Petra Kuppers
Visual Art
Ypsilanti, MI
Petra Kuppers (she/her) is a German disability culture activist living in the US, a community performance artist, a wheelchair dancer, and a poet. Petra grounds herself in disability culture methods, and she uses somatics, performance, media, visual art, and speculative writing to engage audiences toward more socially just and enjoyable futures. Her latest academic study is the award-winning Eco Soma: Pain and Joy in Speculative Performance Encounters (UoMinnesota Press, 2022, open access). Her Crip/Mad Archive Dances (2024), an experimental documentary, won the Best Artists Film Award of the Together! Disability Film Festival. Her dance videos have recently been published in Poetry, Denver Quarterly’s FIVES, and Unearthed.
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. Her fourth poetry collection, Diver Beneath the Street, investigates true crime and ecopoetry at the level of the soil, at the limit of life and death (Wayne State University Press, February 2024).
She received a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Visionary Trailblazer Award by the Association for Theatre in Higher Education for her life-long work in community performance.
She leads the Olimpias, an association of international disability culture artists, and co-directs Turtle Disco, a somatic writing studio, with poet and dancer Stephanie Heit, out of their home on Anishinaabe Territory in Ypsilanti, Michigan. Petra is the Anita Gonzalez Collegiate Professor of Performance Studies and Disability Culture at the University of Michigan. During her time at Ragdale, she will work on Planting Disabled Futures, a virtual reality/community performance project, the focus of her Just Tech Fellowship (2024-2026).