2024 Artists/Scholars

Disability and Ecology Performance Exchange (D.E.P.E.) Lab

Nadia Adame

Julia Watts Belser

Eli Clare

Raven Davis

Adjua Gargi Nzinga Greaves

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson (RGT)

Tebandeke Joseph

Nadia Adame

Nadia Adame is a Spanish multidisciplinary award-winning artist with a spinal cord injury. She studied Ballet & Flamenco at the Royal Dance Conservatory of Madrid and has a BA in Theatre from the University of Colorado. She was a company member with AXIS (2000-2003) and Candoco Dance Company (2007-2008). In 2004, she co-founded and was the Co-Artistic Director of Compañía Y in Spain with Mark Swetz, a multimedia and performance collective. Nadia’s credits include dance, theatre, commercial, and independent film projects in the UK, Spain, US, and Canada. Nadia became the Artistic Director at AXIS Dance Company in January 2022.

Photo Description: Nadia’s mid headshot image is set on a white background. She is a light skin woman with brown hair pulled back and a couple of pieces of wavy hair over her face. She has light green eyes and is smiling and tilting her head a little bit. Nadia is wearing a sleeveless yellow top.

Julia Watts Belser

Julia Watts Belser (she/her) is a rabbi, scholar, and activist who works at the intersections of disability studies, queer feminist Jewish ethics, and environmental justice. She is a professor of Jewish Studies at Georgetown University, Senior Research Fellow at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs, and core faculty in Georgetown’s Disability Studies Program. Julia’s work draws disability arts and culture into provocative conversation with Jewish texts and tradition to challenge structural violence, deepen our capacity for social justice, and honor the sacredness of disabled people’s lives. Her latest book, Loving Our Own Bones: Disability Wisdom and the Spiritual Subversiveness of Knowing Ourselves Whole (Beacon Press, 2023), won a National Jewish Book Award. A longtime advocate for disability and gender justice, Julia currently directs Disability and Climate Change: A Public Archive Project, an initiative that documents the wisdom and insights of disabled activists, artists, and first responders on the frontlines of climate crisis. She regularly collaborates with disabled artists, including a series of creative explorations with UK-based disabled dancer and choreographer Claire Cunningham. Her current work explores wild kinship, tracking the ways that lived disability experience can offer routes of connection to and with the elemental world. She’s a passionate wheelchair hiker, an avid gardener, a student of birds, and a lover of wild places.

Photo Description: A headshot of Julia Watts Belser, a white Jewish woman with curly brown and silvered hair, in front of a flowering bush. She is wearing a patterned red blazer and red kippah (beret) to match.

Eli Clare

White, disabled, and genderqueer, Eli Clare lives near Lake Champlain in unceded Abenaki territory (also known as Vermont) where he writes and proudly claims a penchant for rabble-rousing. He has written two books of essays, the award-winning Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure and Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation, and a collection of poetry, The Marrow’s Telling: Words in Motion. Additionally he has been published in dozens of journals and anthologies. Eli works as a traveling poet, storyteller, and social justice educator. He currently serves on the Community Advisory Board for the Disability Project at the Transgender Law Center and was a Disability Futures Fellow in 2020. Among other pursuits, he has walked across the United States for peace, coordinated a rape prevention program, and helped organize the first ever Queer Disability Conference.

Photo Description: A white transmasculine person with buzzed red hair wearing glasses and a green vest smiles while standing in a myrtlewood tree. His hands clasp the branch he is leaning against.

Raven Davis

Raven Davis is an Anishinaabe, 2-Spirit, multidisciplinary artist, educator, and mediator whose mother is from Treaty Four, Manitoba. Davis was born and raised in Michi Saagig Territory, Toronto, Ontario. Davis weaves their passions for land-based and archival research, with calls to action, movement, sound, and works embodied by lived and intergenerational experience. A parent of three sons, Davis works within the mediums of performance, movement, visual arts, and sound/media, and engages with topics such as, colonization, race, gender, disability, abolition, pleasure, and 2-Spirit/Indigiqueer identity. As an extension of their responsibilities as a Land and spiritual practitioner, and as a way to reconcile the aforementioned, they create spaces using installation, relational aesthetics, ritual, and movement that support individuals in self-actualization and restorative journeys. For over 30 years, Davis has advocated for equitable and community-centered art and 2 Spirit, trans, and disabled BIPOGM futures.

Adjua Gargi Nzinga Greaves

Adjua Gargi Nzinga Greaves is a life-long New Yorker, artist, and writer living between Providence, Rhode Island and New York City. Her multi-disciplinary studio practice centers and explores collective study, anticipatory world building, institutional critique, non-verbal communication, and the “performance of self in everyday life,” though poetics, photography, collage, diorama, essay, lyric, and stagecraft. She is author of Close Reading as Forestry (Belladonna*, 2017), Of Forests and Of Farms: On Faculty and Failure (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2020), is anthologized in Letters to the Future: Black WOMEN / Radical WRITING (Kore Press, 2018), and published in The Brooklyn Rail, and About Place Journal. She performs frequently across a broad spectrum of venues and educational contexts and has begun working with video in response to a Spring 2020 commission from Issue Project Room for their Isolated Field Recording Series. Formerly a Monday Night Reading Series curator at The Poetry Project, site director for Wendy’s Subway reading room, and an artist-in-residence at Rauschenberg Residency, Greaves is Young Mother & CEO of The Florxal Review—an emerging platform of literary criticism, network science, and experimental praxis centering floral language, its instances, applications, implications, and possibilities. Her spring 2021 Artists Space exhibition The x in florxal is silent when spoken was reviewed in Hyperallergic and in 4 Columns and listed by Hyperallergic as one of New York City’s ten best in 2021. She recently performed at Princeton University’s Sites of Memory: A Symposium on Toni Morrison and The Archive. Greaves holds an MFA in Literary Arts from Brown University.

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Photo Description: Black woman with medium brown skin and dark brown natural hair styled as Afro puff. Adjua Gargi Nzinga Greaves is wearing gold-colored dangling earrings and a light blue button up shirt. The is a light source coming from the left obscuring the lower part of the image.Source: courtesy of the artist.

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson (RGT)

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson is a disability justice and culture thought leader, bioethicist, educator, and humanities scholar. Her 2016 op-ed, “Becoming Disabled,” was the inaugural article in the ongoing weekly series in the New York Times about disability by people living with disabilities. As a bioethicist, she is a Hastings Center Fellow and Senior Advisor and a Center for Genetics and Society Fellow who publishes frequently in academic journals and an expert consultant in bioethics and disability. She is currently chief project advisor to The Art of Flourishing: Conversations on Disability and Technology, a Hastings Center project supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities. As a humanist, she is currently a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar.
She is co-editor of About Us: Essays from the New York Times about Disability by People with Disabilities (2019) and the author of Staring: How We Look and several other books. She is professor emerita of English at Emory University, where taught disability studies, bioethics, American literature and culture, and feminist theory. Her academic and scholarly work develops the field of critical disability studies and the health humanities to bring forward disability culture, access, and justice to a broad range of institutions and communities.

Photo Description: this professional headshot shows RGT as a mature, average-sized white woman with pale skin, silver hair, black and white glasses, in a black jacket and dark pearls, posed before a white fireplace mantle decked with a black and a red vase.

Tebandeke Joseph

I am a dancer and choreographer from Uganda. My work stretches the idea of dance, going into contemporary art with a.o. drawings and sculptures. My work involves other arts practices but also communities in addressing urgent social challenges, mainly dominant ideas around ability. I use my body to create my own dictionary of ability. I have been developing a physical practice that encompasses different local and global dance traditions and movement practices. I am a dancer in sector and a society that systematically marginalizes “disabled” people. I am a choreographer as I mobilize local communities to create a movement that will re-label “disability”. I am committed to decolonizing dance as a language that all can access and that benefits from diversity and the different notions of ability, through owning the aesthetic expression and developing self-esteem for persons with disabilities. And questioning the intersection of the world where the concept of being able or disable meet.I have worked in different location such as; Kampnagal_Hamburg, (Mental workout 2023), Berlin (moving Margin Research 2022), South Africa (Sibikwa Arts fest 2022), Vienna (ImPulsTanz 2022), Sweden (Assitej children’s fest) Mali (Eco fest 2020), Freiburg contact impro Festival (Germany in 2019), East Africa Nights of Tolerance Festival (Rwanda 2017), Tuzinne Festival (Uganda 2017- 2018) Ubumuntu (Rwanda 2018)

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