Presenter Bios:

David Gissen: David Gissen is the author of several books on architecture history and theory — The Architecture of Disability: Buildings, Cities and Landscapes Beyond Access (2023), Manhattan Atmospheres: Architecture, the Interior Environment and Urban Crises (2014), and Subnature: Architecture’s Other Environments (2009). He also works with museums and cultural institutions on projects examining histories of architecture, disability, and design, including commissioned work from MoMA, The Walker Art Center, The Victoria and Albert Museum, and the 2016 and 2021 Venice Biennales. He is currently Professor of Architecture and Urban History at The New School and has held distinguished visiting appointments in the schools of architecture at Columbia University, Yale, MIT, and the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna.

Sara Hendren: Sara Hendren is an artist, design researcher, writer, professor at Northeastern University, and the author of What Can A Body Do? How We Meet the Built World. Her art and design works have been exhibited on the White House lawn, the Seoul Museum of Art, the Vitra Museum, and many others, and her work is held in the permanent collections at MoMA, the Victoria & Albert Museum, and the Cooper Hewitt.

Georgina Kleege: Georgina Kleege is Professor Emerita of English at UC Berkeley where she taught classes in creative writing and disability studies. She now lives in New York City.  Her recent books include: Sight Unseen, Blind Rage: Letters to Helen Keller, and More than Meets the Eye: What Blindness Brings to Art.

Laurel Lawson: Laurel Lawson is a choreographic collaborator, dancer, designer, and engineer with Kinetic Light. She is the primary costume and makeup designer, and designs the wheelchairs that Kinetic Light use in performance.. She is also the product designer and lead for access and software initiatives such as Audimance, the company’s app which revolutionizes audio description for non-visual audiences, and the primary curriculum author and teacher for Access ALLways. Her work has been recognized with a 2019-20 Dance/USA Artist Fellowship, made possible with funding from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, and with a 2023 Creative Capital Award.

Simi Linton: Simi Linton is the author of Claiming Disability: Knowledge and Identity, My Body Politic, and “Cultural Territories of Disability,” and the subject of the documentary Invitation to Dance (Christian von Tippelskirch and Simi Linton). Her current and largest project to date is the book Disability Arts, and accompanying 3-phase radically accessible publishing schema – a project led by a collective of disabled creatives and activists.

Mara Mills: Mara Mills is Associate Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University and Director of the NYU Center for Disability Studies, a hub for disability arts programming. She is also a founding editorial board member of the journal Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience. She is recently coeditor of Crip Authorship: Disability as Method (NYU Press, 2023) and a special issue of the journal Osiris on “Disability and the History of Science” (University of Chicago Press, 2024). Upcoming publications include the edited collection How to be Disabled in a Pandemic (NYU Press, February 2025), funded by the National Science Foundation, and a collaborative research project with anthropologist Michele Friedner, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, on “The Global Cochlear Implant.”

Chitra Ramalingam: Chitra Ramalingam is Director of Academic Engagement at the Guggenheim Museum, where she oversees the museum’s programs for students and faculty in higher education, including curricular partnerships with colleges and universities. An interdisciplinary educator, scholar, and curator with a PhD in History of Science from Harvard, she has held positions at the Science Museum London and the University of Cambridge, and was Associate Curator of Photography and Head of Prints and Drawings at the Yale Center for British Art. At Yale she also taught for nearly a decade in the History of Science and Medicine Program, where she developed experimental pedagogies around university collections. She is co-editor of William Henry Fox Talbot: Beyond Photography (Yale University Press, 2013) and author of numerous articles on the visual cultures of experimental science and the early history of photography. 

Geelia Ronkina: Geelia Ronkina is a writer and artist based in New York. Recent work has appeared in CURA., The Contemporary Journal, the Poetry Project, Storefront for Art and Architecture, and Performance Space New York. They were a 2023–2024 Helena Rubinstein Critical Studies Fellow at the Whitney ISP and are a current PhD candidate in Performance Studies at New York University.

David Serlin: David Serlin (pronouns: he/him) is Professor of Communication at UC San Diego, where he is core faculty in Science Studies and affiliated faculty in Critical Gender Studies and Urban Studies. He is also a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome, where he was awarded the Rome Prize in Architecture in 2021. David is the author or editor of numerous books including Replaceable You: Engineering the Body in Postwar America (University of Chicago Press, 2004), Artificial Parts, Practical Lives: Modern Histories of Prosthetics (co-editor; NYU Press, 2002); and Keywords for Disability Studies (co-editor; NYU Press, 2015). Today’s talk is excerpted from his forthcoming book Window Shopping with Helen Keller: Architecture and Disability in Modern Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2025), which will be out in January. He is an editor at large for the journal Cabinet and a founding editor of the journal Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience. Outside of academia, David also writes books for children. He is the author of the New York Times-bestselling beginning reader Baby Monkey, Private Eye (Scholastic, 2018), which was illustrated by his husband, Brian Selznick.

Alice Sheppard: Alice Sheppard is the Founder and Artistic Director of Kinetic Light, as well as a choreographer and dancer in the company. Sheppard has danced in projects with AXIS Dance Company, Ballet Cymru, GDance, and Marc Brew Company in the United Kingdom and Full Radius Dance, Marjani Forté, MBDance, Infinity Dance Theater, and Steve Paxton in the United States. A Bessie award-winning choreographer, Sheppard is also a sought-after speaker and has lectured on topics related to disability arts, race and dance. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, in academic journals, and the anthology Disability Visibility, edited by Alice Wong.  She is a 2020 Disability Futures Fellow, a joint initiative of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and Ford Foundation.

Emily Watlington: Emily Watlington is a critic, curator, and senior editor at Art in America. She holds a master’s degree in the History, Theory and Criticism of Architecture and Art from MIT, and is the recipient of the Rabkin Prize for Arts Journalism (2024), C/O Berlin Theorist Award (2020), and the Vera List Writing Prize for Visual Arts (2018).

Constantina Zavitsanos: Constantina Zavitsanos works in sculpture, performance, text, and sound and deals in debt, dependency, and other shared resources. Zavitsanoshas exhibited at New Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, The Kitchen, Artists Space, Participant Inc., and Performance Space New York, and at Arika UK, Glasgow; If I Can’t Dance, Amsterdam; and Galerie Max Mayer, Düsseldorf. With Park McArthur, they wrote “Other Forms of Conviviality” in the journal, Women & Performance, (Routledge, 2013) and “The Guild of the Brave Poor Things” in Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility (MIT Press, 2017). They co-organize the cross-disability arts events, I Wanna Be With You Everywhere, and have received a Roy Lichtenstein Award in Visual Arts from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts and a Keith Haring Fellowship in Art and Activism from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College.