I have experienced many powerful transformative healing processes beyond biomedical interventions and allopathic care. Not physical or medical cures, but rather powerful emotional transformations that allowed me to shift the perspective of my embodied experience as queer, disabled, ill, and mad. Over time, these gentle and dramatic shifts in perspective shaped my path for the future and substantively changed my life's trajectory. As I take the opportunity to recognize my place of privilege, I choose to utilize my position as an artist, activist, researcher, and student to bring attention to the many issues I confront, with hopes that any light I shine will benefit my community of Queer and Crip folks who have strolled down similar paths. 

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Living most of my life as a professional patient, I find social practice and installation art pieces work as interventions to disrupt the status quo and promote individual, community-level, and political healing by promoting awareness of the many issues faced by others like me. I recognize the power of coming together with community members to collectively participate in creative outpourings intended to catch the attention of broad audiences. Through performance, installation, and socially engaged art practices, I utilize an interdisciplinary approach, incorporating sculpture, photography, design, glass, painting, and other collaborative techniques, transforming them into candid and documentary video, collage, assemblage, and site-specific installations to push back against hegemonic cis-heteropatriarchy, ableism, and living in a medicalized and often desexualized body.

 

As my doctoral studies in Sociocultural Anthropology progress, I look to utilize arts-based and emancipatory disability research methodologies, as a way to push against the troubled settler-colonial legacy of the field. Learning from Indigenous scholars by focusing on reciprocity and research partnership, I hope to help stop the cycles of extractive research. I believe in "Nothing About Us Without Us," and as a Disability Studies scholar, I try to put those words into action as I approach my research and learn pedagogical frameworks for accessibility. In my training on the psychedelic frontier, I have yet to find many discussions of access needs, so I bring my perspective and embodied knowledge to that emerging field as a reminder that we are here and deserving. All of these factors serve to center my research around creating spaces where LGBTQIA2S+, chronically ill, disabled, mad, neurodivergent, and allied individuals can show up as their whole selves to engage in collective, holistic, healing practices, whether that be through psychedelic care, art making, or accessing a guide to assist with biomedical care services or accessible learning. 

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There is power in coming together to create art in community, whether that be through music, clay, fiber, movement, words, paint, or with stillness, silence, uncontrollable shaking and tremors, and seeing yourself reflected and accepted by the energy of the endless universe, one singular atom at a time and fully as holistically as your true self. Through examining experiences with art and expanded states of consciousness, I explore ways to push back against dominant and oppressive power structures, looking for inclusion in education, empathy in healing practices, and accessibility and acceptance for the whole self.