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The Olimpias/Planting Disabled Futures Public Performances
Participation in Public Performances Sign Up Link
Two Options:
Wednesday, January 14th: 4:00-5:30pm Interactive Public Performance
Thursday or Friday 15th and 16th Virtual Reality Installation Limited Headsets
Please sign up to ensure your spot! We will contact you to confirm.
Questions? Contact liswymore@berkeley.edu
Planting Disabled Futures Residency at UC Berkeley
Dates: January 12 - 16, 2026
Locations:
Monday and Tuesday: Art Research Center
Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday: Disability Cultural Community Center
Weeklong residency with working group meetings taking place during the mornings.
Planting Disabled Futures installation performances at the end of the week.
Participation in Working Group Application: Link
Co-Sponsors: by the Othering and Belonging Disability Faculty Research Cluster, the Environmental Arts and Humanities Initiative, (within Center for Interdisciplinary Inquiry) Entanglement Series, The Disability Cultural Community Center, and the Art Research Center.
This queercrip intimacy installation invites you into a world of healing plants cultivated by disabled peoples’ embodied ways of knowing. Come, try out a headset, hold a plushy critter, and become entangled with the ways we as disabled people honor and engage with plant elders.
In the Planting Disabled Futures project, The Olimpias use live performance approaches and virtual reality (and other) technologies to share environmental connection and energy, creaturely liveliness and ongoingness, crip joy and experiences of pain.
In the development of the Virtual Reality (VR) components of the project, we ask: How can VR allow us to celebrate difference, rather than engage in hyper-mobile fantasies of overcoming and of disembodied life? How can our disabled bodymindspirits develop non-extractive intimacies, in energetic touch, using VR as a tool toward connecting with plants, with the world, even in pain, in climate emergency, in our ongoing COVID world?
Organizers and Working Group Members:
Petra Kuppers (she/her) is a German disability culture activist and a community performance artist. Petra grounds herself in disability culture methods, and she uses somatics, performance, media, and speculative poetry 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, an experimental documentary, won the Best Artists Film Award of the international Together! Disability Film Festival in 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-runs Turtle Disco, a somatic writing studio, with her wife, dancer and poet 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. She directs the Planting Disabled Futures Project as part of a Just Tech Fellowship. website: www.petrakuppers.com
Alexis Riley (she/they) is a white neuroqueer psychiatric survivor and interdisciplinary performance artist from Shawnee and Osage Land (colonial West Virginia). They are currently an Assistant Professor of Theatre Studies at the University of Michigan where they direct The Mad Memory Project, a multi-year performance series that explores mad embodiment in and beyond archives. Their written and creative projects have been featured in Theatre Topics (2019), QT Voices (2022), and the forthcoming issue of Liminalities. She is the dramaturg of the Planting Disabled Futures Project.
website: www.madmemoryproject.com
Stephanie Heit (she/her) is a queer disabled poet, dancer, teacher, and codirector of Turtle Disco, a somatic writing space on Anishinaabe territory where she is a white settler in Ypsilanti, Michigan. Her practices explore the seams of movement, language, and mental health difference often within site-specific inquiries involving water. She is bipolar, a mad activist, a shock/psych system survivor, and a member of the Olimpias, an international disability performance collective. Her poetry collections are the award-winning book of hybrid memoir poems PSYCH MURDERS (Wayne State University Press, 2022) and The Color She Gave Gravity (Operating System, 2017). She works as an access doula for the Planting Disabled Futures project. Website: https://stephanie-heit.com/
Lisa Wymore (she/her) is a Professor in the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies. She teaches classes in choreography, dance technique, pedagogy, improvisation, creativity studies, and performance. She is Co-Artistic Director of Smith/Wymore Disappearing Acts with Sheldon B. Smith. She investigates human-computer interactivity with various creative collectives including the Z-Lab, Kinetech Arts “Dance Hack” and a group of artists and social activists investigating generative AI and embodied creativity. Wymore is part of the Othering and Belonging Disability Cluster and serves on the Executive Committees for Berkeley Center for New Media and the Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation.
Karen Nakamura is a cultural and visual anthropologist at the University of California Berkeley who works on disability, social movements, and technology. Her first book was titled Deaf in Japan: Signing and the Politics of Identity (2006). Her next project resulted in two ethnographic films and a monograph titled, A Disability of the Soul: An Ethnography of Schizophrenia and Mental Illness in Contemporary Japan (2014). While finishing a book on the intersections of transsexuality and disability politics in postwar Japan, Nakamura is currently collaborating on research involving the impact of artificial intelligence / machine learning (AI/ML) on disability communities.
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