The Arts and Activism Directory (AAD) is co-produced by Bodies in Translation and Tangled Art + Disability. AAD is meant to recognize, commemorate, and document activism in the arts. The purpose is to highlight and profile artists who are exploring activism and social, cultural and political resistance in their practice.
We use the term “activist art” to refer to Disability art, d/Deaf art, Mad art, aging and e/Elder art, fat art, and Indigenous art. This directory can be used as a resource tool for artists, curators, programmers, researchers and the general public to discover, connect with and directly engage with artists and their work.

Alexa Wright
Alexa Wright is a visual artist based in London, UK. Her practice spans a range of media, including photography, video, sound, interactive installation and book

Allyson Mitchell
Allyson Mitchell is a maximalist artist working in sculpture, performance, installation and film. Her practice melds feminism and pop culture to investigate contemporary ideas about

Birdie
Birdie creates “soft body horror” – a mythology of monsters that live on the “Body Farm.” Using mixed media images and sculpture, Birdie pieces together

Bruce Horak
Legally Blind performer/creator for over 25 years, Bruce Horak was born in Calgary, Alberta and has exhibited his work across Canada and abroad. He lost

Carly Riegger
Carly Riegger is a chronically ill female from Ann Arbor, Michigan. She took a strong interest in ceramics in high school. She is currently working

Carrie Perreault
Working primarily in sculpture and performance, Carrie Perreault balances resistance and restraint in onerous actions that recount long-term precarity. In making her work, she expends

Chris ‘Bucko’ Binkowski
Chris ‘Bucko’ Binkowski currently lives and works in Ottawa, ON. Bucko is an emerging multidisciplinary artist working primarily in electronic music performance and abstract paintings.

Chris Dodd
Chris Dodd is an Edmonton-based Deaf performing artist, playwright, accessibility advocate and Governor General Innovation Award finalist. He is the founder and artistic director of

Christine Negus
Christine Negus is a multidisciplinary artist and writer who received the National Film Board of Canada’s Best Emerging Canadian Video/Filmmaker award through Images Festival in

Claire Cunningham
Claire Cunningham is a performer and creator of multi-disciplinary performance based in Glasgow, Scotland. A recent Factory Artist with Tanzhaus NRW Düsseldorf, Germany she is also

Connor Yuzwenko-Martin
Connor Yuzwenko-Martin is descended from settlers, and recognizes and strives every day to honour and act upon the fact that his work and accomplishments take

David Bobier
As a hard of hearing and disabled media artist David Bobier’s creative practice is centred on researching and expanding vibrotactile technology and multi-sensory artistic modalities

Diane Borsato
Diane Borsato (BFA York University, MFA Concordia University, MA Performance Studies, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University) was awarded the Victor Martyn-Lynch Staunton

Eli Clare
White, disabled, and genderqueer, Eli Clare lives near Lake Champlain in occupied Abenaki territory (currently known as Vermont) where he writes and proudly claims a

Elizabeth Sweeney
Elizabeth Sweeney is a visual artist, arts researcher and curator. She is also a neurodivergent queer of Acadian settler decent, who grew up in rural

Emily Gillespie
Emily Gillespie is an author, activist and daydreamer. She has an MA in Disability Studies. Dancing with Ghosts (2017) is her first novel. She is

Erin Ball
Erin Ball is a Mad, Disabled circus artist and coach based in Kingston, Ontario. She runs and owns Kingston Circus Arts; a circus space created

Gaitrie Persaud
Deaf artist, model, actress, Deaf Interpreter, ASL coach and infamous dynamic personality, Gaitrie “Natasha” Persaud, was born and raised in Toronto, Ontario. Her family lineage

Hanan Hazime
Hanan Hazime is a multidisciplinary artist, creative writer, community arts educator, and writing instructor living in Tkaranto/Toronto. She also identifies as a Lebanese-Canadian Muslimah Feminist

Ingrid Bachmann
Ingrid Bachmann is a Montreal artist who works in multiple formats including kinetic and interactive sculptures and installations, drawing, sound and video. She works with

Jeff Thomas
Jeff Thomas is an independent curator and photographer who deals, in examination of his own history and identity, with issues of aboriginality that have arisen
Jeff thomas
Tribal affiliation: Onondaga of the Six Nations of the Grand River Year Jeff Thomas (b. 1956, Buffalo, New York) is an urban-based Iroquois, self-taught photo-based

Jessica Watkin
Jessica Watkin is a PhD Candidate and artist living in Toronto. She is Blind and Disabled, and uses this to fuel her work. She is

Kaleigh Trace
Kaleigh Trace is a disabled, white femme who talks a lot. For many years Kaleigh travelled North America talking about sex. She led sex education

katherine sherwood
Katherine Sherwood’s acclaimed mixed-media paintings gracefully investigate the point at which the essential aspects of art, medicine, and disability intersect. Her works juxtapose abstracted medical

Lev Levner
I just started painting over a year ago. Now I am using pouring techniques and resin art. Recent workSince August 2019 have been exhibiting at

Lisa Anita Wegner
Lisa Anita Wegner is a filmmaker, performer, curator, producer and instructor at the haus of dada. She is the creative producer of Mighty Brave Productions,

M. C Cruz
M.C Cruz a.k.a Chris is a child of Chilean immigrants. Who was born, raised and currently based in Toronto but has also lived in in

Max Ferguson
Max (formerly Sarah) Ferguson has been a practicing artist since 1996 and received his BFA from the University of Regina in 2001. He graduated with an

Megan Bent
Megan Bent is a New England-based artist and teaching artist. She received her MFA and Graduate Certificate in Disability Studies from the University of Hawai‘i

Michel Dumont
Michel Dumont is a queer Métis two spirited artist who enjoys breathing new life into discarded vintage tile by making mosaic pieces. Working with shattered

Natasha BaccHus
I am Natasha Cecily Bacchus. I am an athlete and artist, passionate about mental health, deaf advocacy, fitness and physical expression. Throughout my life, I

Persimmon Blackbridge
For the past 45 years, Persimmon Blackbridge has worked as a sculptor, writer, curator and performer, as well as being an editor, cleaning lady and

Regan Shrumm
Regan Shrumm is a queer and disabled artist, writer, and curator. Shrumm has lived as an uninvited settler on the traditional and unceded Lekwungen and

Sage Lovell
Mx Sage Lovell is a queer nonbinary femme artist, educator, and writer. They attended Gallaudet University where their experiences made them realize that Deaf Accessibility

salima punjani
Salima Punjani is an Access Activator, M.S.W. and Multisensory Artist based in Montreal, Canada. She is particularly interested in how biological data can be transformed

Todd herman
Todd Edward Herman’s films and photographs deal with themes of the body and transience, representational taboos and spectatorship, difference and the historic consequences of othering.

tony heaton
I am concerned with my own existence and my interaction with both the material and non-material world.In my interaction with other humans I am almost

Vanessa Dion Fletcher
Vanessa Dion Fletcher is a Lenape and Potawatomi neurodiverse Artist. She graduated from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2016 with an

Wy Joung Kou
Wy Joung Kou is a queer, chronically ill, multi-disciplinary artist based in Toronto. With a body of work spanning mosaic art, poetry, sound, movement, performance,

Ysabelle Vautour
Acadian artist and art teacher Ysabelle Vautour started out working in the mental health and disability support sector. She began painting two years ago when