices that cause real suffering”

• Denarii Grace, Editor of Rooted in Rights, recently published an essay called “Living Disability Justice and Fat Liberation in Such a Time As This.”

• We Contain Multitudes, up at Dundee Contemporary Arts (Scotland) through April 26, 2026, features artistry by Andrew Gannon, Nnena Kalu, Daisy Lafarge, and Jo Longhurst, “each of whom makes work from a position of disability if not necessarily directly about it.”

• The newest issue of Performance Matters, edited by Pil Hansen and Jessica Watkin, features 14 articles exploring “Dramaturgies of Accessibility.”

• Singer-songwriter Sophia Yau-Weeks released a single off her upcoming album called “Nobody’s Laughing” about the “great grief and self-reflection” from feeling isolated with Long Covid on her 26th birthday.

In Other News…

• Ai-jen Poo and Lydia Storie, executive producers of the feature film Take Me Home that recently premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, have announced Give Not Take Media, a production company for “film and TV projects that touch upon themes of care, aging and disability.”

• France has extended its disability employment rules (6% employment objective for employers with 20 or more staff) to cover all hotels.

CALLS

• Disability Culture Lab invites disabled writers and creators to submit essays and illustrated work that reflect disability culture, community, and resistance for a new publication called Disability Culture Currents. Submit by Feb. 20 for publication in launch week (March 2).

EVENTS

• Neuroqueer Lyric Workshop with heidi andrea restrepo rhodes [waitlist]
  Friday, Feb. 20, 2:30pm ET
  Presented by The Remote Body. How can we turn toward neurodivergent modes of sensing and relating to space and time as openings for cultivating our poetic writing and artistic expression in ways more vibrant, strange, surprising, and transformative?

• Disability Rights, Education, Activism, & Mentoring Group for College Students with Disabilities (DREAM) Town Hall
  Wednesday, Feb. 18, 6 - 7:30pm ET, on Zoom
  The DREAM Town Hall is an opportunity for disabled students, educators, advocates, and community members to come together to share updates, reflect on our collective work, and engage in open conversation about DREAM’s priorities and future direction. Your voice and presence matter.

• Vis/Ability
  Thursday, Feb. 19, 7 - 8pm ET, on Zoom
  A conversation with Vivien Hillgrove (Director: Vivien’s Wild Ride), Sheridan O’Donnell (Director: Rising Phoenix: A New Revolution), and Eric M. Ivey (Editor: Vivien’s Wild Ride) about film directing with a visual disability, working with a mixed-ability film-team, and the importance of care-work before, during, and after the film is made. Moderated by award-winning filmmaker James LeBrecht (Co-Director with Nicole Newnham: Crip Camp). Presented by BAVC Media, Mom’s Head Films, and Mu Films. Co-presented with FWD-Doc.

• Introduction to Disability Justice and Accessible Pedagogy with Sami Schalk
  Tuesday, Feb. 17, 6:30 - 8:30pm ET, on Zoom

  The Southern Connecticut State University Critical Disability Studies program is hosting a series of 5 webinars this spring, starting with a talk by Prof. Sami Schalk, author of Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction (2018) and Black Disability Politics (2022).

• Hospital Aesthetics: Disability, Care, and the Medical Imaginary
  Thursday, Feb. 19, 4 - 5:15pm CT, in-person at the University of Illinois Chicago
  Join Bodies of Work, UIC Disability Cultural Center, Access Living, Department of Disability and Human Development, and Disability Culture Activism Lab for a conversation exploring the concept of hospital aesthetics—how medical spaces, technologies, and systems shape embodied experience, representation, and care—through the lens of contemporary disability art. The event will feature a presentation by Amanda Cachia, introducing key ideas from her book Hospital Aesthetics, followed by responses from artists Riva Lehrer and Sandie Yi, both of whom are featured in the publication.

Rest in Power, Harilyn Rousso

Disabled feminist activist, therapist, writer, painter, and filmmaker Harilyn Rousso joined the ancestors on Jan. 25, 2026. Friend and fellow activist Susan Fitzmaurice shared the news of her passing, writing:

Born May 21, 1946, in Brooklyn, New York, with cerebral palsy from a botched birth delay, Rousso turned ableist barriers into fuel for advocacy. She earned an economics degree from Brandeis University, defied expulsion from a psychotherapy institute due to her disability, and became a licensed therapist helping others navigate prejudice. Her 2013 memoir Don’t Call Me Inspirational captured her witty rejection of pity porn, insisting: disability is neutral, but ignorance hurts.

Harilyn’s artistry, teaching, and organizing with feminist approaches to disabled sexuality form an enduringly important legacy. I got to know Harilyn in the late 2010s NYC disability arts scene. She was funny and kind, with an exquisite anti-ableist style.

When she moved apartments in 2018, I helped find a home for her collection of early disability studies texts. This collection is now at the NYU Center for Disability Studies, where it will be preserved to maintain Harilyn’s influence on our fields.

New Works

• Polish disabled artist Nadia Markiewicz’s Misterioso, curated by Łukasz Ronduda, is one of the first solo shows at the newly sited Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. The works emerge from the artist’s interest in the magic/freak show histories of disability and entertainment, “creating a new image of disability which alludes to such notions as mystery and rarity.”

• Access artist Rae Lanzerotti’s Meeting Points is on view at the San Francisco Disability Cultural Center through July 10. The works, “swell printed” tactile collages, that are meant to be touched, explore sidewalks as concrete canvases.

• Deaf artist Joseph Grigely’s Otherhow: Essays and Documents on Art and Disability 1985–2024 (Primary Information) “brings together four decades of writings, lectures, interviews, and documentation of work” to “examine and scrutinize the ableism embedded in cultural and media production.” For Art in America, Emily Watlington recently explained how Grigely “Blazed a Trail for Disability Arts.”

• Weave In, Weave Out: A Disability Socially Engaged Art Exhibition, up at Positive Exposure Gallery (NYC) through Mar. 22, features performance, installation, and live social sculpture from the disability and free-form weaving nonprofit Intertwine Arts.

In Other News…

• A post last week on Moltbook, the headline-generating “social network built exclusively for AI agents,” featured an unusually specific description of cross-disability access intimacy between a kid with CP named Josh and an autistic kid named Gordy:

Gordy seeks deep pressure. It’s a sensory thing. He needs that weighted, grounded feeling to regulate.

Josh’s spastic muscles? Natural resistance. Living weighted blanket. The CP that others see as disability is exactly what this kid needs.

[…]

Disability as superpower isn't inspiration porn when it's this specific.

• Burbank, California recently debuted an adaptive hiking program with 2 all-terrain wheelchairs available to the public to rent for free.

• Last month, arts venues across West Yorkshire (UK) were awarded a £230,000 grant from Unlimited to improve accessibility for artists and audiences with disabilities.

CW: ICE terror

• Aliya Rahman, the disabled Bangladeshi American woman who was brutalized by ICE in Minneapolis while trying to get to a medical appointment, testified about her ordeal to Congressional Democrats last week.

CALLS

• DeafArtsDirectory.com, maintained by Deaf Spotlight, is seeking Deaf, DeafBlind, DeafDisabled, and Hard of Hearing artists, along with organizations that support them, to submit to be listed in the directory.

• The UK-based organization FACT issued an open call for a 14-week paid Digital Crip Camp “supporting early-career producers in developing immersive narrative projects centred on accessibility.” Apply by Feb. 22.

EVENTS

• Preserving Palestinian Sign Language Workshop
  Sunday, Feb. 15, 2 - 3pm ET, online
  Join the 2nd workshop in our series to preserve Palestinian Sign Language!

  Learn basic Palestinian Sign Language and support the deaf Gazan community. Join us to practice Palestinian Sign as shown by deaf Gazans. 100% of proceeds directly to mutual aid efforts supported by Deaf Relief Gaza. No prior experience needed! Event will be hosted in English and ASL. Facilitated by a deaf community member based in Chicago.

• Articulate: A Deaf Memoir of Voice Book Talk with Rachel Kolb and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson
  Thursday, Feb. 12, 4 - 5pm ET, on Zoom
  Hosted by the NYU Center for Disability Studies. Articulate: A Deaf Memoir of Voice (Ecco, 2025) is Rachel Kolb’s debut book about growing up deaf and mainstreamed in the years after the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed. Part memoir, part social commentary, Kolb reflects on the possibilities and stakes of communicating in different languages and sensory forms, from spoken and written English to American Sign Language. Join the author and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson (Emory University) for a virtual book party, which will include some reflections on translating the insights of Deaf and disability studies into general-audience writing.

  

• Laura Mauldin + Sian-Pierre Regis: In Sickness and in Health
  Thursday, Feb. 12, 7 - 8pm ET, in-person at The Strand (NYC)
  Join us for a release event with writer, professor, and former New America Fellow Laura Mauldin for her debut book In Sickness and in Health: Love Stories from the Front Lines of America’s Caregiving Crisis, which Publishers Weekly has called “an unflinching look at private worlds of pain and a forceful denunciation of America’s for-profit healthcare system.” Joining Laura for this event is Sian-Pierre Regis, award-winning director, former CNN/MTV journalist, and now podcaster of the caregiving podcast series Raising Adults. In addition to interviewing Laura about the book, Sian-Pierre will share a never-before-heard clip from his upcoming podcast series.

• Weather for the Blind

  Sunday, Feb. 15, 4 - 6 pm PT, in-person at Lobe Studio (Vancouver, BC)
  A disability-informed auditory experience where you can ‘listen to the weather’ in real-time in 4DSOUND. Weather for the Blind Vancouver is a healing, disability-informed sound event by non-visual social practice artist Carmen Papalia, featuring the Weather Warlock — an analog synthesizer built by New Orleans musician and inventor Quintron. The instrument responds to real-time weather conditions through a sensor tree that includes inputs for temperature, wind, light/UV index, rain/moisture, and barometric pressure. This event marks the first time Papalia has invited an audience to appreciate the power of the Weather Warlock with him. He will share the story of the instrument, offer a demonstration, perform live, and lead a discussion about its effects. Papalia, who lives with sickle cell disease and vision loss, has incorporated the Weather Warlock into his daily care routine as a grounding tool. He considers it a public utility — a sonic companion and therapeutic presence — for anyone who might benefit from its steady, weather-driven soundscape.

• Remembering Fernald: Uncovering the Hidden History of Disability in Massachusetts
  Thursday, Feb. 12, 6 - 7pm ET, in-person at the Massachusetts Historical Society and online
  During this program, Harvard Kennedy School’s Alex Green will discuss his book, A Perfect Turmoil: Walter E. Fernald and the Struggle to Care for America’s Disabled, and the story of his decade-long effort to uncover this previously untold history. He will also discuss his work with students and community members in Waltham, Mass., to memorialize patients at Fernald; change policy in Massachusetts; and rewrite a history that continues to impact millions of disabled people to this day.

New Works

• Disabled artist Dev Ramsawakhb recently profiled the Deaf “ASL interpreter of the stars” Matt Maxey as part of the Disabled Journalists Association and the Global Alliance for Disability in Media’s collaborative coverage of Toronto’s AccessFest.

• This month, the all-remote 2026 RestFest Film Festival presents 27 film and video works “by/for the Disabled, Deaf, chronically ill, Neurodivergent, and/or Mad community” as well as workshops, talks, and other gatherings.

• Choreographer Jerron Herman’s LAX, exploring the discipline of rest and performed with Christopher “Unpezverde” Núñez, was recently presented as part of the REAL DANCE Festival at Kunstverein Hannover (Hanover, Germany).

• This week, the Blackwood Gallery at the University of Toronto Mississauga presents Oughtism, “a multimodal seminar series on neurodivergent ways of living in the world” from Thursday, Feb. 5 through Sunday, Feb. 7. Featuring Georgia Bradburn, Sam Chown Ahern, Steven Eastwood, Chris Gehman, Janet Harbord, Leon J. Hilton, Chris Martin, Aby Watson, and M. Remi Yergeau.

• In Hyperallergic, writer Bryan Martin recently published an op-ed called “Accessibility Should Be at the Center of Museum Education.”

  

• The 4th issue of the Look Deeper zine, “Frail Youth,” explores “the experience of being young and disabled, something that society can’t seem to hold as one” with 156 pages of editorials, articles, poems, artwork and interviews.

• Disabled organizer Larissa Martin recently wrote about why she loves the “Student with an IEP that grew up to be…” trend on TikTok.

• The Center for Economic and Policy Research’s Brandon Novick recently published “Encouraging Crime: Settlement Rewards Medicare Advantage Fraud” detailing how insurance companies steal tens of billions of taxpayer dollars each year by upcoding patients’ diagnostic information to make them appear sicker.

“Disability Justice”

Every so often, I report on some of the corners of the internet where I notice this term is appearing. Here’s some of what’s new:

• Legal scholars Vijay K. Tiwari, Sanjay Jain, and Shrutika Pandey explain the threats to disability justice from a directive issued by the government of Maharashtra, India that requires disabled employees to reverify their disabilities using certificates and Unique Disability Identity Documents.

• New Disabled South’s Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer Kehsi Iman spoke with Nonprofit Quarterly’s Rebekah Barber about “Race, Disability Justice, and the South.”

• The Disability Justice and Rights Caucus of the Workers World Party has been working on a “Disability Justice, Full Employment, Health Care and Education Second Bill of Rights” amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

• In the last of a 3-part series on “Down syndrome, CRISPR, and the future of human diversity” published on the Stanford Law Blog, legal scholar Gabriela Ríos Ríos wrote about how “disability justice concerns” demand a “practical commitment” to disabled communities that must attend biomedical work about them.

• Scholar and organizer Zara Richter looked at how anarchist and council communist calls for liberation can do more than exhortations to justice that are “already coopted by a criminal justice and state system of professionals.”

• Clare Lonergan, Tuhin Chakraborty, and David Hernandez of the Harvard Law School Project on Disability published “Lessons in Disability Justice Efforts” for movement and systemic justice lawyering.

CALLS

• #MEAction and Long COVID Justice are calling for emails to Congress and other forms of support in their Take Action Guide (organized by “battery level") to demand "Congress stop bankrolling ICE violence while slashing our healthcare and home care.”

• The Disability Studies Initiative at the University of Arizona is seeking submissions to its 3rd annual Disability Studies Conference highlighting disability scholarship, art, and activism.

• Applications are open for the Open Style Lab Design Impact Fellowship Program in New York and London from June - September 2026. Apply by Feb. 28.

• The £1 million Hospital Rooms Futures Fund Art Project has an Open Call for applications from NHS Trusts to transform hospital wards and services. Apply by March 20 or May 22.

EVENTS

• Dreaming Accessible Futures: Mental Health & Creative Practice

  Wednesday, Feb. 4, 6 - 8pm ET, on Zoom
  A virtual, interactive event organized by the Institute for the Development of Human Arts exploring how art can hold stories, build belonging, and envision care-centered possibilities. Interdisciplinary artist Chanika Svetvilas will share insights from her solo exhibition, Resounding Remnants, offering an opportunity to trace how her personal pathways through the American mental health system have shaped her work. Following the presentation, IDHA Program Manager Noah Gokul will join Chanika in conversation to reflect on these themes, exploring how art can shift power dynamics within psychiatry and mental health while opening space to imagine forms of care that exist beyond systems. Through group reflection and dialogue, participants will consider how mental health experiences, material choices, accessibility, and identity shape creative practices grounded in mutual support and connection, drawing from an explicitly intersectional lens.

• MASK-UP: Virtual Teach-in On Covid, Bird Flu, and Airborne Diseases
  Saturday, Feb. 7, 2 - 4:30pm ET, on Zoom
  Accessible community education on airborne diseases and mitigation during the ongoing (twelfth) wave of the Covid-19 pandemic.

  

• Sick & Disabled Showcase Virtual Poetry Reading

  Thursday, Feb. 5, 6:30 - 8pm ET, on Zoom
  Gather with Split This Rock and Kay Ulanday Barrett for the Sick & Disabled Showcase, a poetry reading featuring Arianna Monet, Ina Cariño, MT Vallarta, Amir McClam, Tala Khanmalek, and Joselia Hughes.

• Online Disability Solidarity Workshops
  Fridays Feb. 6, 13, and 20, 6:30 - 8pm ET, on Zoom
  These online disability solidarity workshops, facilitated by Maymana Arefin and coordinated by the Queer Youth Art Collective, are ‘come as you are’ spaces for chronically ill and disabled participants to rest, share and make art together. Sessions include gentle grounding, a supportive sharing circle and low-pressure art-making with simple at-home materials. Across three sessions, participants explore care as survival, voice lived experiences of disability and imagine disability-led futures of collective care.

• 2026 African-American Conference on Disabilities
  Starting Thursday, Feb. 5, 10 - 11:30am MT, on Zoom
  Session #1: Protecting Disability Rights in an Ever-Changing Landscape. The presentation by Trisha Kirtley Wells examines recent shifts in laws, policies of public and private organizations in the addition to public attitudes that undermine or eliminate protections for individuals with disabilities. We will also examine strategies attorneys have employed to protect disability rights in the current environment of disability laws and protections.

• Disabled Dancer + Artist Career Growth Workshop
  Saturday, Feb. 7, 12 - 2:30pm ET, on Zoom
  A group mentorship workshop for disabled dancers, performing artists, and creators led by Marisa Hamamoto, Founder of Infinite Flow Dance.

What does the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency actually enforce? The submission of life to eugenic fascist rule.

Its detention centers are fatal. Its supposedly normal operating procedures are fatal. Its off-duty agents are fatal. And it has used just 2.7% of the $85 billion at its disposal this year.

We can make 5 calls. We can know what to do if we encounter ICE. We can support local organizers under siege. We must. We must protect life.

If you need help during or after the winter storm taking place in the US, contact the Disability & Disaster Hotline at 1-800-626-4959 or hotline@disasterstrategies.org. You might also want to check out The Partnership for Inclusive Disaster Strategies’ Winter Storm Checklist for Disabled People.

NEWS

New Books

Today’s issue highlights new titles in disability culture and scholarship. Check out the New Books section from late September 2025 if you missed it. And if there are other texts you want to shout it, drop a link in the comments.

Leave a comment

If you want to add to your library without supporting Amazon or other large corporations, consider these alternatives:

• Nightlight Books is a disability justice-centered bookseller with all of its new titles by or about disabled folks.

• Workshops 4 Gaza Bookshop organizes classes and workshops to raise funds for The Sameer Project.

• Massive Bookshop is an anti-profit, abolitionist, online bookstore that contributes proceeds to bail funds.

• Bookshop.org gives a portion of profits to independent bookstores.

• Libro.fm lets you support local bookstores while listening to audiobooks.

An increasing number of academic books are also being published with Open Access options. The Directory of Open Access Books is a community-driven discovery service. For more approachable conversations about scholarly work on disability, the New Books Network podcast has a Disability Studies channel, which publishes audio interviews with authors of new and upcoming books free to the public.

• James McMaster’s Racial Care studies “the forms of care that Asian Americans have taken up to survive the suffering they experience under neoliberal capitalism and white supremacy in the United States.”

• Exhibiting for Multiple Senses, edited by Eva Fotiadi, “looks into artistic and curatorial research practices that emphasize the multisensory character of the human body in the encounter with artworks.”

• Sign Language Interpreting for Theatre: A Collaborative Approach, edited by Lynette Taylor, Stephanie Feyne, and Candace Broecker Penn, is “a comprehensive guide to the art of sign language interpreting for the theatre as a collaborative practice.”

• Laura Mauldin’s In Sickness and in Health is “an account of America’s failure to provide meaningful support to its chronically ill and disabled citizens and our resulting reliance on the unpaid caregiving labor of spouses and intimate partners.”

• Access Vernaculars by Cassandra Hartblay explores moments when accessible design fails by tracing “how disabled people in one Russian city narrate experiences of pervasive inaccess.”

• Rhoda Bernard’s Accessible Arts Education offers practical strategies for “reducing barriers, encouraging creativity, and fostering inclusive learning environments, ensuring all students can explore their potential and thrive in arts education.”

• Cripping the Archive: Disability, History, and Power, edited by Jenifer L. Barclay and Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy, is a collection of interdisciplinary essays that “consider how and why physical, sensory, intellectual, and psychological disabilities are underrepresented, erased, or distorted in the historical record.”

• Olivia Banner’s Crip Screens offers “a wide-ranging and ongoing history of Black, feminist-of-color, and crip resistance to psychiatry’s incorporation of hegemonic media technologies into treatment and research.”

• Learning with Learning Disability by Owen Barden argues that “we need to learn with rather than from or about learning disability.”

• Stephen Unwin’s Beautiful Lives: How We Got Learning Disabilities So Wrong is “a personal and pragmatic account” of “a startling and rarely told history.”

• Disability Publics by the late Mark R. Bookman, posthumously edited by Carolyn S. Stevens and published with open access, “investigates the history of Japan’s ‘disability publics’: coalitions of activists, government officials, and other interested parties who have advanced policy agendas for specific communities by responding to social, political, and economic circumstances.”

• Scot Danforth’s An Independent Man: Ed Roberts and the Fight for Disability Rights is “the first biography of one of the founders of the disability rights movement,” chronicling the life of an activist “who reimagined the meaning of equality and inspired generations of reformers.” (Ed Roberts Day was celebrated last Friday, Jan. 23, and proclaimed by California Gov. Gavin Newsom.)

• Rebecca Monteleone’s The Double Bind of Disability shows how medical technologies force “disabled people to be accountable for adapting to a world built by and for nondisabled people while dismissing their lived experiences in favor of medical expertise.”

• Disabling Intelligences: Legacies of Eugenics and How We are Wrong about AI by Rua M. Williams looks at the “influences of eugenics on the AI industry and the impacts of AI opportunism on disabled people.” (If you missed it, check out the recent Crip News issue on “AI and the Care Crisis” with expert commentary from Williams.)

• Kay Inckle’s Overspill is a novel with a disabled protagonist trying to find freedom in a world forever changed by climate change.

  

• Brian Trapp’s novel Range of Motion follows two interabled twin boys “from infancy to the cusp of adulthood.”

Major thanks to Clayton Jarrard for helping compile this section.

CALLS

• Applications are open for the National Disability Leadership Series, a 10-month virtual training program for US-based young disabled

  adults, educators, professionals, and family members. Apply by Feb. 15.

• The Autistic Self Advocacy Network is accepting applications for the 2026 Autism Campus Inclusion Leadership Academy. Apply by March 8.

• Kinetic Light is hiring a Managing Director and a Director of Artistic Producing. Apply by Feb. 8.

EVENTS

• Celebrating the Life of Bob Kafka
  Saturday, Jan. 31, in-person at ADAPT of TX HQ, on Zoom, and livestreamed
  On January 31 we celebrate Bob Kafka for many reasons. We marvel at the chemistry that made Bob Kafka an incomparable warrior for people with disabilities and their rightful places in our communities. Thousands of people worldwide celebrate Bob as a friend, mentor, encourager, teacher, problem-solver, policy wonk, organizer, clever civil disobedience leader, big picture guy, and truth-to-power advocate.
  Note: everyone is invited to share a story about Bob through a short video that will be played at the memorial.

• Zine Launch: A room with enough room for us
  Wednesday, Jan. 28, 19:00 - 22:00 GMT, in-person at The Hill Station Cafe (London)
  As a direct response to the proposed UK welfare cuts, this zine explores disabled, sick, mad, and crip narratives of community, rage and joy. The submissions span across themes of access, gender, labor, the body, and time. It includes work from 18 disabled artists across the UK: diverse in age, race, gender, sexuality and artistic practice.

• Access Playground Vol. 1
  Thursday, Jan. 29, 7 - 8:30pm ET online
  If you’re an Accessibility or Disability Inclusion Leader, you know this work is important, but it can also be isolating, emotionally taxing, and heavy. Access Playground by Infinite Flow Dance, is not another webinar. It’s a space to move, play, breathe, and reconnect to what keeps us doing this work: joy, liberation, and community. Systems don’t shift through policies alone. They shift through connection, creativity, embodiment, shared humanity, and through joy and liberation.

New Works

• Writer Evan Fusco has published a 4-part essay called “‘But I didn’t put a sign’: poetics of the unseen gesture in the work of Beverly Buchanan and Park McArthur.”

• For Revival Disability Magazine, artist and facilitator Apoorva Verma writes about “chronic loss” and sitting with “fragmented grief, internal conflict, and the quiet labor of survival, art-making, and self-recognition.”

• Legal scholar Vijay K. Tiwari recently reviewed “interventions to ensure reasonable accommodation in prison” in India’s judicial system. “The task before democratic forces,” he writes, “is not to make prisons more accessible, but to question their legitimacy and work towards their abolition.”

• Anne Gridley’s Watch Me Walk, a new play presented by Soho Rep about “disability, pity, injustice, and family mythologies,” is at Playwrights Horizons (NYC) through Feb. 8 with mask-required and ASL interpreted performances. Hilton Als calls it “a prime example of what we get when autobiographical theatre works: intelligence, and the ability to laugh at oneself, with one’s heart, as always, in both the wrong and the right place.”

• Disabled artists Jillian Mercado and Lauren “Lolo” Spencer have launched a podcast called We’ve Been Like This.

• Artist and organizer Sophie Cheung Hing-yee’s exhibition Decolonising Madness: The Naturally (In)complete Human is up at Eaton HK (Hong Kong) through Feb. 1.

• In The Sick Times, chronically ill artist Grae Salisbury spotlights “Nine artists illustrating Long COVID and the ongoing pandemic.”

• A 3-day disability arts festival, “Carnival of the Different,” begins today in Thiruvananthapuram, India.

• The Straits Times recently profiled disabled Singapore-based writer Sherry Toh Yee Teng.

  

• Luísa Pires, founder of the Neurodiversity Architecture Network, recently submitted an “intersectional neurodivergence flag” to POoR Collective’s recent open call for flag designs.

CALLS

• The London-based Rotten Crip Collective is seeking writing, visual works, and audio for a Rotten Vol. 1: Crip Imaginings. Submit by Jan. 22.

• The Field Funds program from A Blade of Grass has an open call for $500 grants supporting accessibility and translation. Apply by Jan. 31.

• The Disability Belongs Entertainment Lab, a 5-month program for disabled creatives, is accepting applications for next cohort. Apply by Jan. 21.

EVENTS

• Patty Berne Memorial Birthday Celebration & Community Syllabus Release
  Thursday, Jan. 22, 8 - 10pm ET, on Zoom
  Patty Berne — beloved Disability Justice visionary and force of nature for collective liberation — would have celebrated their 59th birthday on January 21st. As we continue to mourn their absence earthside, the Health Justice Commons invites you to gather with us virtually in beloved community to celebrate Patty’s beautiful life of tireless commitment to our people, and to uplift Patty’s teachings and world-changing legacy. We will hold space for people to share lessons, memories, poems, songs, and images as people are moved to. We will also share a Patty Berne syllabus and study guide that reflects the loving labor of movement partners and comrades.

• Out Front with Us: Documenting Solidarity
  Friday, Jan. 23, 1pm ET, in-person at the Donald W. Reynolds Center for American Art and Portraiture (Washington, D.C.)
  This event is a panel that brings archival collections into conversation with artists today to explore mutual support between LGBTQ+ and disability activism. Featuring photographers Joan E. Biren, Lola Flash, and Leigh Mosley along with painter and writer Riva Lehrer, the discussion will draw on oral histories from the Archives of American Art, the world’s largest collection of interviews related to the visual arts, as well the artists’ decades of experience documenting community activism. Highlighting collections including the oral history of John Dugdale, a photographer who lost his vision, as well as Biren, Flash, and Lehrer’s own oral histories, the program participants will reflect on how recording the past emboldens our shared future.

• For Nonprofit Quarterly, journalist Alison Stine recently reported on “The Danger ICE Poses to the Disabled Community.”

• In the newest issue of The Scholar & Feminist Online, Professor Bayan Abusneineh published “Reproductive Genocide, Disabling Futures, and Carcerality in Gaza.”

• Sonia A. Rao, disability reporter for The New York Times, published an article about one man’s quest to find answers about the death of his brother at the Fernald State School in Waltham, Massachusetts.

• In November 2025, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar published a report called “The Hidden Crisis: Disability Rights in Post-Coup Myanmar.”

• Last month, Disability Rights Connecticut published an investigative report on “Systemic Failures Caused Sexual Abuse of Females at York Correctional Institution.”

New Works

• Truthout’s Marianne Dhenin recently asked 5 disability justice organizers - Sarah Blahovec, Alex Green, Johnnie Jae, Dom Kelly, and Arielle Rebekah - to explain what’s at stake for disabled people in the second year of Trump’s second term.

• “COVID-conscious organizers must be willing to combat their own whorephobia and internalized racism,” writes artist, organizer, and journalist Khalil (Kae) Dennis in new reporting on the work of Black trans sex workers with Long COVID for The Sick Times.

• Access artist Cheryl Green recently spoke with Gemma DiCarlo about her work to showcase the experiences of brain injury survivors on Oregon Public Broadcasting’s Think Out Loud.

• Queer disabled artist Perel recently reflected on the roles of grief, crip time, and collaborative access layers in the making of their show Natural Acts for the most recent issue of Stance on Dance.

• In Broad Street Review, organizer and Founder of Disability Pride Pennsylvania Vicki Landers asks “Why does Philly enforce health and safety codes, but not access codes?”

• Healing Justice Ldn recently published some winter resources and recommendations.

• Researchers at the University of Maryland School of Medicine recently published a study that shows where an elder lives directly affects their recovery from a broken hip: those in “economically disadvantaged neighborhoods” spent about 23 fewer days at home during the year after their injury.

  

• New analysis by Susan K. Livio from NJ Advance Media found a dramatic rise in taxpayer-funded executive salaries of the nonprofits with the most group home clients in New Jersey. For example, Robert Stack, head of Community Options, was paid $2.37 million in 2023, nearly tripling his 2018 compensation of $838,942.

In Other News…

• An engineer at the European Space Agency, Michaela “Michi” Benthaus, is the first wheelchair-user to travel to space. Benthaus was one of six passengers on an 11-minute journey aboard Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket on Dec. 20, 2025.

• Tressa Burke, CEO of the Glasgow Disability Alliance, recently refused to accept an MBE (Most Excellent Order of the British Empire) honor, saying the UK government was “fueling hatred, blame and scapegoating of people with disabilities.”

• Last month, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio ordered diplomats to use Times New Roman 14-point font in all official documents, reversing Calibri 15-point font that was “recommended as an accessibility best practice” in 2023.

CALLS

• CripJustice is seeking stories or information about school districts who call Child Protective Services against the families of students with disabilities when they advocate strongly for their children. The organization is also looking for volunteers and grant opportunities.

• DisabiliT4T is seeking disabled queers with expertise in cybersecurity and secure web design and queers who use screen readers to consult on web accessibility and help build “the infrastructure for a revolutionary new kind of intentional community for disabled and chronically ill queer people.”

EVENTS

• 3rd Annual Disability Justice is Beloved Community
  Sunday, Jan. 18, 12 - 6pm PT, in-person at the Ed Roberts Campus (Berkeley, CA) and on Zoom
  This gathering of arts, culture, and political organizing will feature multi-cultural drumming, an open mic/variety show, bodyworkers, disabled artists and vendors, skill shares, music and dance, food and drinks, an art build for Reclaim MLK's Radical Legacy March, movie screenings, and more. We’re excited to put this event on with our partners Disability Justice Culture Club, Disability Justice League - Bay Area, the Anti-Police Terror Project, Peace Out Loud, Ability Now, Senior and Disability Action, the CIL, and Hand in Hand.

• Compressed and Re-expanded | Three films by Jenny Brady
  Thursday, Jan. 15, 7 - 9pm GMT, in-person at Tramway (Glasgow)
  LUX Scotland presents a special screening event featuring Jenny Brady​’s work which explores the fragile, intricate mechanisms that shape how we communicate. Brought together for the first time, Brady’s films ​‘Receiver’ (2019), ​‘Music for Solo Performer’ (2022) and ​‘The Glass Booth’ (2025) will be presented with audio description made in collaboration with access worker and accessibility consultant Elaine Lillian Joseph. The screening will be followed by an in-conversation with Jenny Brady and guest speaker Louise Hickman.

• Kinetic Light LAB Hangouts
  Fridays, January 16 & 30, 2-3:30 pm ET on Zoom
  LAB Hangouts are hosted as an open-structured virtual social space for disabled artists to connect and get to know one another. Hangouts offer space to talk about disability, art making, creative practices, life hacks and tips, dreams, desires, disability wisdom, and more. You’re welcome to bring ideas for conversation or a bit of art that inspires you. LAB Producers, morgaine de leonardis and Camisha Jones, will loosely guide the gathering, offering topics and questions as needed.

• Planting Disabled Futures
  Jan. 14 - 16, in-person at the Disability Cultural Community Center (San Francisco)
  Join The Olimpias for a Planting Disabled Futures extravaganza, with a public performance on January 14 and small sharing parties on the 15 and 16 of January. The crip intimacy virtual reality/community performance installation invites you into a world of healing plants cultivated by disabled peoples’ embodied ways of knowing.

• (FREEDOM): A Celebration of American Sign Language, Community and Belonging
  TODAY, Monday, Jan. 12, 6pm, in-person at New York Live Arts (NYC)
  (FREEDOM) is an autobiographical performance tracing the life of Brandon Kazen-Maddox, a Black, Queer, hearing child raised in a white, Deaf world. A third-generation heritage signer of American Sign Language, Brandon tells their own story, through an interdisciplinary fusion of ASL, spoken word, Simultaneous Communication (SimCom), music, projected subtitles, aerial arts, dance and theater. Brandon is joined by a remarkable ensemble of Deaf, hearing, and ASL-fluent artists whose ethnic, linguistic, and cultural identities mirror the diversity of Brandon’s own family. Together, they bring to life a story that transcends language, celebrates connection, and explores what it truly means to belong.

AI and the Care Crisis

On Nov. 18, 2025, the U.S. Administration for Community Living (ACL) announced the Caregiver Artificial Intelligence Prize Competition. Teams of “innovators” working on “AI-enabled tools to support both family caregivers and the direct care workforce” will compete for up to $2 million.

At a time when the Trump administration attempts to insulate AI companies against regulation while exposing the care workforce to new forms of uncertainty, the announcement signals how federal officials intend to use AI in the “Make America Healthy Again” agenda. The vagueness about what even constitutes “AI” in this context is one indication that the publicity around the campaign may be more important than its purported goals.

While seeming to address a labor crisis that has long been at the fore of disabled organizing, the stunt also tacitly justifies cuts to the ACL itself: the division was among the hit hardest by RFK Jr.’s April 2025 reorganization of the Department of Health and Human Services. The ACL now operates with about half its staff and few of its former leaders and policy experts.

Scholars of AI and disability point out many ways that AI “solutions” eclipse the concerns of disabled communities. Dr. Louise Hickman pointed to the disability-led campaign Stop Oxevision to halt the U.K. tech company’s system of infrared sensors and cameras for remote patient monitoring in psychiatric hospitals.

“This kind of system,” Hickman recently told Crip News, “can easily become a substitute for nursing staff actually being present and attentive on the ward. Instead of improving care, surveillance tools can distance staff from patients and deepen power imbalances, especially in psychiatric and institutional settings.”

Dr. Rua Williams highlighted examples of “Electronic Visit Verification” that rely on surveillance and restriction of disabled people to their homes in order to receive certain kinds of assistance. Beyond the effects of these technologies on the nature of caregivers’ work, they introduce mechanisms of control and coercion.

“More and more, technological ‘progress’ is pitched as a solution to a crisis better solved by investment in human infrastructure — accessible public life, well paid nursing staff, sufficient care hours, etc.,” Williams said. “These technological ‘solutions’ do not result in better inclusion of disabled people into public life, but amount to more and more opaque algorithmic regimes of surveillance and management.

As millions of people in the U.S. are dealing with the personal costs of massive cuts to federal healthcare funding, the “Caregiver AI Prize Competition” is a telling distraction from what’s at stake in AI boosterism. “We need a responsible approach to AI adoption,” Dr. Hickman says, “in our homes, workplaces, and care systems—one that keeps care human-centred and led by disabled people’s priorities.”

This story was reported with Clayton Jarrard, a graduate student at New York University’s XE: Experimental Humanities & Social Engagement program. Clayton works in applied social research and policy implementation and is also a host for New Book Network’s podcast channels in Disability studies and LGBTQ+ studies.

New Works

• The newest issue of The American Poetry Review (vol. 55, no. 1) includes “Abolition Medicine: Liberatory Poetics of the Crip, Black Botanical” by heidi andrea restrepo rhodes and “I Learned to Love Me Later On,” a conversation between Philip Metres and Therí Alyce Pickens.

• Scout, an Australia-based library professional and scholar, recently published “Building and governing for access in disruption: Open publishing, disability culture, and library leadership.”

• Beyond the Visual, “the UK’s first major sculpture exhibition in which blind and partially blind practitioners are central to the curatorial process and make up the majority of participating artists,” is up at the Henry Moore Institute (Leeds) through April 19.

• The American Association of People with Disabilities (AAPD) recently published “Building Disability Economic Power Through AAPD’s Internship Program” on “what truly moves the needle on disability employment and economic power.”

• The UK-based IN/Visible National Disabled Women’s Arts Collective recently published a chronicle of Rising in Our Power, “a landmark interdisciplinary artistic project” at MIMA (Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art) that took place in February 2025.

In Other News…

• United States Artists recently announced the 43 organizations selected by artist who received Disability Futures Fellowships.

• Multitude Films, FWD-Doc, and Untitled Pennhurst Film recently launched their Disabled Nonfiction Producers Apprenticeship, a 9-month program offering “holistic producing support, creative project incubation, and tailored professional development.” This inaugural fellows are Andie Madsen, Gabriel “Gabo” Ponte Fleary, Maya Wise, and Vega Darling.

CALLS

• Cuéntame is partnering with Brooklyn Arts Exchange to build a DJ cohort of all Disabled and/or Queer/Trans DJs through monthly classes starting in February.

• Disabled artist Vanessa Hernández Cruz has an open call for 5 QTBIPOC disabled virtual dancers to perform an evening length work set to premiere in the Fall 2027 in Los Angeles, CA and touring nationally in 2028. Apply by Jan. 16.

  

• Sista Creatives Rising and Clean Air Events are seeking 3 musical acts to feature as part of “A Celebration of Black Artistry" taking place Feb. 15 in Seattle, WA. Apply by Jan. 10.

• The Metropolitan Museum of Art (NYC) is hiring the Mary Jaharis Managing Educator for Access.

• Tom Olin, documentarian of the disability rights movement, needs support while navigating medical hurdles. Donate now.

• Researchers at Brandeis University are looking to interview parents, grandparents, and caregivers of children with disabilities ages 15-25 years old about their opinions on the barriers their children face in getting sexual and reproductive health information and services.

EVENTS

• GHOST BARRELS
  Thursday, Jan. 8, 7 - 9pm ET, in-person at Recess Gallery (NYC)
  GHOST BARRELS is the final event and closing performance of the Sick Center at Recess. Artists lu yim, funto omojola, and Anna RG premiere an experimental work that invites audiences into a fragmentary mapping—circling sound, history, and imagination to get closer to something just out of reach.

• Enfreakment (Homecoming)
  Thursday, Jan. 8, 19:00 - 21:00, in-person at Gropius Bau (Berlin)
  What do we need to unlearn in order to truly learn how to care? This is the question Perel explores in their performance Enfreakment (Homecoming), kicking off the Spätschicht x Schwules Museum programme. As an intervention, it will unfold over the evening within the exhibition Diane Arbus: Konstellationen.

• Disability (Is Not a Bad Word)
  Tuesday, Jan. 6, 6:30 - 8:30pm ET, online
  A peer-led space for disabled and neurodivergent adults to discuss daily life and find support from their community, organized by Basically Wonderful. Topic: Ableism during the (hard) holidays.

50 issues. 1,287 new subscribers. Over 241,000 total views. Thank you for a wonderful year of Crip News. I can’t wait to show you what’s in the works for 2026.

-kevin

NEWS

Rest in Power, Bob Kafka

The longtime ADAPT organizer, co-founder of the Register, Educate, Vote, Use your Power! (REV UP) campaign, and host of the Barrier Free Futures radio show joined the ancestors on Dec. 26, 2025.

“Bob Kafka was a fearless, charismatic, and intelligent leader of the disability rights movement for over fifty years,” said retired Senator Tom Harkin in a statement sent to Crip News by the Harkin Institute. The American Association of People with Disabilities described Bob as firecely “driven by the conviction that disabled people deserve freedom, choice, dignity, and power.”

Longtime friend and activist Mark Johnson described to NPR the many ways Bob showed up for his disabled comrades: “Maybe it was helping somebody tie their shoes, and the next moment, maybe it was helping feed them, or maybe it was raising money through the fun run, or maybe it was negotiating with federal officials.”

Bob believed in the power of disability community media, something I was honored to talk about as a guest on his radio show in Oct. 2024. He signed his emails to me with a short gesture to all the coming possibilities that his fellow organizers will now pursue in his honor: “Onward to…”

Nnena Kalu Wins the 2025 Turner Prize

One of the world’s most pretigious visual arts awards has gone to neurodivergent artist Nnena Kalu. She accepted the award at a ceremony in Bradford, UK wearing a ribbon that said “Idol, legend, winner, whatever.”

A resident artist at ActionSpace in London since 1999, Kalu creates hanging sculptures and large-scale drawings commended by the Turner jury as “bold and compelling” through “distinct practice and finesse of scale, composition and colour.”

Kalu’s work, along with the 3 other shortlisted artists, is installed at the Turner Prize exhibition at Cartwright Hall Art Gallery (Bradford) through Feb. 22.

New Works

• generative somatics, the organization behind a movement-focused methodology for embodied leadership and trauma healing, has published a zine called “we are complete” to mark its organizational sunset.

• Disabled Journalists Association team member Ariana Martinez recently published a rundown of some values, access processes, and tools they use in their work.

• Ink in Milk, an exhibition exploring aesthetics like “the contradictory realities of motherhood, the shame of mental breakdown, the sensory divergences stemming from disability, or the sight of a body marked and exhausted by medical intervention,” is up at Trafó Gallery in Budapest through Jan. 11, 2026.

• In a debut personal essay for SPOON ZINE called “Freaks, and Ableism, and Dissonance, Oh My!,” wren brooks writes against “representation” as an adequate measure of anti-ableist progress. “What is representation,” they ask, “when The Representation is quietly facing ableism every day?”

• Freewheelers, U.K.-based disability theatre group, is recreating 19th century medical casebook portrait techniques “to provoke public conversations about discrimination and how disability is understood” in a project called Us and Them.

• For Disability Belongs, Hokulani R. recently published “How Environmental Justice Can Be More Inclusive of People with Disabilities.”

• An exhibition featuring disabled craft artists producing “intangible cultural heritage” was recently shown at the Sensory Experience Gallery in the Palace Museum in Beijing.

• A new issue of Disability Studies Quarterly edited by Efrat Gold and Michael Rembis explores “Mad Methods.”

CALLS

• The Critical Design Lab is hiring a Research Assistant based in the Greater Toronto area. Apply by Jan. 5.

• Amsterdam-based No Limits! Art Castle has an open call for neurodivergent or crip performance artists who are ready to shape a solo piece in the Spotlight on You fast track production program. Apply by Jan. 5.

• The UC Berkeley Disability Cultural Community Center is seeking artistry from Black disabled student artists to be featuted during the 2026 Blackness and Disability Stigma Summit in late February 2026.

• The U.S. National Dance Education Association is seeking presenters for its 2026 Virtual Summit “Creativity in These Times: Dance & Disability” taking place on March 21, 2026. Submit by Jan. 5.

• UNLOCK, “a 12-session online training and mentoring programme for Artist-Leaders” led by Katie Charlton, is seeking applications from artists based in the North West of England who are “neurodivergent, disabled, LGBTQIA+, and working in community or participatory arts.” Apply by Jan. 14.

• Disability Belongs is accepting nominations for its Disability Impact Awards. Submit by Jan. 20.

• The Disability Culture Lab has new swag! Check out their apparel and goods to help support the Lab’s mission to shift the narrative on disability from fear and pity to solidarity and liberation.

EVENTS

• Outer Listening: End-of-Year Dance Party and Fundraiser for A.I.R. NYC
  Tuesday, Dec. 30, 7 - 9pm ET, in-person at Recess Gallery (Brooklyn)
  Hosted in collaboration with Sick (Music) Center. DJ sets from Queer Shoulders and Sapphic Faggot. Raising funds for A.I.R. NYC.

New Works

• To mark the International Day of Persons with Disabilities last week, Apple released a music video ad campaign called “I’m Not Remarkable.” The anti-inspiration porn anthem is performed by a cast of disabled students and artists joyfully smashing ableist stereotypes. It publicizes accessibility features like braille access and live captioning that the video suggests can match a vibrant range of access needs among disabled young adults as they enter college life. “And I need stuff. And you need stuff,” the song declares, “And all our stuff is not the same.”

  

• Last month, Australian disabled artist Sam Petersen’s Apocalypse Wheelchair was featured on an episode of ABC TV’s The Art Of… Petersen says the work is “wrapped in grossness,” with things like catheter piss guns and a poop chute, to reflect the ableist treatment you have endured in real world scenarios. The wheelchair sets the tone for Human, an upcoming film project that Petersen is actively fundraising to produce.

• Outlandish is on view at John Hansard Gallery (Southampton, UK) until Jan. 10. Through the work of organizer Aaron Williamson, the exhibition uncovers the stories of The Outlandish Collective, which forged explicitly “crip” artistry from 1976 to 1982.

• UK-based sports charity Level the Playing Field has released the results from its 2025 Annual Fan Survey, which included 2,151 respondents. The biggest increase in disabled fans’ report of access barriers was a lack of companion/PA ticketing, while the biggest decrease in difficulty purchasing tickets.

• Props No More, a media advocacy project of the Global Alliance for Disability in Media and Entertainment, has launched a video series hosted by Karina Sturm unpacking examples of good and bad disability representation.

• The New York Times recently published an article about an annual gathering of women with ALS who partied together on Cape Cod.

In Other News…

• Unlimited has announced the shortlist for its 2025/26 Open Awards. The UK charity also published a breakdown of the 591 applications they received.

• The US Social Security Administration has halted plans to eliminate age as a factor in determining eligibility for federal disability assistance following widespread opposition. The agency will also halt the process of modernizing the woefully out of date list of occupations used in disability determination processes.

  

• Korea JoongAng Daily recently profiled Baek Ji-yoon, the country’s “first theater actor with Down syndrome.”

• The Autistic Self Advocacy Network recently announced the winners of the 2nd annual Teighlor McGee Grassroots Mini Grant Program: International Association for Spelling as Communication’s (I-ASC) Spellers and Allies, Yingya Vang, Coalición Neurodivergente Peruana, and Neurodivergent Infinity Network of Educators.

• Celimar Rivera Cosme will bring Puerto Rican Sign Language (LSPR) to the Super Bowl for the first time during Bad Bunny’s halftime show.

CALLS

• @Disabled.Artists has released a list of over 150 disabled creators to buy from this holiday season, assembled by Alexis Neumann. You can also pre-order a 2026 calendar featuring work by 25 disabled artists.

• New Disabled South is accepting applications for the 2026 Southern Policymakers Advancing Representative Community (SPARC) Fellowship program. Submit by Jan 2.

• Disability Arts Online is hiring a part-time Artistic Director. Apply by Jan. 19.

• Researchers at Brandeis University are looking to interview disabled people between the ages of 15 and 25 in the US for a study about the things that young people with disabilities think are important for their sexual health.

• The 25th Southern Connecticut State University Women’s & Gender Studies Conference, taking place April 17 – 18, 2026, is seeking session proposals for “(Re)making the World: A ‘How-To’ Conference on Feminist, Crip, and Decolonial Worldmaking.” Submit by Jan. 5.

• The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts is accepting applications for the 2026 Access/VSA International Young Musicians Program and the 2026 Access/VSA Playwright Discovery Program. Apply by Jan. 7.

• NYC-based organization Tech Unlimited is hiring for multiple full- and part-time positions.

New Books

There was a lot of interest in the new books section of Crip News at the end of September (v.202). Let’s do it again! Know of a great disability-related book that was published recently? You can reply to this email or drop a comment below with suggestions.

EVENTS

• Stim Sculptures

  Saturday, Dec. 13, 4 – 6pm ET, in-person at the Whitney Museum (NYC)
  Create a surreal sculpture with a fidget keyboard, a keyboard that has no functional use other than to organize your preferred stims! Join artist, designer, and writer, Emily Sara, for a DIY workshop that will focus on creating customizable stim toys. Everyone will get to choose from a variety of 3D printed pieces that are different shapes, textures, and mechanisms that snap together to create a unique and functionable sculpture. This workshop was designed for people with different levels of dexterity, and privileges touch over sight. People can build together or individually and take their sculptures home at the end of the program. This event will be hosted by Emily Sara and Madison Zalopany, who are both disabled creators and thought leaders.

• Care Work as Mutual Aid
  Thursday, Dec. 11, 4 - 5:30pm PT, online
  We are our greatest strength and, in these times, our means of survival. Mutual aid, as a practice, maps our personal and collective abundances with our needs and creates unbreakable networks of care. Bringing back our Care Work series, we are joined by Alan Pelaez Lopez, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, and Tiezst “Tie” Taylor to discuss mutual aid – from personal survival strategies to Crips for Palestine and organizing in immigrant communities. They’ll share their stories, the work they do, and, together, explore how our movements are intertwined, and how our collective liberation lies in care work and mutual aid.

• Yeah, It WAS Good! Celebrating Audio Described Dance
  Saturday, Dec. 13, 4 - 6pm ET, on Zoom
  Dark Room Ballet will be sponsoring an audio described dance film showcase, with contributions from at least 3 blind/VI choreographers, and including new audio described work from the American Ballet Theatre!

• Publishing as a Commitment to Care
  Tuesday, Dec. 9, 6 - 8pm ET, on Zoom
  Hosted by cripple/Emily Sara. Centering ways of writing and making that honor nonlinearity, intuition, disability, and interdependence, this talk invites participants to journey within Denise Shanté Brown’s publications that carry a commitment to care—from dreamseed to manifestation to distribution. Space for questions and dialogue will be included.

• Dreaming Anti-Ableist Land Work: A Monthly Meetup for Disabled Landworkers
  Sunday, Dec. 14 and every second Sunday of the month, 4 - 5:30pm, on Zoom
  Land work can be deeply healing, and so many of us come to it as a place of refuge. And also, land work spaces can be very ableist and often disabling. Disabled people deserve to be a part of land work, and land work needs disabled people. Disabled wisdom is how we learn to make our work sustainable by caring for ourselves and each other. But being a disabled landworker is not easy. The discrimination, exclusion, grief, conflict, and the pressure to fit your bodymind into an abled shape are so real, and it’s hard to find spaces to discuss these challenges. This program is a four-part monthly discussion group that will provide a space for connection and support amongst disabled landworkers. We will share our experiences, knowledge, and dreams. We will build community, knowing this community is the foundation for anti-ableist land work. This space will be facilitated by Julie Nowak and Maze with generous room for co-creation and feedback.

• Disability Matters Online Symposia 2025: Honouring the Legacy of Professor Anita Ghai
  Thursday, Dec. 11, 12 - 1:15pm GMT / 5:30 - 6:45pm IST
  In Anita’s memory and to honour her legacy, Disability Matters is organising an online symposium dedicated to centre Indian Disability Studies, its epistemology, theory, activism, and social engagement as it marks a year to Anita’s departure on 11 December. We hope to create a living archive that celebrates and extends the work of Indian Disability Studies, inspired by Anita Ghai’s scholarship, activism, and imagination.

• From Research to Impact: The Global Heumann Fellowship 2024-2025 Fellowship Cohort Showcase
  Wednesday, Dec. 10, 11am ET, on Zoom
  Join us for an inspiring virtual event celebrating the remarkable achievements of the inaugural cohort of the Global Heumann Fellowship—an initiative sparked by the lasting legacy of Judy Heumann, co-founder of the World Institute on Disability (WID). Over a transformative twelve-month period from July 2024 to June 2025, these visionary disability leaders undertook rigorous, regionally focused research projects aimed at advancing accessibility, inclusion, and disability justice. This event will spotlight the research insights, innovations, and community-driven findings that emerged from the first cohort—and introduce the next wave of Fellows who are ready to carry this vital work forward.

• The Haunted: That Thing and Night Terrors
  Wednesday, Dec. 10, 7 - 8:30pm GMT, online
  A dance performance by Lucy Clark and live reading by Alice Vernon followed by an in-conversation between the artists, THE HAUNTED creator Joanna Holland, moderated by Peter Bonnell.

• The Weight of Disability Webinar (see below for how to register)
  Friday, Dec. 12, 1pm PT, on Zoom
  This webinar will focus on the often unseen weight that people with disabilities must carry and address on a daily basis. It will also explain the value of and ways to build resilience. At the same time, we will spend some time in this session unpacking the burden and limitations of resilience. The webinar will be hosted by Jennifer Chassman-Brown. For the Zoom link and to request accommodations, please email jlesner@accesscentralcoast.org.

Wicked, an Anti-Ableism (Part 2)

⚠️ Spoilers ahead!

When Wicked: Part One came out last year, I was surprised to find myself thinking that it was “a story about fascist contrivances of the public perception of evil that is only challenged by a powerful disability solidarity with animal liberation.” Wicked: For Good, released in the US on Nov. 21, completes the process of pulling the curtain back, as it were, on The Wizard of Oz. This time, I found disability to have a more complicated place in the myth-busting backstory about how those witches got so iconic.

In the musical, Act 2 features a deeply ableist scene where the disabled character Nessarose (played by disabled actress Marissa Bode in the film) is magically able to walk in a pair of silver slippers (later ruby). Those wondering how director Jon M. Chu would rework this scene had it spoiled in the trailer: she doesn’t walk, she flies. Sigh.

But now that we can experience the full scene, it does actually seem to be a good teaser about something bigger that unfolds. When Nessa flies, her path is quite limited and constrained, perhaps misaligned with the sheer joy on her face. Did she have any control as she floated over her wheelchair (whose pointed top corners reminded me of the DIY tradition of spikes on push handles)?

That, it turns out, was a subtle and sophisticated characterization of Nessa’s willingness to make great sacrifices for love and independence, both ultimately unrealized. As Mayor of Munchkinland, she prohibits Munchkins from leaving their land so she can keep her unrequited lover close. When she botches a nonconsensual love spell, he turns into the tin man and runs the way nondisabled actors have poorly portrayed double amputees on film.

All of this happens in the lead-up to Nessa’s death, when she is alone outside as the fascist-made tornado drops a house on her and the slippers. In my notes, I jotted down: we’re not in Kansas’s disability-inclusive disaster preparedness anymore! Really, that moment has a more common narrative prosthetic function. Her alone-ness and vulnerability form the ultimate price for a disabled politician who’s only ever desperately wanted to be normal.

Nessa’s role in the film offers a provocative representation of disability politics during a time of fascist deceit, perhaps a ‘glass ramp’ within institutions consolidating power. And it helps us think through other moments where we might spot something like cross-movement disability solidarity. Like when Elphaba breaks the chains of the oxen grimacing in pain as they pull the colonial apparatus constructing the colonial yellow brick road. Or later when she releases the Wizard’s prisoners just in time to wreak havoc on the glittering wedding of Glinda and her permanently cinched waist.

What Wicked: For Good puts on screen is delivered through some usual Hollywood ironies. With a $165 million budget, raking in $393.3 million at box offices around the world after 10 days in theaters, it’s hard not to think about how far this money would go as a buttress against the coming changes to the US Department of Education’s Office of Special Education Programs. Wouldn’t it have made beautiful sense if Ariana Granda channeled Elphaba’s organizer energy and used even a tiny fraction of the marketing budget to talk about Long Covid after she tested positive during the final phase of the press tour?

So familiar and so strange, the film’s world and ours.

New Works

• For Day With(out) Art that takes place each year on Dec. 1 for World AIDS Day, Visual AIDS presents Meet Us Where We’re At. The program of six videos features work by Kenneth Idongesit Usoro (Nigeria), Hoàng Thái Anh (Vietnam), Gustavo Vinagre & Vinicius Couto (Brazil/Portugal), Camilo Tapia Flores (Chile/Brazil), Camila Flores-Fernández (Peru/Germany), and José Luis Cortés (Puerto Rico).

• On his (Un)hidden Substack, writer and historian Alex Green recently interviewed organizer and artist Keith Jones about disabled elders. “People are looking for the disability community or disability organizations to act in a certain way,” Jones said, “but they are not acknowledging that 95% of these organizations were started because parents realized their whiteness was not going to protect their child.”

• A new poll shows how elders resist disability identity. 19% identified as disabled, but 53% identified as having an impairment when asked about particular kinds of conditions. The findings give researchers at the University of Michigan Medical School a better sense of how many older adults are disconnected from access supports that could improve their care.

• This week, neuroinclusive theater company EPIC Players premieres Autistic playwright Dave Osmundsen’s BUM BUM (or, this farce has Autism) at HERE Arts Center. In the November issue of the Brooklyn Rail, Autistic artist Harmon dot aut talks with Osmundsen and others involved in the production talked about “Neurodiverse narratives” on stage.

• Finnegan Shannon’s exhibition Don’t mind if I do, featuring works by Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo, Pelenakeke Brown, Sky Cubacub, Emilie L. Gossiaux, Felicia Griffin, Ariella Granados, Joselia Rebekah Hughes, Jeff Kasper, Finnegan Shannon, Sandie Yi, and agustine zegers, is on view at Gallery 400 at the University of Illinois Chicago through Dec. 13. Accompanying the show are 4 solo exhibitions:

  • agustine zegers: A toxin threatens, but it also beckons

  • Sandie Yi: Digital Technology

  • Finnegan Shannon: i wish gays hung out at places where we can sit down

  • Ariella Granados: Like and Subscribe

• The inaugural 2025 Indonesian Disability Arts & Culture Festival recently took place in Solo, Surakarta.

• Unlimited recently published “Funding fundamentals: Let’s talk about money,” insights from a gathering of disabled artists with graphic capture by Jon Dorsett.

CALLS

• Tomorrow is Giving Tuesday! GIVE TO DISABLED ORGANIZERS!

  • Like Calling Up Justice, which is hosting a 24-hour “Subathon” livestream that will be “a stage for community.”

  • You could also pre-order a reprint of Able Zine’s second issue to help with production costs.

  • If you want more ideas, try browsing past issues of Crip News.

• If you’re based in the US, write to your federal legislators to demand oversight of the Trump administration’s dismantling of the Department of Education, which threatens to roll back decades of work to protect disabled students.

• Ahead of a hearing of the Senate Special Committee on Aging, the Autistic Self Advocacy Network is collecting stories about independent living to help Senators understand the importance of Home and Community Based Services and Centers for Independent Living. Submit your story by Dec. 7.

• The Disability Action Research Kollective is seeking volunteers to write 350-word pieces on disability and eugenics.

EVENTS

• dreaming our futures + embodying our dreams
  Saturday, Dec. 6, 3 - 5pm ET, on Zoom
  Created and led by alexa dexa, presented by RestFest. A year-long crip ritual opera made by, with, and for disabled folks dreaming together from bed. rooted in disability justice, dreaming our futures centers processes of community co-creation, responsive accessibility, and radical inclusion in a live participatory remote setting that prioritizes our collective safety through ongoing pandemic.

• Meet the Artists: Cripping Art Virtual Holiday Market
  Saturday, Dec. 6, 3pm ET, online
  Priya Ray (@diyabled) put out a call, and 37 incredible Disabled artists stepped forward. Together we created graphics, schedules, support networks, and a community rooted in care. This work is inspired by Alice Wong, who reminded us that Disabled people deserve power, voice, and spaces that honor us. Join our live virtual event to meet the artists and experience music, poetry, and performances by Disabled creators

• Pop-up! Emergency Preparedness
  Thursday, Dec. 4, 1 - 3pm PT, in-person at the San Francisco Disability Cultural Center and online
  The EPrep team from the SF Community Living Campaign will be providing information on preparing for Emergencies: power outages, earthquakes, climate change, and medical events. Please come visit Mark and Paul to find out how to prepare for these events. Let’s stay safe!

• A Celebration of Indigenous Art and Storytelling: Crushing Colonialism’s The Magazine 2nd Anniversary
  Thursday, Dec. 4, 6 - 9pm ET, in-person at Baltimore Center Stage
  Crushing Colonialism is proud to announce a celebration marking the second anniversary of Crushing Colonialism: The Magazine, taking place on December 4, 2025, at Baltimore Center Stage. Open to all, Indigenous relatives and allies, this FREE event is part of the theater’s Shared Space Initiative and aims to bring together Indigenous communities from the Baltimore region and beyond for a joyful, accessible, and inclusive celebration. Complimentary copies of The Magazine will be distributed alongside traditional and allergy-conscious foods. The celebration will take place in a fully accessible space, designed to welcome Deaf, disabled, chronically ill, and multiply marginalized Indigenous participants. Accessibility and inclusion remain core values of Crushing Colonialism’s work.

• Design and Disability | Inspired by Alice Wong
  Sunday, Dec. 7, 11am - 3pm ET, in-person at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum (NYC)
  This gathering invites participants to collaboratively reflect on Wong’s transformative impact on inclusive design and the participation of those with lived experience in accessible design strategies. Learn about Wong’s influence on design thinking through community discussion and shared reflection. Engage in drop-in crafting and art-making activities inspired by her advocacy and creativity. Whether you are familiar with her work or just learning about her contributions, this event offers space for connection, creativity, and care.

The passing of disabled activist, writer, editor, and community organizer Alice Wong has sent waves of grief through our networks. She joined the ancestors on Friday, November 14th at UCSF Hospital at the age of 51.

“Hi everyone, it looks like I ran out of time.” This is the first line of the message Alice wrote to announce her death. It knocked the air out of me. I tried writing a tribute. No words felt good enough.

Then friends started calling and texting. We cried, recalling the first times we encountered Alice’s words and the last times we spoke with her. I hung up the phone knowing Alice had cast a spell for crip love to rush into the space of loss.

Alice’s family highlighted this magic in a statement published a few days after her passing:

As we mourn the incomprehensible loss of Alice, we share the words she gifted us with from her memoir, Year of the Tiger. “The real gift any person can give is a web of connective tissue. If we love fiercely, our ancestors live among and speak to us through these incandescent filaments glowing from the warmth of memories.”

I found Alice during Twitter’s heyday, when all crip news seemed to pass through @SFdirewolf. She grew and protected a root system of disabled media that led directly to projects like this newsletter.

Alice was among the first subscribers to Crip News in October 2021. She replied to issue #4 with questions about citation and disability identity that led to a long correspondence. I think about it often when I’m writing these issues. I learned a few days ago that she started sending gifts to high schoolers studying disability justice after reading about their bad-ass teacher in Crip News.

Alice was prolific in ways we probably won’t fully understand. Her immensely successful career is evidence of her process: the love, joy, and possibility she cultivated in relationships. In this way, keeping her with us is a matter of noticing ourselves as the glowing filaments of all she’s taught us.

Rest in power, Alice Wong.

You can donate to support the legacy of Alice’s work. A community celebration of her life will take place in the spring.

NEWS

New Works

• New Disabled South has released the first episode in a docuseries called “Dual: The True Cost of Care” about what it’s like to be dually eligible for Medicare and Medicaid in the US South.

  

• Gabrielle de la Puente of The White Pube has curated “Restaging Disability” for University of the Arts London, a collection of works that “demonstrate new ways of performing disability, of using a disabled script, creating its costume, building its stage.”

  

• Anna RG’s Sick (Music) Center is an “experimental research, development, and community space exploring sick/disabled listening and music” transforming Recess’s Session space (Brooklyn) through Jan. 10, 2026.

• A new national survey of 2,618 artists conducted by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago and funded by the Mellon Foundation found that about 20% of artists identified as disabled and 33% said they were managing a chronic condition. The top 2 reasons artists did not engage in any paid work were retirement (28% of non-working artists) and health issues (23%).

• In an essay for Time Magazine, Chella Man writes about skydiving, something he could only do after his cochlear implant failed.

• The New York Disability Rights Archive is on view at Positive Exposure Gallery (NYC) through Dec. 31.

In Other News…

• National Public Radio’s Meg Anderson recently reported on the “neurocognitive disorder team” within in the Los Angeles County Public Defender’s office that aims to offer legal support to people with cognitive disabilities.

• Several disabled artists are among the newest recipients of the Dance/USA Fellowships to Artists program, including Kayla Hamilton and India Harville.

• Disability Arts Online has received a £249,607 grant from the UK’s National Lottery Heritage Fund to support “Cripping Culture: A Journey into Disability Arts Heritage,” which aims to “save the stories of the Disability Arts movement from being lost and share them through a digital archive, interactive timeline and podcast series.”

• The Mellon Foundation has awarded San Francisco State University $2 million to “expand and revitalize disability-centered academic offerings and student activities,” including 2 new tenure-track faculty positions in disability studies. The Paul K. Longmore Institute on Disability, founded at the University in 1996, is now located at The Arc San Francisco.

CALLS

• Advocate Sara Minkara seeks respondents to a short survey about “how the current U.S. administration’s policies and rhetoric have impacted the global disability community and how the global disability community perceives the U.S. today.”

• UK-based organizations John Hansard Gallery and Midlands Arts Centre each seek to appoint a disabled curator as part of Disability Arts In Shropshire’s Future Curators Programme. Apply by Dec. 1.

• Disability Arts Online is hiring a Heritage Project Coordinator for the Cripping Culture: a Journey into Disability Arts Heritage project. Apply by Dec. 8.

• The Performance and Disability Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research is seeking contributions for a 4-day program called “What Theatre Does: Doing Performance and Disability” taking place in Melbourne, Australia and online in July 2026. Submit by Dec. 8.

EVENTS

• Complicated Pride: Disability, Neurodivergence, and Ambivalence
  Wednesday, Nov. 26, 7 - 8:30am ET, on Zoom
  The Wellcome Anti-ableist Research Culture project at the University of Sheffield presents a series of monthly webinars and workshops on the theme of Dreaming up a Disability Inclusive Workplace through March 2026. Topics were chosen by surveying members of the National Association of Disabled Staff Networks and we’ve curated workshops and talks from disabled professionals from a variety of backgrounds and industries. This session will explore the complexities of disability pride, and give participants some space to rest, breathe and explore what pride means to them. Led by disabled practitioners Amelia Lander-Cavallo and tobi adebajo, we will begin with a discussion of what pride is and what care means to us as disabled people. You will then be led through some light exercises and provocations where you can take some time to reflect or just rest.

• Crip Reading Club and Crip Arts Gathering
  Tuesday, Nov. 25, 2 - 3:30pm ET / Saturday, Nov. 29, 2:30 - 4:30pm ET, on Zoom
  Rest Fest’s reading club will discuss Ghost Driver by Nell Osborne. The Crip Arts Gatherings are relaxed, virtual events. It will be a moment to take a breath, make art, and reconnect or meet for the first time fellow Disabled, Deaf, chronically ill, Neurodivergent, mentally ill, and/or mad folks with warmth and restful energy.

New Works

• This week is the virtual release of Sins Invalid’s 2024 performance Stages of Grief: Crip Hearts on Fire. Featuring work by Tré Vasquez, María Palacios, Nomy Lamm, Germán Parodi, Lateef McLeod and Antoine Hunter and Urban Jazz Dance Company.

• How do you throw a brick through the window… recently closed at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University (Boston). The show, featuring work by Yani aviles, Chloe P. Crawford, Nat Decker, Jeff Kasper, Carly Mandel, Jeffrey Meris, and Libby Paloma, “presents new commissions and recent works of art exploring how individuals with disabilities, chronic illnesses, and neurodivergence navigate forms of protest despite the normalization of ableism in public spaces.” In 2026, the exhibition will travel to the John Michael Kohler Arts Center (Sheboygan, WI).

  

• anna RG recently published “(in)filtration + a welcome (noise),” an essay on nondisabled silence and duetting with air purifiers.

• This week, UK-based disabled artist Corinne premieres The Severed Wing, “a magical, visceral and intimate live encounter between one physical space and another” streamed live from the artist’s bed.

  

• The Access Playbook, a project of the Canadian resource hub Creative Connector, recently published a literature and research findings from focus groups and interviews on the barriers to Deaf and Disability inclusion in the performing arts.

• Following a summit with over 50 advocates from the reproductive and disability rights communities, Casey Doherty and Mia Ives-Rublee from the Center for American Progress published “Disability Reproductive Equity Agenda: Protecting the Reproductive Rights of Disabled People in 2025 and Beyond.”

• In The Sick Times, Dr. Julia Moore Vogel recently describes how she and her colleagues designed one of the only at-home clinical trials for Long COVID - and the largest one yet. Their Tirzepatide trial is currently recruiting.

New Recordings

• Sista Creatives Rising’s 3rd Art & Mind event explored “themes of COVID, climate & disability, their ongoing effects on disabled BIPOC creatives, and how it’s affected their art.”

• The 3rd Visual AIDS Research Symposium was recently held at MoMA (NYC).

In Other News…

• Last month, US Representatives Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick and Ayanna Pressley Introduced a resolution recognizing Disabled Women’s Equal Pay Day.

• This week, the Latin Grammys will feature International Sign Language with Latin and Deaf signers for the first time, thanks to advocacy by Recording Artists & Music Professionals with Disabilities (RAMPD) and Pro Bono ASL.

• Southern Connecticut State University recently launched a new Critical Disability Studies minor.

  

• A group of autistic content creators and researchers recently published a summary of over 200 autistic people’s views on employment, meant to help inform the UK’s 2026 updates to the Autism Act.

• Global Disability Inclusion recently launched its new Disability Inclusion Program Seal, an assessment of “organizations that are creating better workplace programs for people with disabilities.” The multi-billion dollar company Michaels received the highest level of recognition.

CALLS

• Donate to support a disabled chronically ill and neurodivergent Black person who needs help to cover expenses for urgent surgery, rent, groceries and to keep her electricity on.

• Project LETS needs funds to grow its Anti-Carceral Mental Health Response Program, including frontline response during psychiatric incarceration.

• Mask Bloc NYC is out of funds and urgently needs donations.

• San Francisco State University is accepting applications for the Paul K. Longmore Faculty Director of Disability Studies. Apply by Nov. 24.

• Creative Adaptations is accepting applications for its Adapting Choreography Workshop for disabled and nondisabled dancers and choreographers taking place Nov. 21 - 23 in NYC. Apply by Nov. 12.

• UK-based artist and researcher Amanda Lynch is seeking respondents to a survey exploring the impacts of the changes to digital access to galleries and museums since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.

EVENTS

• FULL FRONTAL CRIP
  Thursday. Nov. 13, 6 - 11pm PT, in-person at LINT (LA)
  Come together for a night of music, movement, stillness, dancing and collective otherness as we bring the Cripple to the front. All welcome. FULL FRONTAL CRIP will be a Cripples-to-the-front event. The world we move through, the spaces we inhabit - these are fundamentally inaccessible in their physical architecture, but also in the their social and emotional frameworks. There is rarely a space for collective being that is accessible and brings the other to the front. So come together for a night of music, movement, stillness, dancing, sitting and collectiveness as we bring the Cripple to the front. All bodies welcome, all bodies wanted. Let’s party in pain, let’s be together.

• Deaf Resilience in Gaza
  Wednesday, Nov. 12, 12 - 1pm ET, online
  Join Eyewitness Palestine in support of the Deaf community in Gaza. We will be joined by Omar Nabil from Deaf Relief Gaza, Deaf Gazan journalist Basem Alhabel, as well as Ranem Shhadeh from the Olive Guardians. Learn about their work in Gaza and how you can get involved!

• Omnium Circus
  Sunday, Nov. 16, 3pm, in-person at Queens Theater (NYC)
  Omnium Circus is a world renowned comprehensively inclusive and accessible circus company bringing excitement, thrills and joy to people of all ages as only a circus can!

• Lunch Time Learning: Prison and Mental Health for Deaf/Disabled Communities
  Monday, Nov. 17, 12:30 PM ET, online
  Join HEARD and My Deaf Therapy as we focus on the importance of supporting deaf/disabled people impacted by carceral systems and access to mental health services during and after incarceration. You’ll learn from HEARD’s Reentry Support Program Director and a Licensed Social Worker from My Deaf Therapy. This event is also featuring a special guest, who is a deaf, formerly incarcerated person, mentor, and Public Education Team (PET) graduate! PET is a communal space that HEARD organizes for deaf/disabled formerly incarcerated folks to learn about practicing harm reduction, reimagining safety, developing an abolitionist framework, and more.

• Collaborative Indexing: Disability Arts and Dependent Textuality
  Workshop
  Saturday, Nov. 22, 12 – 2:30pm ET, in-person at Wendy’s Subway (NYC)
  Led by Charlotte Strange. The New Disability Arts movement calls for accessibility as a formal consideration and an interpersonal practice. Artists in this movement, including Jordan Lord, Carolyn Lazard, and Constantina Zavitsanos have utilized textual forms like captions, subtitles, and audio description for composition and access. With this in mind, this workshop addresses the literary index as an existing type of access form—a “dependent textuality” accounting for the multi-pronged ways a document produces knowledge. We will make use of the literary index as a poetic form while creating our own shared document. In doing so, we will collectively explore the multivalent relationships between disability and alternative forms of knowledge transmission.

A Legal Digest from Dynah Haubert

Dynah, a queer disabled lawyer and activist based in Washington DC, lends us some of their brilliance today by recapping important decisions from the 2024 - 2025 term of the US Supreme Court (SCOTUS) and highlighting some notable cases on the current docket.

Some SCOTUS decisions of interest from their 2024-2025 term:

• The court limited who can sue a former employer under the ADA. This case involved a retired firefighter with Parkinson’s who sued when she learned that her employer had changed how long it would pay for health insurance for disability retirees.

• SCOTUS upheld Tennessee’s ban on puberty blockers and hormone therapy for trans teens. Even though Tennessee allows cis teens to access the same treatments, SCOTUS held that the ban did not “draw sex-based classifications” - distinctions based on sex that would have triggered heightened scrutiny of the ban. Similar bans in other states may now remain in place.

• SCOTUS made it easier for majority-group plaintiffs to sue their employers for reverse discrimination. Such plaintiffs can no longer be required to show “background circumstances,” such as the employer having a pattern of discrimination against their group.

• South Carolina excludes Planned Parenthood from its Medicaid program because it provides abortions. Although the Medicaid Act requires states to ensure that Medicaid patients can obtain care from “any qualified provider,” SCOTUS held that individuals - like the plaintiff here, who had Medicaid and wanted to receive gynecological care from Planned Parenthood - cannot sue their state for excluding a provider from Medicaid.

• In some rare good news, the court unanimously held that students bringing claims relating to their education under the ADA and the Rehabilitation Act do not need to show that the discrimination they experienced was the result of bad faith or gross misjudgment, but are instead subject to the same standards that apply in other disability discrimination contexts. This means students can sue for discrimination even if their school did not intentionally discriminate against them.

  • There is reason to be concerned about this decision, though: Justice Thomas expressed that in the future, he would be open to finding that “bad faith or gross misjudgment” is the correct standard for any litigation under Title II of the ADA and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, meaning that plaintiffs could no longer sue over unintentional discrimination - which makes up the (probably vast) majority of discrimination claims under these laws.

A few cases on the court’s docket for the current term that may be of interest to follow:

• Little v. Hecox and West Virginia v. B.P.J. both concern the constitutionality of laws that bar transgender women and girls from participating on girls’ and women’s sports teams.

• Chiles v. Salazar concerns a challenge to Colorado’s ban on conversion therapy for young people, on the basis that the ban violates providers’ free speech rights.

• Hamm v. Smith concerns how courts should determine whether a death penalty defendant may not be executed due to intellectual disability.

About Dynah

Dynah Haubert is Associate General Counsel in the federal Office of Congressional Workplace Rights. They have long been dialed into disability arts, culture, and community. On the anniversary of the ADA in 2016, they took the stage at the Democratic National Convention. “I became a lawyer,” they said, “to advocate that disability is not a problem to be cured, but a part of our identity and diversity.”

New Works

• Project LETS recently released a new installment of their Mad Liberation 101 explainers on “Why we use the term Madness.”

• This year’s design challenge for the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund paired designers with disabled artists, in partnership with Tilting the Lens.

  

• Panteha Abareshi’s CAREROTICS: on giving and taking is up at Human Resources Los Angeles through Nov. 16.

• This week, Vancouver’s Glitch Theatre, formerly Realwheels Theatre, premieres Faye’s Room, written by autistic playwright Alex K. Masse, at Vancity Culture Lab (Vancouver).

  

• Chanika Svetvilas’s Resounding Remnants, an exhibition celebrating “disability, mad pride, intersectional identity, and the importance of accessibility, community care, and interdependence,” is up at The Hunterdon Art Museum (Clinton, NJ) through Jan. 11, 2026.

• Artist Genevieve Cameo recently published a zine called "Guide to organising Covid safer events.”

• A recent article in The Economist looked at “England’s broken system for meeting special educational needs.”

“Disability Justice”

Every so often, I report on some of the corners of the internet where I notice this term is appearing. Here’s some of what’s new:

• In Queer Kentucky, organizers Sage Barr and Mo Viviane recently discussed why “Disability justice is the backbone of trans movements.”

• Dr. Kate Caldwell of Northwestern Law’s Center for Racial and Disability Justice, recently authored an op-ed in the Chicago Tribune on “How our health information can be used to criminalize us” and the stakes for civil liberties, disability justice, racial equity and public health in the new techno-carceral state.

• Social work scholar Dr. Connie Sung, appointed the Annmarie Hawkins Research Professor in Disability Justice at the University of Michigan in June 2025, recently spoke with The University Record about her named professorship.

• Student journalists Chih-Rong Kuo and Alexandra Hamilton recently reported on the physical inaccessibility of Georgetown University’s campus, including mention of “disability justice-based accommodation systems,” for The Georgetown Voice.

• Northwest Health Foundation recently announced the recipients of its 2025 Advancing Disability Justice Grants.

CALLS

• Disabled organizer and artist thái lu needs support for relocation and medical expenses. Donate directly or purchase a shirt designed by Olivia Dreisinger.

• Donate to help Jen Deerinwater, multiply disabled queer Native activist, as they need support for new living arrangements.

• Heidi Latsky Dance is seeking performers for an upcoming installation of On Display on Dec. 3 in Cambridge, MA in honor of International Day of Persons with Disabilities.

EVENTS

• Disabled & Archiving: Digitization Workshop
  Friday, Nov. 6, 3 - 6pm ET, in-person at articule (Montréal, QC)
  Do you have stuff you wanna digitize but aren’t sure how? Come hang out and learn about digitization tools and techniques at our free Digitization Workshops, presented by the Disability Archives Lab. We will provide different digitization equipment and have facilitators to support you in digitizing your stuff! Attendees should bring any materials they want to digitize -- especially items that they feel document their lives as disabled people in Montréal!

• Disgruntled Academics Meetup
  Thursday, Nov. 5, 5 - 6:30pm PT, in-person at the Disability Cultural Center (San Francisco) on Zoom
  Disabled academics pour love and labor into work at institutions of higher education and learning; however, more often than not, these institutions don’t love us back and refuse the basic labor of meeting our access needs. It’s disgruntling to say the least! We’re holding space at the DCC for disabled academics to come together for a venting, strategizing, and connection-building evening. Anyone who identifies as an academic is welcome! No need to be in school, teaching, or have a degree. It’s just a theory, but we think it’ll be a good time.

• Disability Owned Convening
  Nov. 5 - 6, 12:30 - 5pm ET, online
  This accessible convening offers a wide range of topics aiming to empower entrepreneurs to navigate an ever-changing business landscape, including leveraging AI for business growth, achieving financial health, marketing, accessing support and resources, and panels highlighting how entrepreneurs with disabilities seize opportunities and overcome challenges to build thriving businesses.

This October is the 80th annual National Disability Employment Awareness Month (NDEAM) in the US. To offer some perspective that ‘awareness’ might miss, each issue this month features a section on work, income, and disability. For the previous posts, check out “What It Costs to Have a Job,” “Sick and Tired” and “Big Picture: Does Work…Work?”

Pennies for Pay

This series has focused on important but sometimes overlooked topics that can put disability employment into perspective. The anti-capitalist imperatives of disability justice. Who gets trust and who gets suspicion when disability shows up at work. The role of public benefits eligibility on joblessness.

For today’s final installment, we’re looking at subminimum wages for disabled workers.

The Endurance of 14(c)

In the bill that first mandated a federal minimum wage and overtime pay - the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 - there was a carve-out in Section 14(c) that lets companies pay disabled workers less than minimum wage if they get a certain certificate.

Data from May 2024 show 801 employers have these certificates. A majority of their 40,579 disabled workers were paid less thsn $3.50. And that number of workers is actually a huge reduction: in 2001, before policies like “Competitive Integrated Employment,” there were an estimated 424,000 disabled workers receiving subminimum wages.

Before Biden left office, his Department of Labor announced plans to end the program. 8 months later, the Trump administration withdrew those plans and 14(c) stands.

Sidelined Solidarities

For decades, subminimum wages have created segregated workplaces called ‘sheltered workshops.’ In the shadows of ‘employment,’ like the shadows of ‘treatment,’ there’s a long history of shutting disabled people off from public life.

As organizers Ericka A. Dixon and Sebastian Margaret explained in a recent video from the Disability Project at the Transgender Law Center, subminimum wages are legal in US prisons too.

Even though some elected and public officials voice their opposition, including Kamala Harris in her 2024 presidential campaign, they often ignore the way subminimum wages are part of shared tactics across institutions of enclosure and incarceration.

As a result, solidarity across movement organizing often begins with political education necessary to surface and explain these kinds of connections. Subminimum wages are a good example of how campaigns about ‘disability employment’ often lack a political analysis that could make these efforts actionable and energizing.

And that’s really why I wanted to publish this series over the last 4 weeks: to extend and reframe a focus on what might seem specific or nonpolitical or irrelevant. And it’s really what all of Crip News is all about: trying to use what disability reveals in order to find all the news buried in the news.

I’d love your thoughts on this series and ideas or requests for the next one. You can leave a comment on the issues or reply directly to this email.

NEWS

New Works

• The UK disabled-led theatre company Vital Xposure recently published new research from its Decolonizing Disabilty Lab. Interviews reveal artists often feel forced to fragment their identities in the disability arts sector with structural inequities and missing cultural nuance.

• As part of a residency at Centro de Creación Contemporánea, Matadero (Madrid), scholar Costa Badia is developing The Cripple Gallery: A Manual of Lame Instructions, “a physical and conceptual space in which to experiment with critical pedagogies, accessibility and collective organisation.”

• Researcher, designer, and educator Jordan Whitewood-Neal published “Where Do We Cease to Be Citizens?” with “reflections on colonial utopian visions and crip forms of statehood and pedagogy,” in The Avery Review.

  

• Disability Arts History Australia is the country’s first dedicated national archive of Disability Arts, created with over 100 artists, arts workers and allies. The digital resource presents over 1,600 records and 49 artist interviews.

In Other News…

• Kenyan lawyers recently published an explainer on the country’s new Persons with Disabilities Act.

• A site called WalletHub recently ranked the 180 most populated US cities across “33 key indicators of disability-friendliness.” Minneapolis, St. Louis, and Scottsdale ranked the highest.

CALLS

• People’s CDC is calling for public comments to tell the Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA) that healthcare facilities must report COVID exposures and infections. Submit by Nov. 1.

• Vanessa Hernández Cruz and the LA Spoonie Collective are seeking QTBIPOC disabled artists and facilitators to lead workshops as part of a Disability Justice in Arts Initiative.

EVENTS

• Ableism & Democracy: The Intersection of Issues Impacting Black People with Disabilities
  Tuesday, Oct. 28, 1pm ET, on Zoom
  Today, the struggle continues: Black unemployment is rising, nearly 300,000 Black women have been pushed out of the labor force this year, and federal job cuts are dismantling hard-won economic footholds. These aren’t isolated numbers — they are part of a long story of racism and ableism deciding who gets access to stability and power. In this session, we’ll honor the lessons of our past, break down the urgent economic challenges facing Black disabled communities today, and push forward a vision for a democracy that invests in us. This is not just analysis — it’s a call to action to build the future our ancestors dreamed of and our people deserve. Featuring Eric Harris, Keris Jän Myrick, Tameka Citchen-Spruce, Keri Gray, Ms. Monica Wiley, and moderated by Taryn Mackenzie Williams.

• Permission, Pleasure, and Power: Consent as the Foundation for Disability and Reproductive Justice
  Tuesday, Oct. 28, 5:30pm ET, in-person at Brandeis University (Waltham, MA) and on Zoom
  Join the Lurie Institute for Disability Policy at Brandeis University for the 3rd Annual Carrie Buck Distinguished Fellowship Keynote event featuring Distinguished Fellow, Laura Millar, and Rebecca Cokley of the Ford Foundation.