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. 

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 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.

Here is their panel citation: "The panel commends Petra Kuppers for Eco Soma: Pain and Joy in Speculative Performance Encounters. We found this book to be methodologically daring, and a profound and effective experiment in an embodied encounter with performance by and with disabled practitioners. It will surely be a valuable text for the study of disability and performance, in particular for its demonstration of how an auto-ethnographic approach might be captured vividly in speculative, tentacular writing."

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

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 - will appear 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, forthcoming 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.