Petra Kuppers (she/her) is a community performance artist, a disability culture activist, and a wheelchair dancer. She uses social somatics, performance, and speculative writing to engage audiences toward more socially just and enjoyable futures. She has been engaged in community dance and disability culture production since the late 80s and continues to lead workshops internationally. Currently, she runs weekly online disability culture movement classes, Starship Somatics, through Movement Research. When her chronic pain does not allow outer movement, Petra writes. Her third performance poetry collection, Gut Botany (Wayne State University Press, 2020), was named one of the top ten US poetry books of 2020 by the New York Public Library and won the 2022 Creative Book Award by the Association for the Study of Literature and the
Environment. Kuppers also writes speculative fiction and academic books (latest, Eco Soma: Joy and Pain in Speculative Performance Encounters (University of Minnesota Press, 2022, open access). Petra was a 2021 Dance Research Fellow at the New York Public Library’s dance division, where she created the ongoing Crip/Mad Archive Dances, and she is a 2022 Dance/USA Fellow and a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow. She is Artistic Director of The Olimpias, an international disability culture collective, and co-creates Turtle Disco, a somatic writing studio, with her wife, poet and dancer Stephanie Heit, from their home on Three Fires Confederacy Territory, colonially known as Ypsilanti, Michigan. Petra is the Anita Gonzalez Collegiate Professor of Performance Studies and Disability Culture at the University of Michigan, and an adviser on the MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts at Goddard College.
