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.
If you’d like to have a profile in the Arts and Activism Directory, please fill out this form.
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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 works. She has worked at the intersection of art and medical science since the mid-1990s, when she became known for her award-winning photographs of people with phantom limbs, After Image.…
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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 sexuality, autobiography and the body, largely through the use of reclaimed textile and abandoned craft. These articulations have resulted in a coven of lesbian feminist Sasquatch monsters, a room-sized Vagina…
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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 a Mad gaze: a way of seeing that encompasses what some might call a combination of autism, gender dysphoria, and PTSD. This lens of “Madness” reframes Birdie’s experiences with awe,…
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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 over 90% of his eyesight to a childhood cancer, Bilateral Retinoblastoma. His award-winning theatrical performances include; This is CANCER and Assassinating Thomson. His visual art has been installed at numerous…
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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 on a Post-Baccalaureate Certificate in Ceramics at Indiana University Southeast. In the Spring of 2020, she received a BFA in Studio Art, with a specialization in Ceramics at Bowling Green…
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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 great effort to achieve minimal results. This isn’t about labour; she prioritizes process to reflect on systems of abuse and their connection to emotional and psychological experiences. Through gestural, often…
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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. He performs improvised synth based music via iPhone. Bucko paints squares in acrylic medium and digitally creates atmospheric watercolour forms. Recent HistoryOutliers on Tour group exhibitionTangled Art + Disability 2019…
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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 Canada’s national theatre festival dedicated to the Deaf performing arts, SOUND OFF. He is an artistic associate with Workshop West Playwrights’ Theatre and is one of their Playwrights in Development.…
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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 2008. Negus obtained her MFA in 2010 from Northwestern University in Chicago, IL and her BFA in 2008 from Western University in London, ON. Her work has been reviewed in…
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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 an Affiliate Artist with The Place, London. One of the UK’s most acclaimed and internationally renowned disabled artists, Cunningham’s work is often rooted in the study and use/misuse of her…
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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 place on Treaty 6 territory, primarily in the region of Amiskwaciy’waskahan, known as the settler city of Edmonton. He benefits from the land, water, and air shared by countless generations…
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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 as creative mediums. He is the Founder and Director of VibraFusionLab (VFL) that aims to provide access to inclusive technologies for supporting greater accessibility in the arts. In his work…
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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 Award from the Canada Council for the Arts, and was twice nominated for the Sobey Art Award. She has exhibited the Art Gallery of Ontario, The Power Plant, the AGYU,…
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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 penchant for rabble-rousing. He has written two books of creative non-fiction, Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure and Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation, and a collection of poetry, The…
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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 Nova Scotia. She has a BFA in Studio Art from Concordia University (2001), a B.Ed from the University Of Ottawa (2005) and an MA in Critical Disability Studies from York…
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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 currently working on her second book. Her writing appears in several anthologies. Recent work I am finishing my second novel, which I received TAC funding for. Press Art form Performance…
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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 with Disability in mind. Erin is also the co-founder of LEGacy Circus, a performance company co-created with Mad artist, Vanessa Furlong. Erin uses aerial arts and ground acrobatics to tell…
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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 hails from Portuguese, Brazilian, Guyanese, and Indian backgrounds. Before becoming a mom to three beautiful children, Gaitrie lived in New York State where she was able to meet Deaf BIPOC…
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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 and Mad Pride Activist. Through her intersectional and interdisciplinary artwork, Hanan aims to push boundaries, question arbitrary binaries, dispel stigmas, and shatter stereotypes. Her primary mission as an arts educator…
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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 all levels of technology from redundant to relatively state-of–the-art digital media. Her work is less about creating new things but working with things that already exist in the world –…
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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 story teller, writer, pubic speaker, and curator, living in Ottawa, Ontario, and has works in major collections in Canada, the United States, and Europe. Jeff’s most recent solo shows were…
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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 a non-visual, multidisciplinary artist working with tactile arts, storytelling, Disability Dramaturgy, and performance. Recent History Press Websitewww.jesswatkin.cominstagram.com/fekkledfudge Art formVisual ArtsTextilesPerformance ArtInstallationTheatreDance CommunityDisabledBlindQueerFeminist ProvinceOntario
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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 workshops exploring the intersections of disability, desirability, pain and pleasure. Through these speaking engagements Kaleigh aimed to interrupt shameful stories about sexuality. She wrote a book to that effect titled…
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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 images, such as cerebral angiograms of the artist’s brain, with fluid renderings of ancient patterns; the paintings thus explore and reveal, with a most unusual palette, the strange nature of…
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Lev Levner
I just started painting over a year ago. Now I am using pouring techniques and resin art. Recent work Since August 2019 have been exhibiting at Show Gallery. Art form Painting Community Disabled Website instagram.com/levs.abstract Location Toronto, Ontario, Canada
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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, a small award-winning multi-media production company and a founding member of the Akhilanda Collaborative. Her work has been shown at the Phoenix Art Museum, Art Gallery of Ontario, Mayworks Festival,…
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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 Chile and more recently did an Artist Residency in Morocco and Spain. They attended Etobicoke School of Arts and majored in Visual Arts before moving to Vancouver to study film…
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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 MFA in Interdisciplinary Studies (Visual Art and Women’s and Gender Studies) in 2017 and is currently pursuing his PhD in Art and Women’s and Gender Studies at York University. His…
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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 at Mānoa in 2012. She received her BFA from the School of Visual Arts, NY, in 2004. Through photography, she explores disability culture and identity. Her artwork has been exhibited…
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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 tile mirrors his daily life of dealing with a shattered back, which drives him to make something beautiful out of it. Making outfits for local and national drag communities allows…
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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 have nurtured my passion for fitness by competing as a professional athlete and securing medal positions in both the Deaf Olympics and Pan Am Olympics as well as many other…
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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 very bad waitress. She has consistently made art on themes of disability since the late 1970s, as well as art, writing and performance on institutionalization, censorship, queer identity, generational alcoholism,…
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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 WSANEC territory (Victoria, BC) for the past ten years. Shrumm creates arts and arts programming that centres arts on every level and aspect of society, as the arts allows us…
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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 was twenty years behind in Canada. They returned to their roots and focused on advocacy which led them into creating art as political statements. Since then, they’ve been working closely…
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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 to create artful experiences of empathy and connection. Her recent projects include The Cost of Entry is a Heartbeat, a collective rest experience using heartbeat data and sounds recorded in…
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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. His work has generated collaborations with artists on books, films, performances and exhibitions around the world. Todd has been the recipient of many awards for his work including the San…
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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 always reminded that I am perceived as a disabled person, this in manifest in their actions towards me and their interaction with me.Much of my work explores my personal analysis…
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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 MFA in performance, she has exhibited across Canada and the US, at Art Mur Montreal, Eastern Edge Gallery Newfoundland, The Queer Arts Festival Vancouver, Satellite Art show Miami. Her work…
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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, video, and installation, their work is often inextricable from queer, disabled, diasporic narratives. Grounded in a disability justice framework centering accessibility, community and interdependence, their artistic practice is interwoven with…
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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 she decided to paint and create art every day for a year. Ysabelle uses a contemplative approach to her portraits. She has ten years of experience in both improv and…