Carrie Sandahl
Arts Administration
Oak Park, IL
Arts Administration
Carrie Sandahl is Interim Head and Professor of Disability Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago in the Department of Disability and Human Development. She directs Chicago’s Bodies of Work, an organization that supports the development of disability arts and culture through festivals, advocacy, and an artist residency program. Her research and creative activity focus on disability identity in live 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 articles have appeared in numerous journals, including Theatre Journal, Theatre Topics, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, Gay and Lesbian Quarterly, Cinema Journal, Disability Studies Quarterly, and Choreographic Practices, among others. Sandahl travels nationally and internationally to speak about her research and arts advocacy initiatives. Her 2003 article, “Queering the Crip or Cripping the Queer: Intersections of Queer and Crip Identities in Solo Autobiographical Performance” inspired the name and theme of a 2022 exhibition at Berlin’s Schwules Museum. She was invited to share with museum visitors how the concepts from that article were conceived and how they have evolved in her work as an artist, activist, and scholar.
Sandahl's creative activity includes producing, directing, dramaturgy, solo and collaborative performance art pieces, and video work that participates in the creation of disability culture, particularly from a feminist perspective. The Gimp Parade (2008) is a collection of parodic video shorts on the theme of disability, that represents Sandahl’s ten-year collaboration as a performer, writer, and dramaturg with the Mickee Faust alternative theatre company in Tallahassee, Florida. These award-winning video shorts have toured film festivals internationally. The Anarcha Project (2005-2008) is a collaborative performance research project in which black culture and disability culture activists explored the legacy of experimentation on enslaved disabled women in the 1840s. The collaborators conducted workshops and created performances with hundreds of artists, activists, and academics across the United States, culminating in an “anti-archive” in the online journal Liminalities, a performance poem in the journal Sustainable Feminisms, and the Anarcha Symposium, a research and performance event that was held at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, Michigan, and a documentary video.
In August of 2017, Sandahl collaborated with artists Riva Lehrer and Christophe Preissing in an installation at the Evanston Art Center. She collaborated on the feature-length documentary Code of the Freaks, a critique of disability representations in cinema, which premiered in 2020 and has been shown in festivals, on television, and on online streaming platforms in the US and Internationally. She is currently working on a memoir, Too Much Information, which explores her experiences as a white, disabled mother of two adopted, disabled, African American children. These experiences have revealed the deep racial divides in Chicago as well as divides in the disability activist community between those with mental and physical disabilities.