Petra Kuppers
Salamander Project, Neil Marcus and Petra Kuppers
Helping Dance Hawai'i, photographer Mareva Minerbi
Salamander Project, Neil Marcus and Chia-Yi Seetoo
Helping Dance, Washington Mall, photographer Cheryl Kaplan
Earth Stories, work with mental health system survivors in Wales
Christchurch Masquerade, working with people deemed to have cognitive difference in the rubble fields of the post-quake city
Salamander Project: Josie Noble, Aotearoa/New Zealand
Drawing of a Michigan Salamander, created as part of meditative actions
Petra Kuppers (she/her) is a disability culture activist, writer, dance video maker and community performance artist. Petra grounds herself in disability culture methods. She uses somatics, performance, speculative writing and media to engage audiences toward more socially just and enjoyable futures.
She teaches at the University of Michigan as the Anita Gonzalez Collegiate Professor of Performance Studies and Disability Culture. She was an adviser on the MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts at Goddard College for 15 years, until the college closed in 2024.
She has been engaged in community dance and disability culture production since the late 80s (first in her native Germany, then in Wales, UK; Aotearoa/New Zealand; and since 2001 in the US). She continues to lead workshops internationally, in these forms as well as in disability-culture adapted social somatics.
When her chronic pain does not allow outer movement, she writes. Her third performance poetry collection, Gut Botany, was named one of the top ten US poetry books of 2020 by the New York Public Library, and it won the 2022 Creative Book Award by the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment. Her fourth collection, Diver Beneath the Street – true crime meets ecopoetry at the level of the soil – appeared in 2024.
Petra also writes speculative fiction (short story collection Ice Bar 2018), and academic books (latest, 2022, award-winning and open access: Eco Soma: Joy and Pain in Speculative Performance Encounters).
She is the 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 in Ypsilanti, Michigan, on Three Fires Confederacy Territory, colonially known as Ypsilanti, Michigan.
She was a 2021 Dance Research Fellow at the New York Public Library’s dance division. In 2022, she was awarded a Dance/USA Artist Fellowship, and she was a national nominee for the Johnson Fellowship for Artists Transforming Communities. She was a 2023/24 Guggenheim Fellow, a 2024 Camargo Foundation Fellow, and is currently a Just Tech Fellow (2024-2026), working on Planting Disabled Futures, a ‘crip cave’ experience that combines eco soma community performance, disability culture, and virtual reality.