Biography

Petra Kuppers (she/her) is a community performance artist, a disability culture activist, and a wheelchair dancer. For more than 30 years, she has fostered collaborative, connective community spaces where delicious bodymindspirit movement and beauty of all kinds are explored and celebrated. She uses social somatics, performance, and speculative writing to engage audiences toward more socially just and enjoyable futures. She has been a core influence on community dance and disability culture production since the late 80s (first in her native Germany, then in Wales, UK; Aotearoa/New Zealand; Australia; and then in the US) and continues to lead workshops internationally. Petra has been hosted by Tramway, Glasgow, Scotland; Berner Tanztage, Switzerland; Bare Bones Butoh, San Francisco; the Drillhall, Aberwystwyth, Wales; Chisenhale Dance Space, London; the Poetics Center, Adelaide, Australia; Gotenburg LGBTQ festival, Sweden; The Republic of Inclusion, Ottawa, Canada; Arts Activated, Sydney, Australia; Movement Research, NYC; and universities and conferences around the world.

When her chronic pain does not allow outer movement, Petra writes. Her third performance poetry collection, Gut Botany (Wayne State University Press, 2020), was named one of the top ten US poetry books of 2020 by the New York Public Library and won the 2022 Creative Book Award by the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment. Petra also writes speculative fiction and academic books (latest, Eco Soma: Joy and Pain in Speculative Performance Encounters (University of Minnesota Press, 2022, open access).

In 2005 Aotearoa/New Zealand awarded Petra the inaugural Fellowship in Community Dance – at that time the first position in community dance worldwide. Petra was a 2021 Dance Research Fellow at the New York Public Library's dance division, where she created the ongoing Crip/Mad Archive Dances, and she is a 2022/2023 Dance/USA Artist Fellow. In April 2023, she was named a Guggenheim Fellow for her creative/critical work, Crip/Mad Performances: Asylum Dances, Archive Dances.

She is Artistic Director of The Olimpias, an international disability culture collective, and co-creates Turtle Disco, a somatic writing studio, with her wife, poet and dancer Stephanie Heit, from their home on Three Fires Confederacy Territory, colonially known as Ypsilanti, Michigan.

Petra is the Anita Gonzalez Collegiate Professor of Performance Studies and Disability Culture at the University of Michigan, and an adviser on the MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts at Goddard College.