Registration: This event was part of the #ArtistsAreNecessaryWorkers Series. Registration was required. All conversations are free and open to the public. Attend one or multiple town halls.
If you require additional reasonable accommodation, please contact Brinda Guha at least two weeks prior to the event via email at sympcoordinator@dance.nyc or call 212.966.4452 (voice only).
About: Dance/NYC led a discussion with disabled artists and activists about the values of disability justice as a framework for building our new reality.
Alice Sheppard trained with Kitty Lunn and made her debut with Infinity Dance Theater. After an apprenticeship with AXIS Dance Company, Alice became a core company member and toured nationally and taught in the company’s education and outreach programs. Since becoming an independent dance artist, Alice has danced in projects with Ballet Cymru/GDance, and Marc Brew Company in the United Kingdom. In the United States, she has worked with Marjani Forté, MBDance, Infinity Dance Theater, and Steve Paxton. Alice is the founder and artistic lead for Kinetic Light, a project-based ensemble working at the intersections of disability, dance, design, identity, and technology to create transformative art and advance the intersectional disability arts movement. A USA Artist, Creative Capital grantee, and Bessie Award winner, Alice creates movement that engages intersectional disability arts, culture, and history to challenge conventional understandings of disabled and dancing bodies.
Christopher “Unpezverde” Núñez is a Visually Impaired choreographer based in NYC. Núñez is a Princeton University Arts Fellow 22’, a Jerome Hill Fellow 22’, a Dance/USA Fellow 22’, and a Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art Fellow 18’. His performances have been presented by The Joyce Theater, The Brooklyn Museum-The Immigrant Artist Biennale, The Kitchen, Danspace Project, Movement Research at The Judson Church, The Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, CUE Art Foundation, and Performance Mix Festival, among others. His work has been featured in The New York Times, Art In America, The Brooklyn Rail, The Dance Enthusiast and The Archive: The Leslie-Lohman Museum bi-annual journal. He’s been an Artist In Residence at Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), The Kitchen, Danspace Project, Abrons Arts Center, Movement Research, and Center for Performance Research. In 2023, Unpezverde was selected by the magazine Art In America as one of the New Talent artists and was nominated for A Bessie, The New York Dance and Performance Awards in the Best Performer category. As a performer, his most recent collaboration include “Dressing Up for Civil Rights” by William Pope L, presented at MoMA, The Museum of Modern Art. Núñez was invited by the NYC Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs to share his story as disabled and formally undocumented during Immigrant Heritage Week 2020. Núñez received his American Citizenship in 2023 but continues to be an advocate for the rights of undocumented disabled immigrants.
Dustin Gibson is guided by the aspiration, legacies, and pursuit of liberation. He develops he(art)work that embodies a practice of disability justice that can live, build, support and be implemented by marginalized communities to address the nexus between race, class, and disability. Dustin brings lived experience, scholarship, histories, art and resources into classrooms, neighborhoods, and carceral institutions to support people in collectively imagining and building a world free from institutionalization and incarceration. He has taught various disability-related courses at middle-schools, high-schools, kid jails, prisons and law schools. He also has worked with three Centers for Independent Living (CIL) in Pittsburgh, PA and both of the national CIL networks. He co-founded Disability Advocates for Rights and Transition, an organization led by disabled people that works in the tradition of deinstitutionalization to provide support to live freely in communities with the dignity of risk. He is a Peer Support Trainer with Disability Link, the Disability, Access and Language Justice Coordinator at PeoplesHub, a founding member of the Harriet Tubman Collective, and builds with grassroots organizations and artists to expand experiences of access.
Simi Linton, Arts Consultant, Author, Filmmaker & Activist
Simi Linton of Disability/Arts Consultancy, was formerly a Co-Director of Disability/Arts/NYC [DANT] 2016-2019. Her writings include Claiming Disability: Knowledge and Identity, My Body Politic, and “Cultural Territories of Disability” published by Dance/NYC. She is the subject of the documentary Invitation to Dance (Christian von Tippelskirch and Simi Linton 2016). Linton was on faculty at CUNY from 1985-1998. She received the 2015 Barnard College Medal of Distinction, an honorary Doctor of Arts from Middlebury College (2016), and was appointed by Mayor Bill de Blasio in 2015 to NYC’s Cultural Affairs Advisory Commission, and in 2018 to the SheBuiltNYC monuments committee.
Dance/NYC's justice, equity, and inclusion initiatives are made possible with leadership support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Dance/NYC convening is made possible, in part, by support from the Howard Gilman Foundation and the Mertz Gilmore Foundation, and by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council, the New York State Council on the Arts and from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Dance/NYC seeks partners and speakers with a variety of viewpoints for its events with the goal of generating discussion. The inclusion of any partner or speaker does not constitute an endorsement by Dance/NYC of that partner's or speaker's views.
ASL interpretation will be provided by LC Interpreting Services. 
Closed Captioning services provided by The Viscardi Center.
