Petra Kuppers

Petra Kuppers is a disability culture activist, a community artist, and a Professor of English, Women’s Studies, Theatre and Dance, and Art and Design.

Petra uses somatic speculative writing and performance practice to engage audiences toward more socially just and enjoyable futures, and she grounds herself and her work in site-specific performance and disability culture methods. She has written academic books on disability arts, somatic poetics, and medicine and performance. Her Disability Culture and Community Performance: Find a Strange and Twisted Shape (2011) explores arts-based research methods, and her Studying Disability Arts and Culture: An Introduction (2014) is full of practical exercises for classrooms and studios.

Her creative books include the poetry collection PearlStitch (2016) and the queer/crip speculative short story collection Ice Bar (2018).

Petra is a recipient of the American Society for Theatre Research’s best dance/theatre book award, and the National Women’s Caucus for the Arts’ Award for Arts and Activism.

Prof. Kuppers is interested in creative methodologies and their place in university-level research, and has organized a number of events (for instance, The Anarcha Symposium, part of what is now on Liminalities – Performance Studies Journal) where she encourages both artists and non-artists to work together using performance and poetic approaches to meaning and knowledge.

Thematically, her work encompasses disability studies, performance studies, critical theory and poetics, medical humanities, and the general fields of arts and expression, arts and health, and arts and community building.