Petra Kuppers

Petra Kuppers is disability culture activist and a community performance artist. She creates participatory community performance environments that think/feel into public space, tenderness, site-specific art, access and experimentation. Petra grounds herself in disability culture methods, and uses ecosomatics, performance, and speculative writing to engage audiences toward more socially just and enjoyable futures.

Petra received a 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2022/23 Dance/USA fellowship, 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. 

During 2024-2026, she is a Just Tech Fellow,working on "Planting Disabled Futures," a ‘crip cave’ experience that will combine community performance, disability culture, and virtual reality. 

Her first academic book was Disability and Contemporary Performance: Bodies on Edge (Routledge, 2003). Other books since include The Scar of Visibility: Medical Performance and Contemporary Art (Minnesota, 2007), Disability Culture and Community Performance (Palgrave, 2011), and Eco Soma: Pain and Joy in Speculative Performance Encounters (Minnesota, 2022).

Eco Soma is a phenomenological engagement with intercultural performance practice from a disability culture perspective. This book has now received the ATHE Book Prize with Distinction for Innovative Achievement by the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, an honorable mention by the National Dance Educator’s Organization, was shortlisted for the de la Torre Bueno Prize by the Dance Studies Association, and was one of two shortlisted books for the British Theatre and Performance Book Award, the David Bradby monograph award (TaPRA) 2023.

The book is available as full Open Access, both as a free PDF and on Manifold.

Sample reviews: "Eco Soma might be required reading for artists, activists, ecologists, historians, critical theory scholars, art educators, arts managers, writers, futurists, dreamers… If you are interested in the non/human, post-humanism, post-qualitative inquiry, phenomenology, race/queer/crip theory, disability culture, embodiment, performance, and/or encounters, there is much in/between these pages for I/you/we to encounter and more. We always seem to find ourselves in dangerous times, where ethics and the future lie hand in hand. Eco Soma provides entry points and exit strategies for disrupting systemic and corporeal colonial habits and tendencies. Eco soma is a nonlinear, open method, one that is certain to continue evolving as Kuppers lives with it and as readers make their own somatic relations with the text." (Erin Hoppe, Research in Arts and Education)

Petra Kuppers’s grounded and reflective investigation encourages generative dialogue within and beyond disability performance studies. Sharing many vivid examples drawn from diverse community scales and sites, her eco soma method both illuminates and prompts creative reimaginings of relations between self, land, other humans, and more-than-humans. Answering the urgent call for multidisciplinary work to address climate catastrophe, she reveals the profound power of art-based methods to engage the body, forge connection, and enact change. (Kirsty Johnston)

Petra's third poetry collection, Gut Botany (Wayne State University Press) was named one of the top ten US poetry books of 2020 by the New York Public Library. In 2022, the collection received the Creative Book Award from the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment. Her fourth collection, Diver Beneath the Street - true crime meets eco poetry at the level of the soil - appeared with Wayne State in 2024.

She is the Artistic Director of The Olimpias, an international disability culture collective, and co-creates Turtle Disco, a somatic writing studio, with her wife, poet and dancer Stephanie Heit, from their home in Ypsilanti, Michigan. 

Additional selected recent publications:

‘Disability and Sexual Assault in Public(s): Performance/Nebula’ Biography, special #metoo issue (2023)

‘Starship Somatics : Disability Walking in Outer Space’ The Hopkins Review. Traversals: A Folio on Walking, eds. Anna Marie Hong and Christine Hume. 16:3 (2023).

Crip Ecologies: Changing Orientation Poetry (2022).

‘Crip Mad Archive Dances – a Personal Essay on Arts-based Methods in and out of the Archive’ Theater. 52:2, 2022: 66-77.

Contemporary Horror and Disability: Adaptations and Active Readers.” In: Routledge Companion to Literature and Disability, ed Alice Hall, New York: Routledge, 2020: 82-93.

‘Online Intimacies and Artful Life in Turtle Disco Zoomshells,’ in: Art as Social Practice: Technologies for Change, edited by xtine burrough and Judy Walgren, Routledge, 2022: 241-237.

(co-written with Margaret Noodin): “Minobimaadiziwinke (Creating a Good Life): Native Bodies Healing.” In: The Arts of Indigenous Health and Wellbeing, Eds. Nancy Van Styvendale, J.D. Mcdougall, Robert Henry, and  Robert Alexander Innes. University of Minnetoba Press, 2021: 201-217.

Note: I am available for new graduate students, and run a monthly online Research Coven with my advisees. If you want to contact me, please make yourself familiar with your research first: that'll save some time for both of us.