Carrie Sandahl

Carrie Sandahl is Professor of Disability Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago in the Department of Disability and Human Development. She directs Chicago’s Bodies of Work, an organization that supports the development of disability arts and culture, through festivals, advocacy, and an artist residency program. Her research and creative activity focus on disability identity in live performance and film. Sandahl’s publications include a co-edited an anthology, Bodies in Commotion: Disability and Performance, which garnered the Association for Theatre in Higher Education’s award for Outstanding Book in Theatre Practice and Pedagogy (2006). Her articles have appeared numerous journals, including Theatre Journal, Theatre Topics, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, Gay and Lesbian Quarterly, Cinema Journal, and Disability Studies Quarterly among others. Sandahl frequently travels nationally and internationally to speak about her research and arts advocacy initiatives. Her 2003 article, “Queering the Crip or Cripping the Queer: Intersections of Queer and Crip Identities in Solo Autobiographical Performance” inspired the name of a 2022 exhibition at Berlin’s Schwules Museum. She was invited to share with museum visitors how the concepts from that article were conceived and how they have evolved in her work as an artist, activist, and scholar. She collaborated on a documentary, Code of the Freaks, a critique of disability representations in cinema, which premiered in 2020 and has been shown in festivals, on television, and online streaming platforms in the US and Internationally.