Petra Kuppers is a disability culture activist and a community performance artist who uses disability culture methods, somatics, performance, media, and speculative poetry to engage audiences toward more socially just and enjoyable futures.
Her latest academic study is the award-winning Eco Soma: Pain and Joy in Speculative Performance Encounters (UoMinnesota Press, 2022, open access). Her Crip/Mad Archive Dances, an experimental documentary, won the Best Artists Film Award of the Together! Disability Film Festival. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Visionary Trailblazer Award by the Association for Theatre in Higher Education for her life-long work in community performance. She leads the Olimpias, an association of international disability culture artists, and co-directs Turtle Disco, a somatic writing studio, with poet and dancer Stephanie Heit, out of their home on Anishinaabe Territory in Ypsilanti, MI. Kuppers is the Anita Gonzalez Collegiate Professor of Performance Studies and Disability Culture at the University of Michigan.
At MacDowell, Kuppers worked on portal videos for her Planting Disabled Futures virtual reality/community performance ritual, and she used visual arts and poetry practices to research and prepare for Crip Drift - geology performances in daily engagements with local rocks of MacDowell. Kuppers was a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow and a 2024 Just Tech Fellow, and she will be touring her virtual reality exhibit throughout the U.S. in the coming year.
