Carrie Sandahl
Associate Professor
Phone 312-996-1967
Email csandahl@uic.edu
Bio
Dr. Carrie Sandahl is an Associate Professor in the Department of Disability and Human Development at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is the head of the new Program on Disability Art, Culture, and Humanities, which is devoted to research on and the creation of disability art. Beginning in 2010, this program will also serve as the new administrative home for Chicago’s Bodies of Work, an organization that supports city-wide disability arts festivals and that promotes disability arts and culture year-round. Her own research and creative activity focus on disability and gender identities in live performance, including theatre, dance, and performance art.
Sandahl has published numerous articles in journals and magazines, such as Theatre Topics, Theatre Journal, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Disability Studies Quarterly, Contemporary Theatre Review, Gay and Lesbian Quarterly, Text and Performance Quarterly, American Theatre Magazine, Opening Stages: A Quarterly Newsletter for People with Disabilities Pursuing Careers in the Arts, and the PMLA. An anthology she co-edited with Philip Auslander, entitled Bodies in Commotion: Disability and Performance (University of Michigan Press) garnered the Association for Theatre in Higher Education’s award for Outstanding Book in Theatre Practice and Pedagogy in 2006. She served as an editor for Sage Press’s Encyclopedia of American Disability History (2009) for the entries on disability art and culture. She is currently working on a book called Americans with Disabilities Act: Disability Identity and Performance, which surveys strategies used by performers with disabilities to challenge prevailing notions of disability and to create disability culture in the United States.
Sandahl was the Co-Project Investigator with Dr. Carol Gill of the University of Illinois at Chicago’s on a three-year qualitative study entitled “Experiences of Individuals with Disabilities Pursuing Careers in the Arts: Creating a National Portrait in Words and Numbers” for the National Endowment for the Arts. This study explored the barriers and facilitators to arts careers for people with disabilities and included in-depth interviews and focus groups.
Sandahl is active nationally as a public speaker. She is frequently invited to present her research and creative work on disability art and culture at universities across the United States, including University of California-Berkeley, University of California-Santa Barbara, Stanford University, Bucknell University, University of Florida, Smith College, and Davidson College among others. She has keynoted conferences such as the Articulations Conference at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities and the Portland Disability Art and Culture Festival in Oregon. Sandahl also regularly presents her research at the Society for Disability Studies and the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, both professional organizations in which she has been an active member for more than twelve years.
Sandahl's creative activity includes producing, directing, dramaturgy, solo and collaborative performance art pieces, and video work that participate in the creation of disability culture, particularly from a feminist perspective. The Gimp Parade, a collection of parodic video shorts on the theme of disability, was released in 2008. This project represents Sandahl’s ten years of collaboration as a performer, writer, and dramaturg with the Mickee Faust alternative theatre company in Tallahassee, Florida. Videos include Disability Factor (2008), Saul Ringer Answers your Questions on. . .(2008), Dis(aster)abilities (2007), and The Scary Lewis Yell-A-Thon (2004), among others. These award-winning video shorts have toured film festivals internationally. Another recent creative endeavor was The Anarcha Project, a three-year performance research project whose primary collaborators were Petra Kuppers, Anita Gonzalez, Aimee Meredith Cox, and Tiye Giraud. In this project, black culture and disability culture activists used performance methods to address the memory of experimentation on slave women in Montgomery in the 1840s. The collaborators conducted workshops and created performances with hundreds of artists, activists, and academics nationally and internationally over several years. In addition to workshops and performances, the collaborators published an “anti-archive” in the online journal Liminalities, published a performance poem in the journal Sustainable Feminisms, and hosted the Anarcha Symposium, a performance research event that was held at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 2008. A dvd documenting this event was produced and distributed in 2008.
She has been active at both the local and national levels in advocating for people with disabilities. She served on the board of Ability1st (North Florida's Center for Independent Living), chairing the fund development committee, and was secretary of the board and chair of the disability culture committee for the Society for Disability Studies (SDS). She served on the grant advisory panel for VSA Arts, was a consultant to the Kennedy Center on its new play development project on the subject of disability for youth, and has worked with the Alliance for Inclusion in the Arts and Disability Arts of New York City to advocate for artists in television, film, and theatre. To pursue her work, she has received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, National Endowment for the Arts, VSA Arts, Florida State University, and numerous county and local grants in Florida. Currently in Chicago, Sandahl serves on the organizing committee of the Disability Art and Culture Project of Access Living (Chicago’s Independent Living Center) as well as the fundraising and organizing committee for Project Access at Victory Gardens Theatre.
Sandahl earned her PhD at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1998 in Dramatic Literature, Criticism, History and Theory with a minor in Performance Studies. She was a faculty member at Florida State University’s School of Theatre for eleven years, during which time she served as Head of the MA/PhD program in Theatre Studies for four years and Head of the BA program for two years.