Petra Kuppers

Petra Kuppers is an internationally active disability culture activist, a community performance artist, and Artistic Director of The Olimpias performance research collective. She creates participatory 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. She received the American Society for Theatre Research’s best dance/theatre book award, the National Women’s Caucus for the Arts’ Award for Arts and Activism, and her performance poetry collection Gut Botany was just named one of the top ten poetry books of 2020 by the New York Public Library. She lives with her partner Stephanie Heit in Ypsilanti, Michigan, where they co-create Turtle Disco, a somatic writing space. She teaches at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and on the low-residency MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts at Goddard College.

Her next academic book project, Eco Soma: Pain and Joy in Speculative Performance Encounters, appears with the University of Minnesota Press in early 2022. Here is the link for it: https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/eco-soma