Planting Disabled Futures

Planting Disabled Futures 

Residency at UC Berkeley

Dates: January 12 - 16, 2026

Location: Check Back Soon

• 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

Participation in Public Performances: Link

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. She runs weekly Starship Somatics sessions online through Movement Research. 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.

Luisa Caldes Luisa Caldas is an architect, educator, sustainability consultant, and creator of virtual immersive experiences. Caldas is Professor of Architecture at University of California and is the founder and director of the UC Berkeley XR Lab, a research laboratory for virtual, augmented and mixed reality created in 2017. She is a Faculty Scientist in the Energy Technologies Area of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a member of the FHL VIVE Center for Enhanced Reality and of the executive committee of the Berkeley Center for New Media.

Caldas holds a PhD from MIT in Architecture and Building Technology, where her pioneering work in application of Artificial Intelligence to the design of sustainable buildings helped to lay the foundations for the booming field of sustainable generative design. She earned her professional architecture degree at the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Lisbon, and a MSc degree from the Bartlett Graduate School, UCL, University of London.