A lecture by Alice Sheppard, Founder of Kinetic Light.
Intersectional disability is an aesthetic, a culture, and a catalyst in the creative process. When explored in partnership, design and disability emerge as a creative force. Access becomes an essential, generative element, rather than a retroactive accommodation or service. Sheppard’s talk will take audiences through a historical arc of disability and culture and will ask audiences to develop an intersectional disability lens.
This lecture is part of a week-long series of engagements with Kinetic Light at institutions across Philadelphia.
Accessibility
This event is wheelchair accessible and ASL interpreters will be available.
About Alice Sheppard
Alice Sheppard (she/her) is the Founder and Artistic Director of the disability arts organization Kinetic Light, internationally recognized for a decade of innovation in dance, disability arts, and equitable access practices and technology. Engaging with disability arts, culture, and history, Alice’s work attends to the complex intersections of disability, gender, and race. With Kinetic Light, Alice choreographs and creates immersive worlds on stage and screen that emerge from her understanding of disabled expression and aesthetics. She is a United States Artists, MacDowell, and Disability Futures Fellow; a UCLA Regents Lecturer; and a Bessie Award and NCCAkron Knight Choreography Prize winner. Alice is also a sought-after speaker and independent arts researcher whose writing on dance, access, and disability has appeared in The New York Times, peer-reviewed essay collections, and academic journals.
Image Caption: Alice Sheppard speaks at TEDWomen 2019. Photo by Stacie McChesney/TED.
Image Description: Alice, a multiracial Black femme with coffee-colored skin and short curly red hair, speaks onstage. She wears a shimmery dark red sleeveless top, and copper leggings. She sits in her wheelchair, holding a presentation clicker in one hand and gesturing with the other. She is smiling as she speaks. On the large screen behind her is a rehearsal photo in which Alice and Laurel Lawson are mid-air, tethered to the ceiling by bungees.