This week we are delighted to spotlight our Fellow, Petra Kuppers!

Petra has pioneered the community performance project Salamander that “uses underwater photography, dry performance workshops, creative writing, clay work, and video… to find our disabled beauty emerging from the deep…” As a disability performance scholar, Petra has led Salamander workshops “since 2013 in public pools and other bodies of water around the world to challenge ableism and celebrate the full diversity of human experience and embodiment.” She recently presented a Salamander workshop at the 88th annual Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, which took place at the University of British Columbia.

Follow this link to read more about the amazing ways Petra is confronting social justice issues in regards to the disabled through the Salamander project.

Being Salamander, that is the question.
In this life you have to be able to transform, mentally and bodily.
Underwater everything changes.
In water the body receives life impulses, another mobility, another way of life dancing.

– Xavier Duacastilla (Salamander Free-Write contributor for the East Bay Poetry Summit)