Dr. Petra Kuppers

Biography

Petra Kuppers is a German community performance artist and disability culture activist. She incorporates social somatics, performance, and speculative writing to engage audiences in socially enjoyable futures. Kuppers has been involved in community performance and disability culture production since the late 1980s and continues to lead workshops internationally. Her latest academic study, "Eco Soma: Pain Joy Speculative Performance Encounters," was published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2022 as an open access work. Kuppers has served as a Dance Research Fellow at the New York Public Library in 2021, was a Dance/USA Fellow in 2022, and became a Guggenheim Fellow in 2023. She is the Artistic Director of Olimpias, an international disability culture collective, and co-creates the Turtle Disco, a somatic writing studio located in Ypsilanti, Michigan, situated on Fires Confederacy Territory. Her performance poetry collection "Gut Botany," published by Wayne State University Press in 2020, was named one of the top ten poetry books of 2020 by the New York Public Library and won the 2022 Creative Book Award from the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment. Kuppers' forthcoming work, "Diver Street," set to be published by Wayne State University Press in 2024, delves into themes of true crime and ecopoetry.

Research Interests