People

meesh sara fradkin is a writer, sound artist, and phd candidate in interdisciplinary music technology at mcgill university.

Image by Meesh Fradkin

Born in 1981, Carmen Papalia is a nonvisual social practice artist with chronic and episodic pain. He uses organizing strategies and improvisation to address his access to public space, art institutions and visual culture. As a convener, he establishes welcoming spaces where disabled, sick and chronically ill people can build capacity for care that they lack on account of governmental failure and medical ableism. His work, which takes forms ranging from collaborative performance to public intervention, is a response to the harms of the Medical Model of Disability.

Papalia holds a Bachelor of Arts from Simon Fraser University and a Master of Fine Arts with a focus in Art & Social Practice from Portland State University.

He is an inaugural fellow of the Crip Tech Incubator via Leonardo: the International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology. In 2020 Papalia was one of 25 artists who received the Sobey Art Award; in 2019 he was a Sobey long list recipient in the West Coast / Yukon region. His work has been featured at institutions such as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Tate Liverpool, Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity, the Contemporary Art Gallery, Surrey Art Gallery and Gallery Gachet, among others.

Headshot, image credit: Kristin Lantz 

Josephine Sales works with systems of reliance and acts of contingency to consider how disability may expand our relational capacity. Engaging perceptual conditions of access, Sales creates site-specific installations based in cinema, sculpture, sound, and performance. The artist's work has been presented at Palais de Tokyo, The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Kai Matsumiya, New York and The Shed.  Fellowships include Leonardo, International Society for Arts, Sciences and Technology (2021-2023) and Black Box Residency at University of California Irvine Beall Center for Art + Technology (2022-2023).  Sales received an MFA in Photography from Milton Avery School of the Arts, Bard College and lives and works in New York City

Image credit: Courtesy of the artist

Andy Slater (b. 1975 Milford, CT) is a blind Chicago-based media artist, writer, performer, and Disability advocate/loudmouth.
Andy holds a Masters in Sound Arts and Industries from Northwestern University and a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is a 2022 United States Artists fellow, 2022-2023 Leonardo Crip Tech Incubator fellow and a 2018 3Arts/Bodies of Work fellow at the University of Illinois Chicago

He is a teaching artist with the Atlantic Center for the Arts’ Young SoundSeekers program, Midwest Society For Acoustic Ecology, and Creative Users’ Sensory Shift program.

Andy’s current work focuses on advocacy for accessible art and technology, Alt-Text for sound and image, the phonology of the blind body, spatial audio for extended reality, and sound design for film, dance, and digital scent design..

Andy was the feature on an episode of BBC Outlook in 2023. In 2020 Andy was acknowledged for his art by the New York Times in their article, “28 Ways To Learn About Disability Culture.”
His research on Crypto Acoustic Auditory Non-Hallucination was published in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern volume 61. Andy’s audio description production for Alison O’Daniel’s film,” The Tuba Thieves”, was featured at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival. He was music director for the 2022-2023 Lit y Luz festival in Mexico City. His sound description of Molly Joyce’s, “Side By Side”, was commissioned by Carnegie Hall in 2022.
Andy has been published in Array: The International Computer Music Journal, Curating Access:Disability Art Activism AndCreative Accommodation, English Studies in Canada, the Chicago Reader, There Plant Eyes (Godin 2021), and Jane magazine.
He has exhibited and performed at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Fonoteca Nacional in Mexico City, , the Contemporary Jewish Museum SF, Massechussettes Museum of Contemporary Art, American Writers and Publishers conference, Transmediale Festival Berlin, Kinetic Light’s “Wired”, Technosonics Festival University of Virginia, , Ian Potter Museum of Art Melbourne, Meyer Sound Lab SF, Critical Distance Toronto, Gallery 400 Chicago, Experimental Sound Studios, the Art Institute of Chicago, and Inclusive Dance Festival..

Andy is a member of the 3Arts Disability Culture Leadership Initiative New Art City accessibility board, and the founder of the Society of Visually Impaired Sound Artists..

And last but not least, he is a member of the acid-soul band, the Velcro Lewis Group, and performs solo as electronic melting pot, Calculator Font.

Image Credit: Tressa Slater

Olivia Ting is a hard of hearing visual artist, designer, photographer, video projectionist, and pianist. She explores audial perception without hearing and the intersections of sound perception interpreted as speech, noise, and music (organized sound). Without her hearing aid and cochlear implant, she perceives nearly no sounds, so visuals stand in for the audio that she is familiar with, but hears and not hears. Formerly a pre-med major at Pomona College, she went on to a second degree in graphic design at Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles. She worked for design and branding agencies in New York City for several years before returning to San Francisco, where her work expanded to collaborative video projections with dance choreographers and museum exhibits. She received her MFA Art Practice from U.C. Berkeley and is currently freelancing and developing new work reconnecting with her music background.

Image credit: Olivia Ting

I was born in Montreal, Quebec, and spent the later part of my adolescence in Arizona, before moving to Los Angeles. I am a first-generation North-American, and am fluent in Farsi. I began showing my work nationally and internationally at a young age, and achieved my BFA at the University of Southern California. I strive to integrate public engagement and interaction into my practice, holding great value in making the experience and discussion of contemporary art highly accessible - physically, emotionally and intellectually. In parallel to my practice I have an artist book entitled "I Am Inside The Body," published in the fall of 2020, and as of August 2020, two of my pieces have been acquired by the Special Collections at the Whitney Museum of Contemporary Art, in NYC. In February of 2021, a solo exhibition of my work, entitled TENDER CALAMITIES, opened at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery.

Indira Allegra is the founder of Indira Allegra Studio - a performative craft design studio using weaving as a ritual action and a conceptual framework to craft living structures off the loom and in the world. As a recognized leader within the field of performative craft, Allegra investigates cycles of death memorial and regeneration. A living structure can be performed as a memorial, a text​ ​or the movement of human and non-human behavior across a rolling planet.

Allegra's work has been featured in ARTFORUM, Art Journal, BOMB Magazine, SF Chronicle and KQED and in exhibitions at the Museum of Arts and Design, the Arts Incubator in Chicago, Center for Craft Creativity and Design, John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and the Museum of the African Diaspora among others.

Allegra's writing has been featured in Theater, TEXTILE: Cloth and Culture, American Craft Magazine, Manual: A Journal About Art & Its Making, Cream City Review and Foglifter Journal among others. They have been the recipient of numerous awards including the United States Artists Fellowship, Burke Prize, Gerbode Choreographer Award, Art Matters Fellowship, Mike Kelley Artist Project Grant, Lambda Literary Fellowship and Joseph Henry Jackson Literary Award.

Nat Decker (they/them) is a Chicago born, Los Angeles based artist. In June 2022 they graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles with a degree in Design/Media Arts and Disability Studies. Weaving these two fields, they work within the realm of disability arts as an inherently political practice, driven by the personal, and desires for care and collective liberation. Employing digital and sculptural mediums, they explore the aesthetics of access, the intimacies of lived experience, technology and crip fantasy. They use the mobility device as a site of crip narrative, reimagining the wheelchairs, walkers, scooters, canes they use each day with fluid impractical form, vivid celebratory color and questions about desirability. With Cielo Saucedo, they are creating a web archive of digital disabled embodiment, offering a repository of disability related 3D assets, avatars and motion-capture.

Oakland native, Antoine Hunter aka Purple Fire Crow is an award-winning internationally known African-American, Indigenous, Deaf, Disabled, choreographer, dancer, actor, instructor, speaker, producer and Deaf advocate. He creates opportunities for Disabled, Deaf and hearing artists, produces Deaf-friendly events, and founded the Urban Jazz Dance Company in 2007 and Bay Area International Deaf Dance Festival in 2013. Awards include the 2022 Disability Futures Fellowship, 2021 Dance Teacher Award, 2019 National Dance/USA fellowship recognized by the Mayor of Oakland, 2018 inaugural Jeanette Lomujo Bremond Humanity Arts Award and 2017 Isadora Duncan (Izzie) for BAIDDF.

Hunter’s work has been performed globally and he has lectured across the U.S. including at Kennedy Center’s VSA, Harvard and Duke University, and the National Assembly of State Arts as an ambassador for social change. Hunter utilizes his company’s artistic talents to engage with audiences, empower Deaf and disabled communities, and advocate for human rights and access, working to end discrimination and prejudice.

His shoe company DropLabs and Susan Paley released an innovative haptic product to help people feel music. Hunter curated 2021 Bay Area Deaf Arts at SOMArts, is a 2021 YBCA 100 honoree, is on the production team of Signing Animation actively working on inclusive films and serves on the boards of Dance/USA, BABDA, Museum of Dance and councils for CalArts Alumnx and Intrinsic Arts.

In response to Covid-19 in July 2020, Hunter founded #DeafWoke, an online talk show that amplifies BIPOC Deaf and Disabled stories as a force for cultural change. www.realurbanjazzdance.com

Melissa Malzkuhn is an activist, academic, artist, and digital strategist with a love for language play, interactive experiences, and community-based change. She founded and leads creative research and development at Motion Light Lab, at a Gallaudet University research center. The Lab uses creative literature and digital technology techniques to create immersive learning experiences- from storybook apps that have been translated into over 20 international languages to motion capture projects that build signing avatars- all of which expand the 3D experiences for deaf children, visual learners, and more. Melissa is a cofounder of CREST Network, focusing on equity and inclusion of deaf people in sign language technology. Her production company Ink & Salt developed an app to teach American Sign Language, The ASL App, which has been downloaded over 3 million times. Third-generation Deaf, she has organized deaf youth and worked with international deaf youth programs, fostering leadership and self-representation. Now, she collaborates with teams in different countries to support literacy development for deaf children and collaborates with multiple organizations. Melissa started a campaign, Hu - To Sign Is Human, through screen printing to continue positive advocacy for language access for all deaf children. Her work has been recognized nationally and internationally. She is an Obama Fellow, inaugural class 2018, and has been recognized as a leading social entrepreneur by Ashoka, in 2020. She resides in Maryland with her family.

Interdisciplinary artist Maia Scott’s blend of creative, quirky and compassionate sensibilities infuse her work teaching accessible visual and performing arts at City College of San Francisco and coordinating arts programming and outings at the Lighthouse for the Blind. Maia also currently a teaching artist with the Palo Alto Art Center where she is partnering with the museum to bring arts programming to local housing and programs serving seniors and people with disabilities. She started her connection with PAAC as a resident artist for the show “The Art of Disability Culture” where she displayed her labyrinth inspired art and performed for community celebrations. Maia is also a certified labyrinth facilitator who offers movement meditation sessions, creates temporary labyrinths and incorporates the practice into arts workshops. Maia has been the keynote speaker and presented various sessions for the Labyrinth Society Gathering international conference. She proposed, authored and collaborated with the American Printing House for the Blind to create “Finger Walks” a collection of tactile labyrinths and guidebook. Maia holds an AA in dance, a BA and certificate in therapeutic recreation, an MFA in creative inquiry, interdisciplinary arts from California Institute of Integral Studies plus certifications in massage and sound healing.

Stephanie Sherriff is an interdisciplinary artist, composer, and performer currently based in San Francisco, California. Their work with sound, video, and physical phenomena is ephemeral in nature and culminates as time-based installations and performances that deconstruct fragments of daily life through experimental processes. They received a BA from San Francisco State University in 2014 and an MFA in Art Practice from Stanford University in 2019. Their work has been featured both nationally and internationally at creative centers such as the Institute for Research Coordination in Acoustics/Music (IRCAM), Sonorities Belfast, the Sfendoni Theater, the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), O. Festival, Gray Area, The Lab, Artists Television Access (ATA), and the Center for New Music (C4NM).

Andy Slater (b. 1975 Milford, CT) is a blind Chicago-based media artist, writer, performer, and Disability advocate/loudmouth.
Andy holds a Masters in Sound Arts and Industries from Northwestern University and a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is a 2022 United States Artists fellow, 2022-2023 Leonardo Crip Tech Incubator fellow and a 2018 3Arts/Bodies of Work fellow at the University of Illinois Chicago

He is a teaching artist with the Atlantic Center for the Arts’ Young SoundSeekers program, Midwest Society For Acoustic Ecology, and Creative Users’ Sensory Shift program.

Andy’s current work focuses on advocacy for accessible art and technology, Alt-Text for sound and image, the phonology of the blind body, spatial audio for extended reality, and sound design for film, dance, and digital scent design..

Andy was the feature on an episode of BBC Outlook in 2023. In 2020 Andy was acknowledged for his art by the New York Times in their article, “28 Ways To Learn About Disability Culture.”
His research on Crypto Acoustic Auditory Non-Hallucination was published in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern volume 61. Andy’s audio description production for Alison O’Daniel’s film,” The Tuba Thieves”, was featured at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival. He was music director for the 2022-2023 Lit y Luz festival in Mexico City. His sound description of Molly Joyce’s, “Side By Side”, was commissioned by Carnegie Hall in 2022.
Andy has been published in Array: The International Computer Music Journal, Curating Access:Disability Art Activism AndCreative Accommodation, English Studies in Canada, the Chicago Reader, There Plant Eyes (Godin 2021), and Jane magazine.
He has exhibited and performed at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Fonoteca Nacional in Mexico City, , the Contemporary Jewish Museum SF, Massechussettes Museum of Contemporary Art, American Writers and Publishers conference, Transmediale Festival Berlin, Kinetic Light’s “Wired”, Technosonics Festival University of Virginia, , Ian Potter Museum of Art Melbourne, Meyer Sound Lab SF, Critical Distance Toronto, Gallery 400 Chicago, Experimental Sound Studios, the Art Institute of Chicago, and Inclusive Dance Festival..

Andy is a member of the 3Arts Disability Culture Leadership Initiative New Art City accessibility board, and the founder of the Society of Visually Impaired Sound Artists..

And last but not least, he is a member of the acid-soul band, the Velcro Lewis Group, and performs solo as electronic melting pot, Calculator Font.

Image Credit: Tressa Slater

Jen is an Afro-Latina disabled art activist, designer and educator whose visual work explores the intersection of content and caregiving with an emphasis on redesigning ableist visual culture. As an artist-educator with Graves disease and ADHD, her heart-centered and electric approach to disability advocacy bolsters these movements with invaluable currencies: powerful, dynamic art and media that all at once educates, bridges divergent worlds, and builds a future that mirrors her Autistic son’s experience. Jen has presented her activist work and collaborated with a number of brands and art spaces across print and digital such as Twitter, Target, Converse, and Apple. Her photography and design are permanently archived in libraries at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the National Museum of Women in the Arts in DC. Jen has her MFA in Graphic Design in 2010 from the Maryland Institute College of Art. She currently lives in Baltimore with her husband and 10-year-old son.

Iris Xie (they/them/theirs) is a disabled, neurodivergent, queer trans nonbinary 2nd generation Chinese American multi-discipline writer, artist, and designer from the Bay Area, currently living in Davis, CA. Iris recently graduated from UC Davis with an MFA in Design, and has a double B.A. in Gender, Sexuality, Women's Studies, and English from UC Davis. For their MFA thesis, Iris designed interactive installations involving lyric/poetry games, solo live action role playing games (solo LARPs), a board game, interactive fiction zine games, and stim objects that explore neurodivergence and invisibilized disability through the framework of crip technoscience and disability justice. Their knowing-making practice centers on finding rest and self-trust while traversing liminality through discovering their political identities as a disabled queer trans person of color. Iris is also a member of the Critical Design Lab, which centers collaborative access research on disability culture and crip technoscience. They are also part of QT Labs at UC Davis, and are creating an interactive Augmented Reality installation to highlight queer and trans international grad student experiences. They also write prose and poetry, and love making friends and having conversations, so please say hi!

Jennifer Justice is an artist and writer living in Mendocino County. She develops speculative sculptural environments that invite multi-sensory, performative encounters with handmade, machined, and computer-generated artifacts. Her work has been exhibited at the Palo Alto Art Center, the Contemporary Jewish Museum of San Francisco, StoreFrontLab, the Chicago Cultural Center, Woman Made Gallery, and the Birmingham Museum of Art. Her writing appears in Curating Access: Disability Art Activism and Creative Accommodation (Routledge). She is the Assistive Technology Specialist for Mendocino-Lake County Community College system and previously served as a researcher at the Smith-Kettlewell Rehabilitation Engineering Center.​ Jennifer received her MFA from the University of Illinois and her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.​ 

Frank Mondelli, PhD is a historian of Japanese and transnational media, disability, and technology. He is currently a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Davis, where he is working on his book project on Japanese videogames and disability. He holds a PhD degree from Stanford and a BA from Swarthmore College. His research has been supported by several grants and awards, such as the Fulbright Dissertation Research Grant and the Stanford Enhancing Diversity in Graduate Education Doctoral Fellowship Program. Outside of research, Frank advocates for Deaf and disability access in a variety of contexts. He has worked for disability rights at Stanford in a variety of positions, such as ASSU Executive Disability Advocacy Co-Director and Executive Director of the Abilities Hub, Stanford’s disability community space. He is also a consultant on assistive technology startups in the Bay Area. With his project FM Unit, Frank is also involved in Deaf advocacy through musical production.

Claudia Alick is a cultural producer, performer, and inclusion expert. Claudia serves as Intersectional Design Specialist at Leonardo/ISAST. Named by American Theater Magazine as one of 25 theater artists who will shape American Theater in the next 25 years, Alick has served as the founding Artistic Director of Smokin' Word Productions, is a NY Neofuturist alum, published playwright, recipient of NYC Fresh Fruit directing award, TedXFargo speaker, the Lilla Jewel Award for Women Artists, featured on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam and former Community Producer at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. At OSF for ten years she produced events such as “The Every 28 Hours Plays”, "The Green Show", The Daedalus Project, OSF Open Mics as well as producing/directing audio-plays with OSF such as the Grammy nominated "Hamlet". Her personal projects include her podcast “Hold On…Wait for it”, vlog “This Week in Cultural Appropriation”, StreetPoetry, and one-person Show “Fill in the Blank” exploring disability and the medical industry. Claudia served on Oregon Arts Leaders in Inclusion, the steering committee of The Ghostlight Project, the steering committee for Black Theater Commons.  She is currently managing content with The Crew Revolution black female leadership, serves as Co-president of the board of Network of Ensemble Theater, collaborated on Unsettling Dramaturgy (crip and indigenous international digital colloquium) and is on the advisory councils for the National Disability Theater, Howlround, and NW Arts Streaming Hub.  Claudia Alick serves as founding executive producer of the transmedia social justice company CALLING UP whose projects include Producing in Pandemic, The Every 28 Hours Plays, We Charge Genocide TV, Co-artistic direction of The FURY Factory Festival, and consulting and advising funders and companies around the country. ​https://linktr.ee/callingupjustice