Celebrating Disability Pride Month: A Disability Content Round-Up
Performers Sarah Powers as the Cicada (left) and “JJ” James Janis as the Sun (right) reach for each other as they perform on stage in Flutter Productions' OSITY in 2016.
Disability Pride Month, celebrated each July, honors the unique contributions and experiences of individuals with disabilities. It's a time to promote visibility, foster inclusivity, and challenge societal stigmas. The arts play a crucial role in this celebration, providing a platform for expression, creativity, and accessibility. The NEA recognizes the diverse abilities and achievements of artists, arts organizations, and arts workers within the disability community.
Below, we are spotlighting some of the stories, projects, and resources for and by individuals and organizations within the disability community. This Disability Pride Month, we hope you will join us in reimagining the ways in which we can continue to honor individuals with disabilities and express our appreciation for their contributions to society. Click on the title to read or listen to each story!
The Careers in the Arts Toolkit, developed by the NEA and Art Beyond Sight, aims to enhance equity, access, and inclusion for people with disabilities in arts careers. Originating from national dialogues with the arts and disability communities, the toolkit addresses significant barriers to success for disabled individuals in the arts and provides online tools, resources, and professional development opportunities based on comprehensive research and field scans. As emphasized in the toolkit, "equal access to all aspects of community life for disabled people, including employment, is fundamental to our nation’s principles."
Grant Spotlight: Black Hills Works and Flutter Productions
This blog post highlights Black Hills Works, founded in 1958 by a group of determined parents in Rapid City, South Dakota, to support adults with intellectual disabilities. Black Hills Works offers diverse residential options, employment support, and social enterprises. Additionally, the blog post spotlights Flutter Productions, an all-ability theater and dance company within Black Hills Works, and their 2024 FashionABLE: All-Ability Threads production, supported by an Arts Endowment grant, which features fashion designs that are created and modeled by adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Heather Pickering, Flutter Productions founder and artistic director, said, “Through our arts programming, individuals with disabilities become visible and participate in the overall fabric that we weave together as a society with our collective histories.”
This episode of the Art Works podcast features 2020 NEA Big Read author, teacher, and advocate Rebekah Taussig’s discussion about her first book, a memoir titled Sitting Pretty: The View from My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body. With a PhD in Disability Studies and Creative Nonfiction, Taussig shares her journey as a paralyzed woman who found a lack of relatable stories and decided to create her own. In the memoir, she addressed the myth of ableism and challenged the notion of an idealized typical body, arguing that “we all live in bodies with limitations and points of access.”
The American Artscape story explores the artistic journey of Toby MacNutt, a queer, nonbinary-trans, disabled artist whose creative practices span dance, textile arts, and writing. MacNutt reflects on their lifelong engagement with art, emphasizing themes of embodiment and relationship, and the importance of creating for joy rather than profit. They discuss their multidisciplinary approach, balancing various forms of expression, and the challenges of professional expectations. MacNutt also highlights the intersectionality of their identity and how it influences their work, advocating for authentic representation and the exploration of diverse aesthetics in dance and other art forms. MacNutt said, “The definition [for dance] I tend to use is making an intentional choice about movement or stillness—about movement of your body and how it is seen, which we don’t have to be on a stage to do. As a disabled person, that feels really important as someone whose ability to move my body and ability to engage with dance as an art form fluctuates a lot.”
Disability as Diversity: A Conversation with Musician Gaelynn Lea
This blog post highlights the journey of Gaelynn Lea, a violinist, singer, and songwriter born with osteogenesis imperfecta (brittle bones disease). Inspired by an orchestra visit to her elementary school, Lea developed a unique technique to play the violin similar to a cellist. Her music blends original songs with traditional fiddle music, enhanced by live looping and sonic exploration. A passionate advocate for disability education and awareness, she gained widespread recognition after winning NPR’s Tiny Desk Contest in 2016, leading to numerous presentations and media appearances. Lea said, “When you start to put disability culture out in the world, celebrate it, and actually take it seriously, we can start to dismantle stereotypes and also recognize ourselves in the music.”
In this blog post, NEA Dance Director Sara Nash's interviewed Alice Sheppard and Laurel Lawson of Kinetic Light, a project-based dance ensemble co-founded with Michael Maag in 2016. Led by disabled artists, Kinetic Light focuses on disability aesthetics, emphasizing accessibility in their performances and designs. Sheppard and Lawson discuss their entry into dance, the formation and mission of Kinetic Light, and their commitment to equity over inclusion. “Organizations should be asking themselves what they can do to be equitable in their programming: which could mean that a presenter presents or facilitates the creation of work which offers equitable artistic accessibility for audiences,” said Lawson.
James LeBrecht and Day Al-Mohamed
In this episode of the Art Works podcast, filmmakers and disability rights advocates James LeBrecht and Day Al-Mohamed discuss their efforts to create a space in media for stories created by, for, and about people with disabilities. “Living in a world that wasn’t built for you makes you a natural troubleshooter or problem-solver,” said Brecht. As the two founding members of FWD-Doc, a community dedicated to fostering an inclusive and accessible entertainment industry, Brecht and Al-Mohamed reflect on the lack of access and opportunities for disabled filmmakers and the scarcity of authentic disability narratives. They discuss the many resources offered on their website, including the Toolkit for Inclusion & Accessibility: Changing the Narrative of Disability in Documentary Film and their collaboration with the International Documentary Association to launch the Nonfiction Access Initiative, a fund supporting nonfiction storytellers and media makers from the disability community.
