Adrienne Asch

Adrienne Asch is the Edward and Robin Milstein Professor of Bioethics at the Wurzweiler School of Social Work, and Director, Center for Ethics, Yeshiva University. She received a B.A. in Philosophy from Swarthmore College; an M.S. in Social Work and a Ph.D. in Social Psychology from Columbia University. Her work focuses on the ethical, political, psychological, and social implications of human reproduction and the family. She has authored numerous articles and book chapters, and is editor with Erik Parens of Prenatal Testing and Disability Rights, published in 2000 by Georgetown University Press and a co-editor of The Double-Edged Helix: Social Implications of Genetics in a Diverse Society, published in 2002 by the Johns Hopkins University Press. Dr. Asch has been a member of the Board of Directors of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities, the Clinton Task Force on Health Care Reform, and the Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications Policy Planning Group of the National Human Genome Research Institute. She is a newly-elected board member of the Society of Jewish Ethics and is a Fellow at The Hastings Center.

Teresa Blankmeyer Burke

Teresa Blankmeyer Burke is a bioethicist and philosopher at Gallaudet University. She has worked in bioethics since 1986, starting her career by writing position papers for California Health Decisions, a grassroots advocacy organization. In addition to teaching at Gallaudet University, she currently serves as a consultant and instructor to the Ethics Institute at the University of New Mexico.

Nerina Cevra

Born in Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Nerina Cevra left Bosnia at age 15 due to the war. She became a refugee first in Croatia, then Italy, then Germany, and moved to the U.S. in 1997. Nerina Cevra is Rights and Advocacy Officer at the Landmine Survivors Network (LSN) Bosnia and Herzegovina Program. In this capacity, she designs, develops, and implements regional human rights and disability trainings; researches and prepares analyses of national and international law; designs campaign strategies; and lobbies at the governmental and international organizational level on disability rights. She has also served as official delegate for Bosnia and Herzegovina to the United Nations Ad Hoc Committee for Development of the Convention on Human Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Ms. Cevra began her advocacy work with LSN by doing legal research and drafting legal analyses of the proposed UN treaty, which was published and presented at the UN; and representing LSN at the UN Ad Hoc Committee.

Prior to joining LSN, Ms. Cevra was Research Assistant at Public International Law and Policy Group where she drafted peace agreements for countries conducting peace negotiations and structured innovative models of governance for emerging democracies. She also was Research Assistant at Vital Voices Global Partnership where she researched and prepared reports on the status of women in Europe and the Newly Independent States, with particular emphasis on the trafficking of women. Ms. Cevra graduated from Grand Valley State University (GVSU) in 2001, with a dual degree in International Relations and German. While attending GVSU, her contributions to the Grand Rapids, MI community were many. She organized events such as poetry readings, round table discussions, and soccer tournaments for the Bosnian Community; was editor of the weekly radio show for the Bosnian community, and served as a counselor for at-risk adolescents at the St. John's Home residential treatment center. Currently she is attending American University Washington College of Law and working towards a dual degree in law and masters of international relations (JD/MA).

Peter Cook and Kenny Lerner: Flying Words Project

Meeting in 1984, Peter Cook and Kenny Lerner were soon invited to perform and lecture at the first National Deaf Poetry Conference in 1987, in Rochester, NY.  Their success was immediate, and lead to a five week run at the Friends & Artists Theater in Los Angeles in 1989,and invitations to perform and lecture at the Saskatchewan Writers Guild 21st  Annual Conference, "Writing:  The Future,” the Theatre de Lucernaire in Paris, France, as well as performances across the American Southwest. In 1998, Mr. Cook and Mr. Lerner were invited to deliver the keynote performance at the Ohio State University Conference, "Disabilities Studies in Higher Education."   A partial list of Flying Words Project performances at various theaters, colleges, and poetry houses across the country include Manhattan Theater Club, NYC, Randolph Street Gallery, Chicago, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Nuyorican Poets Cafe, NYC, Cleveland Performance Arts Festival, Harvard University, Boston, Walker Art Center, Minn, Whitney Museum, NYC, Institute for Critical Thinking, Montclair   College, NJ, as well as the Colorado School for the Deaf and Blind, CO Springs.     No more, not less." This is why Flying  Words Project was created--to educate the American mainstream poetry that there is a wonderful corner in the literary field and that is called ASL Literature. Critical study about Flying Words Project has appeared in the Modern Language Association, Literature and Medicine, the Tactile Mind. An interview with FWP for NPR radio station WNYC aired on April 8, 2001, as well as Sunday Morning for CBS. Peter Cook was also the only deaf poet to be featured on the United States of Poetry: an award winning film highlighting the best of contemporary American poetry that premiered on PBS in 1996.   As Peter Cook has written, the significance of his work as a Deaf American poet is in his recognition that ASL poetry isn't solely about Deafness, nor is it about the oppression of Deaf Culture. "Why not turn on the poetry-engine and have it roam around country like what Ginsberg did to America with his Howl? . . . . Why not let ASL poetry be poetry?"    

Julia Epstein

Julia Epstein is Director of Communications and Development for DREDF. She founded the Berkeley Special Education Parents Network (BSPED), a grassroots organization of parents of children with disabilities in the Berkeley Unified School District, in 1999. BSPED works with the Superintendent and district administrators, with teachers, and with advocacy agencies to improve programs and outcomes for students who are eligible for special education services in Berkeley.

Prior to her work with the disability community, Ms. Epstein was a technical writer and editor at PeopleSoft and at Gene Logic. She received a Diplôme Supérieure d'Études Françaises from the Université de Strasbourg, France, in 1972, a B.A. summa cum laude from Washington University in St. Louis in 1973, and M.A. (1976) and Ph.D. (1977) degrees in Comparative Literature from Cornell University. She has been on the faculties of the College of William and Mary, Drexel University, and Haverford College. At Haverford, where she taught beginning in 1986, she was Barbara Riley Levin Professor of Comparative Literature from 1992 to 1997. Ms. Epstein is the author of The Iron Pen: Frances Burney and the Politics of Women's Writing (University of Wisconsin Press, 1989) and Altered Conditions: Disease, medicine, and Storytelling (Routledge, 1995) and the co-editor of Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity (Routledge, 1991) and Shaping Losses: Cultural Memory and the Holocaust (University of Illinois Press, 2001). She has also published several dozen articles on eighteenth-century literature, legal and medical humanities, and cultural studies.

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson is Associate Professor of Women's Studies at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Her fields of study are feminist theory, American literature, and disability studies. Her scholarly and professional activities are devoted to developing the field of disability studies in the humanities and in women's studies. She is the author of Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Literature and Culture (Columbia UP, 1997), Staring: How We Look, (Oxford UP, forthcoming 2007), editor of Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body (NYU Press, 1996), and co-editor of Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities (MLA Press, 2002). She is currently writing a book on the cultural logic of euthanasia.

David Gerber

David Gerber is a social historian whose research and writing have concentrated on issues of personal and social identity and group formation in nineteenth and twentieth century America. At one time or another in the last three decades he has written on African Americans, European immigrants, American Catholics, and American Jews as well as American veterans of World War II with service-related disabilities and chronic illnesses. His work on disabled veterans and on the conceptualization of disability in the social sciences and in history has appeared in a number of journals, in various disciplines,in the United States and the United Kingdom. His edited volume, Disabled Veterans in History, a collection of essays spanning Europe and America, from antiquity to the recent past, by historians and social scientists, was published in 2000 by the University of Michigan Press in its Corporealities series. He is Professor of History and Departmental Chair at the Department of History, University at Buffalo (SUNY), where he has been on the faculty since 1971.

Sujatha Jesudason

Sujatha Jesudason, Program Director on Gender, Justice and Human Genetics, has been active as an organizer, advocate and researcher in communities of color and on women’s liberation issues for more than 15 years. She currently directs the program on Gender, Justice and Human Genetics at the Center for Genetics and Society where she is highlighting the feminist, eugenic and social justice concerns with the new reproductive and genetic technologies. Her recent projects include developing a national collaborative campaign against sex selection, making the connections between past, present and future eugenic technologies, and framing genetic justice as a human right. She is on the Board of Directors of the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum and on the Management Circle of SisterSong. She comes to this work with a background in immigration issues, community organizing, domestic violence prevention, particularly in the South Asian community, and reproductive rights in communities of color. In addition, she is working on her Ph.D. dissertation at the University of California at Berkeley in sociology where she is studying martial arts as an embodied practice of freedom to violence against women.

Arlene Kanter

Professor Kanter is a recipient of Syracuse University's most prestigious teaching award, the Laura J. and L. Douglas Meredith Award for Excellence in Teaching. From 1989-2005, she was the Director of the Office of Clinical Legal Education, which now houses six clinics, and Director of the Externship Program, which places students in Syracuse and in other cities nationwide and abroad. In 2005, Professor Kanter became the co-director of Syracuse University's Center on Human Policy, Law, and Disability Studies, which is the nation's first multi-disciplinary university center of its kind. She is also the Director of the College of Law's Disability Law and Policy Program, and founder of the nation's first joint degree program in Law and Disability Studies. Professor Kanter teaches courses on disability law and policy, education and special education law, ethics and professionalism, and international human rights and comparative disability law. Prior to joining the law faculty, Professor Kanter taught at Georgetown Law Center and practiced law at a national disability rights organization in Washington, D.C. where she represented clients, including before the United States Supreme Court and Congress. Professor Kanter publishes and lectures on domestic, comparative, and international disability law. Her most recent publications include a co-authored casebook, Cases and Materials on International Human Rights and Comparative Mental Disability Law (Carolina Press, 2006), an article "The Globalization of Disability Rights Law", 30 Syracuse Journal of International Law & Commerce 243 (2003), which has been republished in two books, and "Ethics in Externships: Confidentiality, Conflicts and Competence", 10 Clinical Law Review 473 (with A. Anderson and C. Slane), which has been recognized as one of the top ten downloaded articles from the SSRN Legal Studies Research Journal. Her investigative research with Mental Disability Rights International culminated in a report on Turkish mental hospitals, Behind Closed Doors: Human Rights Abuses in the Psychiatric Facilities, Orphanages and Rehabilitation Centers of Turkey, (available at http://www.mdri.org/) which was covered by the New York Times and other international press, and which has resulted in dramatic reforms in Turkey's mental health system. Professor Kanter is a member of the American Bar Association’s Commission on Mental and Physical Disability Law, and of a committee working with the United Nations on a proposed international treaty on the rights of people with disabilities.

Cindy Lewis

Ms. Lewis is the Director of Programs at Mobility International USA and is the co-author and producer of numerous books and videos for MIUSA, including Loud, Proud and Passionate: Including Women with Disabilities in International Development Programs, which educates development and women's organizations about the importance of including women with disabilities in community development projects; the Loud, Proud, and Passionate! video; and Building Bridges: Including People with Disabilities in International Programs featuring recommendations for recruiting and including people with disabilities in international programs, and Building an Inclusive Development Community: A Manual on Including People with Disabilities in International Development Programs. Since 1986, Cindy has coordinated programs and projects with MIUSA including topics such as gender issues and disability including income generation, microcredit, and international development issues for women with disabilities. Ms. Lewis holds a MS Degree from the University of Oregon.

Simi Linton

As a writer, consultant and public speaker, Simi Linton is one of America's foremost experts on disability and the arts. She works with a diverse range of cultural organizations - theater companies, film and television producers, museums, non-profit arts companies, universities, and other groups across the country - to improve and increase the way disability is represented and depicted in all art forms. Her memoir, My Body Politic, was published in 2006 to critical acclaim. Kirkus Reviews, the influential book industry newsletter, described “The struggles, joys, and political awakening of a firecracker of a narrator … Wholly enjoyable.” A documentary based on My Body Politic is currently in development. A Switzer Distinguished Fellowship enabled her to complete her first book, Claiming Disability: Knowledge and Identity (1998), which is widely used in university courses in women's studies, disability studies, and cultural studies. Dr Linton received a PhD in Counseling Psychology from New York University. She left her faculty position in 1998 as Associate Professor of Psychology in the Division of Education at Hunter College, after fourteen years of teaching, to write and establish her consultancy, Disability/Arts. She has been co-director of Columbia University's Seminar on Disability Studies since 2003. Simi Linton is frequently invited to address national conferences and speak at seminars of professional associations, museums, universities, and national and regional arts councils. She speaks on topics such as disability and the design of museums and public spaces, disability and theatrical conventions, gender and disability, and disability and the Holocaust. Under the banner of Disability/Arts, Simi Linton has consulted on projects with the Smithsonian, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bancroft Library at the University of California - Berkeley, the Margaret Mead Film and Video Festival, the Non-Traditional Casting Project, the Writers Guild of America, the Dramatists Guild, and numerous others.

Lynn Manning

Lynn Manning is an award winning playwright, poet, actor, Paralympic Silver Medallist and former Blind Judo Champion of The world.  He accomplished all of this after being shot and blinded in a Hollywood bar at age 23.    Mr. Manning is also a critically recognized theatrical performer.  New York's Theater By The Blind's 2004 "Off Broadway" production of Lynn's autobiographical solo show, WEIGHTS, received raves from New York reviewers.  In Los Angeles, Center Theater Group's original 2001 production of WEIGHTS was not only critically acclaimed, but also won three NAACP Theater Awards, including Best Actor for Lynn.  Lynn has since performed Weights at The Kennedy Center For The Performing arts in Washington DC; at The 2003 National Black Theater Festival in Winston-Salem, North Carolina; and at The 2003 Third International Blind And Visually Impaired Theater Festival in Zagreb, Croatia where he was invited to reprise his performance at the 2005 festival.    As a television actor, Lynn has appeared on the TV shows,  8 Simple Rules, Popular, Sienfeld, The Sinbad Show, and Dream On.  Lynn wrote and starred in the independent short film, Shoot!, which debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in 2001, world premiered on HBO/Cinemax that same year, and is in circulation among the cable television networks.  Recognizing a need for theater and theater arts education in L.A.'s underserved community of Watts, Lynn Co-founded the Watts Village Theater Company and serves as both President of The Board and Literary Manager.  He is also President of the Firehouse Theater Company--dedicated to the involvement of persons with disability in all aspects of the theatrical performing arts.  Because of such activism, Lynn was KCET TV's Community Artist Unsung Heroes honoree for 2004.  Watts Village Theater Company's 2003 production of Lynn's play, PRIVATE BATTLE, at The Mafundi Institute in Watts, received rave reviews from community and critics alike, as well as an NAACP Theater Award.    In 2001, Lynn completed 3 years as California arts Council's Artist In Residence with the Mark Taper Forum’s "Other Voices Project."  As resident, he conducted playwriting and storytelling workshops for the physically disabled and visually impaired.  Lynn's poetry has appeared in numerous magazines and literary anthologies such as, STARING BACK (THE DISABILITY EXPERIENCE FROM THE INSIDE OUT), and GRAND PASSION, an anthology of Los Angeles poets.  His solo spoken word' CD, CLARITY OF VISION was released on New Alliance Records in 1994.  Bridge Multimedia of New York has produced a 5.1 surround-sound spoken word CD of Lynn's solo show, WEIGHTS, for national release this spring. 

Arlene Mayerson

Arlene B. Mayerson has been the Directing Attorney of DREDF since 1981. One of the nation's leading experts in disability rights law, she has been a key advisor to both Congress and the disability community on the major disability rights legislation for the past two decades, including the Handicapped Children's Protection Act as well as other legislation ensuring the special education rights of students with disabilities, and the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). At the request of members of Congress, Ms. Mayerson supplied expert testimony before several committees of Congress when they were debating the ADA. She filed comments on the ADA regulations for more than 500 disability rights organizations. Ms. Mayerson has devoted her career exclusively to disability rights practice, representing clients in a wide array of issues. She has provided representation, consultation to counsel, and coordination of amicus briefs on key disability rights cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. She was appointed by the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Education to the Civil Rights Reviewing Authority, responsible for reviewing civil rights decisions of the Department.

In addition to her position at DREDF, Ms. Mayerson is currently a lecturer in disability law at the University of California, Berkeley (Boalt Hall). She has published many articles on disability rights and is the author of a comprehensive three-volume treatise on the ADA: Americans with Disabilities Act Annotated-Legislative History, Regulations & Commentary (Clark Boardman Callaghan, 1994), which sets forth the legislative history and regulations for each provision of the ADA.

Charlotte McClain-Nhlapo

Charlotte McClain-Nhlapo is trained as a human rights lawyer. She obtained a Master of International Law at the University of Warsaw in Poland, and thereafter studied for an LLM at Cornell Law School in New York. In August 1999, she was appointed by the President of South Africa to the South African Human Rights Commission. She was subsequently reappointed in October 2002. At the Commission she focuses on socio-economic rights, disability rights and child rights. In addition to the thematic areas she is responsible for two provinces Mpumalanga and Limpopo. She currently is on a leave of absence from the South African Human Rights Commission and for the last year has been at the World Bank where she is the disability advisor to the East Asia and the Pacific region and the South Asia region. Over the years she has worked primarily in the area of human rights, with a particular interest in marginalized groups, children, women and people with disabilities. Before joining the Commission she was a Project Officer on Child Protection for UNICEF (United Nations Children’s Fund). She helped draft provincial policy for street children and convened a task team to establish a national register for sexual offenders against children. She was appointed by the former Minister of Justice Dullah Omar as a member of the South African Law Commission Project Committee on sexual offences by and against children. In 1996, she was Legal Advisor to the Disability Desk in the Office of the Deputy President where she worked on the Integrated National Disability Strategy. Previous to that she was a senior researcher for the Community Law Centre at the University of the Western Cape in the child rights unit. She has served as an expert on child rights, the right to food and the rights of people with disabilities issues to various UN agencies. She also represented the National Human Rights Institutions at the UN during the process of developing a Convention for People with Disabilities. She serves on a number of community boards and was until recently chair of the board of RAPCAN (Resources Aimed at the Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect). She is currently the deputy Chairperson of the Council of the University of South Africa (UNISA). Ms McClain-Nhlapo has written widely on human rights issues and is committed to social justice.

Robert McRuer

Robert McRuer is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the George Washington University, where he teaches queer studies, disability studies, and critical theory. He is the author of Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability (NYU, 2006) and The Queer Renaissance: Contemporary American Literature and the Reinvention of Lesbian and Gay Identities (NYU, 1997). With Abby L. Wilkerson, he co-edited Desiring Disability: Queer Theory Meets Disability Studies, a special issue of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies (Duke UP, 2003).

Paul Steven Miller

An internationally renowned expert in disability law, Professor Miller arrived at the UW School of Law in August 2004, after spending twelve years in public service in Washington, D.C. He was one of the longest serving commissioners of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), the federal agency which enforces this nation’s employment discrimination laws. While at the EEOC, Professor Miller spearheaded the development of the agency's successful mediation program. He has also served as the White House liaison to the disability community and as deputy director of the U.S. Office of Consumer Affairs.

Prior to joining the U.S. government, Professor Miller was the director of litigation for the Western Law Center for Disability Rights. He has taught disability and elderly rights, civil procedure, clinical litigation and legal writing skills at Loyola Law School and at UCLA Law School. He began his career as a litigation associate at a Los Angeles law firm.

Professor Miller has been active in many national and international organizations and has served on several boards. Currently, he sits on the ELSI (Ethics, Legal and Social Implications) Research Advisory Board of the Human Genome Project at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), serves as a member of the board of Mental Disability Rights International, and is a fellow of the British American Project. He is a former trustee of the University of Pennsylvania. Professor Miller is an active member of the American Bar Association's Labor and Employment Section. In 2003, Professor Miller received an honorary Doctor of Laws from CUNY Law School in New York.

Professor Miller lectures regularly on issues of workplace equity, disability rights, genetics and the law. He has spoken before corporations, business groups, law firms, bar associations, academic conferences, and civil rights organizations in all fifty states, and in numerous countries.

Professor Miller’s primary teaching and research interests include disability law, employment discrimination and genetics and the law. He will also be teaching first year torts. Professor Miller is the Henry M. Jackson Professor of Law at the University of Washington School of Law, a Faculty Associate of the Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies at the University of Washington and a faculty advisor to the Law School's health law concentration. He is also the Director of the newly-established University of Washington Disability Studies Program in the School of Arts and Sciences.

David Mitchell

David Mitchell is Associate Professor in the Disability Studies doctoral program and the Department of Disability and Human Development at the University of Illinois, Chicago. He is the author of four books on disability art, culture and history - namely, The Body and Physical Difference: Discourses of Disability (1997), Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse (2000), Cultural Locations of Disability (2006) and the forthcoming collection Eugenics in America: 1848-1945. He is also the editor of the academic book series Corporealities: Discourses of Disability and founding member of the Committee on Disability Status in the Profession and The Disability Studies Discussion Group in the Modern Languages Association. As well as publishing more than three dozen articles in academic and popular media, he has edited and produced four award winning independent films on disability: Vital Signs: Crip Culture Talks Back (1996); A World Without Bodies (2002); Self Preservation: The Art of Riva Lehrer (2004); and Disability Takes on the Arts (2005). Most recently he co-curated the Chicago Disability History exhibit at the National Vietnam Veterans Art Museum in Chicago.

Karen Nakamura

Karen Nakamura is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and East Asian Studies Department of Anthropology at Yale University where her research focuses on issues of disability and minority movements.  She is the author of Deaf in Japan; Signing and Identity (Cornell UP, 2006) which concerns sign language, identity, civil society, and deaf social movements in contemporary Japan; she is also an editor of Many Ways to be Deaf; International Variations in Deaf Communities (Gallaudet UP, 2003).  Among her many articles is the forthcoming "The Crysanthemum and the Queer:  Ethnographic and Historical Perspectives on Sexuality in Japan" in the Journal of Homosexuality, drawing upon her interests in gender and sexuality.  Currently she is engaged in a new project on the camparative politics of severe disabilities in the United States and Japan.  She is also practiced in photoethnography as the visual culture of anthropology (see http://www.photoethnography.com).

Jonathan Shay

The illustrious works of Dr. Shay have been recognized and honored by many medical and military groups, as well as by prominent programs in Classics. Currently a psychiatrist for the United States Department of Veterans Affairs in Boston, Shay treats combat veterans with severe psychological injuries. He is the author of the best-selling book Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character published by Simon & Schuster. For several years, his book has been part of the U.S. Marine Corps professional reading program for “all hands.” In addition to clinical work and visiting lectures on Homer’s epics, he speaks and writes frequently for active duty military audiences on prevention of psychological and moral injury in military service. He has delivered visiting lectures in ethics at the USMA and USNA. In February 2000, he delivered the Guest Lecture of the Secretary of the Navy, and in 2000 completed a study for the Commandant of the Marine Corps known as the Trust Study. In 2001, he was Visiting Scholar-at-Large at the Naval War College, Newport, RI. He describes himself as a missionary to the active duty force for the veterans he serves. His new work, Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming, with foreward by Senators John McCain and Max Cleland, was published by Scriber on Veterans Day 2002. The works of Dr. Shay are pioneering in the field of Classics, resulting in many honors and speaking engagements throughout the world: the Irvine F. Belser Memorial Lecture in Classics, University of South Carolina; Rockefeller Foundation, Bellagio Center Scholar, Bellagio, Italy; Costas Memorial Lecture in Classics, Brooklyn College; Harry Ransom Visiting Professor in Classics, University of Texas at Austin; Conklin Memorial Lecture in Classics, Wayne State University, Detroit; and the Presidential Plenary Address, Classics Association of the Middle West and South, Lexington, KY.

Sharon Snyder

Sharon Snyder is Assistant Professor in the Department of Disability and Human Development at the University of Illinois, Chicago, where she is also the Director of the Disability and Cultural Studies Unit. As well as being a coauthor of Cultural Locations of Disability (2006) and Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse (2001), coediter of Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities (2002) and The Body and Physical Difference: Discourses of Disability (1997), she is the author of numerous essays on disability theory, culture and representational history that have been published widely and translated for many professional journals. The founder of Brace Yourselves Productions, she is also an award-winning filmmaker whose work includes Self-Preservation: the Art of Riva Lehrer (2004), Disability Takes on the Arts (2005), A World Without Bodies (2002) and Vital Signs: Crip Culture Talks Back (1996). She is a founding member of the MLA's Committee on Disability Issues, a key organizer of the MLA's Disability Studies Discussion Group and has served as Program Director for the Society for Disability Studies.