Keynote Speakers
Amanda Cachia (Australia, USA)
Amanda Cachia received her PhD in Art History, Theory & Criticism at the University of California, San Diego in Spring, 2017, and is an independent curator and critic from Sydney, Australia. She is also the first full-time Assistant Professor of Art History at Moreno Valley College in the Riverside Community College District in Southern California. Her research focuses on modern and contemporary art; curatorial studies; disability studies; performance, choreography and politics; activist art and museum access; feminist and queer theory; and phenomenology. Her dissertation, “Raw Sense: Choreography, Disability, Politics,” analyzes the work of eight contemporary artists who create radical interventions in public space by virtue of non-normative body actions, and traces a genealogy for this work through avant-garde art movements from the 1960s and 1970s to offer an expanded narrative on performance, minimalism and Fluxus from a disabled perspective. She was a 2016 Yale University Sarah Pettit Doctoral Fellow and was the recipient of the Irving K. Zola Award for Emerging Scholars in Disability Studies, issued by the Society for Disability Studies (SDS) in 2014.
Jennifer (Eisenhauer) Richardson (USA)
Jennifer (Eisenhauer) Richardson is an Associate Professor in Arts Administraon, Educaon, and Policy at The Ohio State University and an affiliated faculty member with the Disability Studies program. Her research explores, through social and cultural theory and philosophy, the representaons of disability in visual culture and parcularly the cultural and visual construcon of understandings of mental disability within both historical and contemporary representaons. She has published in journals including Studies in Art Education, Disability Studies Quarterly, Visual Arts Research, Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, International Review of Qualitative Research, and Art Education . Dr. Richardson also writes creave nonficon and poetry and was nominated for a Puschart prize for an essay appearing in South Loop Review.
Kaisa Leka (Finland)
“You know, you could also look normal if you’d just wear pants!”
This is a question I’ve actually been asked. Several times. And always as a compliment. But I’m not normal, and it isn’t something I aspire to be. Normality is confining. It’s static. But most of all it’s boring. Why anyone in their right mind would want to be normal is beyond my comprehension.
I’m a comics artist and I publish autobiographical books about the nature of being together with my partner Christoffer Leka. When I’m not drawing I’m usually exploring the world on a bike, but the two aren’t mutually exclusive.
I have been awarded the Finnish Comics Society's prestigious Puupäähattu prize and several of our books have received design prizes such as Grafia’s Gold Award. I also regularly contribute comics to several different Finnish magazines, covering topics such as feminism, disability and animal rights.
“Kaisa Leka can be considered a member of the growing international disability arts and culture movement. Across the globe, disabled people are recognizing that their unique bodies are vital sources of creative generation and knowledge, not to be hidden away under lap blankets or put away in institutions. Leka’s autobiographical graphic novel, I Am Not These Feet, is a complicated entry in the growing collection of work by disabled artists whose stories of claiming disability reject and complicate the tired, simplistic tales of ‘overcoming,’ ‘inspiration,’ or ‘tragedy.’”
—Carrie Sandahl