Cripping the Keynote - Opening conversations - Making a Difference Berlin Owning Spaces Conference

Public Conversation in English spoken language with English subtitles and German spoken language and German sign language interpretation

Challenging the traditional keynote as a one-human-show, we, Carrie Sandahl, Kate Marsh and Noa Winter will open the conference with a trialogue. We will ask each other what crip communities bring to us and how we make space for shared lived experiences and learn from our differences without being divided. Collectively, we will raise questions and thoughts to guide us through the following five days.

Carrie Sandahl, a white disabled woman with blond hair, sporting glasses and a bright smile, in front of a dark grey background. The photo shows her from the upper body upwards, looking directly at the camera. She is wearing a black sweater and a scarf in purple and grey with black plant ornaments looped several times around her neck.

Carrie Sandahl is a Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago in the Department of Disability and Human Development. She co-directs Chicago’s Bodies of Work, an organization that supports the development of disability art and culture. Her research and creative activity focus on disability identity in performance and film. Sandahl’s publications include a co-edited anthology, Bodies in Commotion: Disability and Performance, which garnered the Association for Theatre in Higher Education’s award for Outstanding Book in Theatre Practice and Pedagogy (2006). Her collaboratively created documentary, Code of the Freaks, a critique of disability representations in cinema, premiered in 2020.

Kate Marsh, a white disabled woman with a red brown fringe lying down on her back on a black dancefloor. Her left arm is spread out in a 90 degree angle from her body. She is wearing a black shirt with the imprint „The future is accessible“ in white letters only partly visible on the photo.

Kate Marsh is a disabled dance artist-researcher with over 20 years of experience in performing, teaching and making. Her interests are centred around perceptions of the body in the arts and notions of corporeal aesthetics. Specifically, she is interested in each of our lived experiences of our bodies, and how this does (or doesn’t) inform our artistic practice. Her PhD focusses on leadership in the context of dance and disability and draws strongly on the voices of artists to interrogate questions around notions of leadership, perceptions and the body. Kate is a research fellow based at C-Dare (Centre for Dance Research) at Coventry University.

Noa Winter, a white, queer, disabled and chronically ill person with dark brown hair. They are lying with tucked up legs on their back, the green eyes looking headfirst into the camera. They are wearing a black skirt and a black shirt with the partly visible imprint „Access is Love“ in white capital letters with the O of Love is replaced with a red heart.

Noa Winter is a queer, disabled and chronically ill curator and dramaturg with a focus on disability arts and anti-ableism. They work as project leader for Making a Difference, a Berlin-based project that seeks to empower disabled and deaf artists, and as an independent researcher and consultant. Their main interests are the self-determined working methods of disabled, deaf and chronically ill artists, aesthetics of access and questions of anti-ableist curating. Most recently they co-curated the symposia Making Theatre Accessible – Be prepared to make mistakes and Exploded Times, Mad Spaces – Disability Arts & Crip Spacetime.