January 2024
January 29, 2024 @ 6:00 pm
Choreographer Jerron Herman and Historian of Science and Technology Mara Mills discuss opera and disability and Herman’s approach to choreography and design for the upcoming 2025 world premiere of Sensorium Ex, a contemporary opera composed by Paola Prestini, with libretto by Brenda Shaugnessy and co-direction by Jay Scheib. In partnership with NYU Center for Disability Studies, the evening will investigate the ways that disability shapes time, with a particular focus on the possibilities and paradoxes of fermata in Herman’s work. Dance and music from the work will be part of the discussion.
February 2024
February 15, 2024 @ 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm
Please join us for Dr. Alshammari’s reading from Head Above Water, one of the first disability memoirs from the Gulf region, with a follow up discussion on disability in literature and the role of illness narratives by Arab women.
Head above Water is an intimate, philosophical memoir by Shahd Alshammari, a woman marked “ill” by society and a lifelong reader, student, and teacher. Alshammari explores disability, displacement, and belonging—not only of the body, but of culture, gender, and race. Head Above Water was longlisted for The Barbellion Prize and has been referred to as “an intimate and layered portrait of disabled womanhood.” – Kirkus (starred review).
February 29, 2024 @ 5:00 pm – 6:30 pm
Join us for an evening of bad crip feelings with a talk by J. Logan Smilges (UBC) on their book Crip Negativity (2023), followed by a conversation with Jina B. Kim (Smith). Crip Negativity addresses the role of bad feelings in disability studies and organizing, and at this event, Smilges will address what the book’s reception can tell us about the field’s affective attachments and political commitments.
March 2024
March 1, 2024 @ 5:00 pm – 7:30 pm
This award-winning documentary chronicles the devastation experienced by residents of a NYC nursing home during the coronavirus pandemic. The film takes viewers inside Coler, on Roosevelt Island, where director Jay Molina lives with his fellow Reality Poets, a group of mostly gun violence survivors. Instead of history repeating itself on this tiny island with a dark history of institutional neglect and abandonment, Fire Through Dry Grass shows these disabled Black and Brown artists refusing to be abused, confined, erased.
March 29, 2024 @ 5:00 pm – 6:30 pm
Join us as Arseli Dokumaci and Michele Friedner engage in a conversation about shrinking worlds and activist affordances. Following a brief viewing and discussion of Arseli’s ethnographic videos showing activist affordances in action, Arseli and Michele will facilitate and open up a conversation about the immense amount of effort and creative work disabled people do everyday, building inhabitable worlds from the ground up.
April 12, 2024 @ 4:00 pm – 5:30 pm
The Center for Disability Studies invites you to join Andy Slater, Josephine Sales, and Meesh Sara Fradkin for an artist talk moderated by Jonathan Sterne. The three artists will delve into their individual practices through various forms of sound art and descriptions, and then come together in conversation about poetics and access.
April 25, 2024 @ 6:00 pm – 7:15 pm
Join us for a conversation between poet ofi davis and artist Alex Dolores Salerno, moderated by artist Francisco echo Eraso in conjunction with Alex Dolores Salerno’s exhibition Greenness on view at Real Art Ways. Greenness, a show dedicated to disabled ancestor Mel Baggs, frames being in relationship with the earth as an access need. ofi and Alex will share poetry by Mel Baggs along with their own work. This will be followed by an intimate conversation foregrounding autistic access intimacy, friendship, and an exploration of the ways that their practices are inextricable from their lived experiences.
May 2024
May 16, 2024 @ 5:00 pm – 6:30 pm
Please join The Center for Disability Studies, Faye Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp (NYU anthropologists/authors/