Petra Kuppers

Petra Kuppers (she/her) is a disability culture activist and a community performance artist. Petra grounds herself in disability culture methods. She uses ecosomatics, performance, and speculative writing to engage audiences toward more socially just and enjoyable futures. She teaches at the University of Michigan and is also an advisor on the low-residency MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts at Goddard College. 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 on Anishinaabe Territory, in Ypsilanti, Michigan. 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. Her next academic book is Eco Soma: Pain and Joy in Speculative Performance Encounters, University of Minnesota Press, February 2022.