The Sensational Museum: Hannah Thompson in Conversation with Georgina Kleege on Arts Access

Wednesday, March 11, 2026
12 – 1:30pm ET on Zoom

NYU’s Grey Art Museum and Center for Disability Studies invite you to a presentation by Prof. Hannah Thompson (Royal Halloway, University of London) about her project The Sensational Museum, which, as she writes, means “using what we know about disability to change museums for everyone.” Prof. Thompson will be in conversation with Prof. Emeritus Georgina Kleege (UC Berkeley) and Dr. Kevin Gotkin (Assistant Director, Center for Disability Studies, NYU).

This special event is held in memory of Joseph Lovett, a devoted friend of the Grey Art Museum and the Center for Disability Studies. Lovett used film and television to foster awareness of critical issues. He produced the first US broadcast news segments on the AIDS crisis in the early 1980s, and later created feature documentaries on subjects such as gay life in the US, blindness, and cancer. With his husband James Cottrell, Lovett gifted some 200 artworks to the Grey Art Museum, further strengthening NYU’s holdings from the downtown NYC arts scene around SoHo and the Lower East Side.

This event is free and open to the public, but requires registration.

Access information: This event will feature open audio description, ASL interpretation, and automated captions. If there other features that will meet your access needs, please email kgotkin@nyu.edu ideally by Wednesday, February 4.

Register Here

Bios:

Hannah Thompson is Professor of French and Critical Disability Studies at Royal Holloway, University of London and describes herself as a ‘partially blind academic and activist’. She has published widely on the body, gender and disability in nineteenth-century French literature. Her most recent research focuses on the benefits of blindness (“blindness gain”) in literature, culture and heritage and on audio description as a kind of creative, intermodal translation with a focus on museums, galleries and performance venues. She worked with a range of theatres and audio describers during her AHRC 2021-2 EDI Fellowship ‘Inclusive Description for Equality and Access’. In April 2023 she became PI on the £1M AHRC-funded grant The Sensational Museum which aims to ‘use what we know about disability to change how museums work for everyone.’ Hannah writes about her place as a partially blind academic in a resolutely sighted world in her blog Blind Spot.

Georgina Kleege is a blind writer and disability studies scholar who recently retired from the University of California, Berkeley, and now lives in New York City.  Her recent books include: Sight Unseen and Blind Rage: Letters to Helen Keller. Kleege’s latest book, More than Meets the Eye: What Blindness Brings to Art, is concerned with blindness and visual art: how blindness is represented in art, how blindness affects the lives of visual artists, how museums can make visual art accessible to people who are blind and visually impaired. She has lectured and served as consultant to art institutions around the world.