critical design lab
The Critical Design Lab is a multi-disciplinary and multi-institution arts and design collaborative rooted in disability culture. Our collaborative draws on the methods of disability justice, critical and interrogative design, intersectional feminist design theory, and crip technoscience to address thorny questions about accessibility. We are artists, designers, critical makers, storytellers, filmmakers, activists, and scholars. Members begin in one-year cohorts before joining our member network.
Meet the lab
[Image description: an olive-skinned person with short black hair and black glasses looks at the camera at an an gle. They are smiling slightly. They wear a black-and-white checkered shirt, a green cardigan, and a bowtie made out of wood, which has a botanical look]
Aimi Hamraie
Director
Dr. Aimi Hamraie is a disabled, diasporic Iranian/SWANA designer and scholar. They are associate professor of Medicine, Health, & Society and American Studies at Vanderbilt University. Hamraie is the author of Building Access: Universal Design and the Politics of Disability, co-curator of the Crip Ritual exhibition (Toronto, 2022), and host of the Contra* podcast. They are a new member of the U.S. Access Board.
Remote Access Archive Project
Image description: Kelsie, a white woman with curly brown hair looks affectionately over her shoulder at a tuxedo cat.
Kelsie Acton
Lead researcher and project manager, Remote Access Archive project.
Dr. Kelsie Acton is a neurodivergent scholar and the Inclusive Practices manager at Battersea Arts Centre in the U.K. Formerly, she completed SSHRC-funded research examining accessibility and timing in disability dance. Her choreography has been supported by the Canada Council for the Arts and the Alberta Foundation for the Arts and she recently participated in the inaugural Dancing Disability Lab at UCLA. Acton designs Simple English for all lab projects, including Contra*, Crip Ritual, and Remote Access.
Image description: Cavar, a genderless, white-presenting being, smiles slightly against a backdrop of tree branches and leaves. Cavar has a buzz-cut, and wears glasses as well as visible ear, septum, philtrum, and eyebrow piercings. They wear a wine-colored mock-neck shirt beneath a burnt-brown vest adorned a vintage bicycle brooch.
Cavar
[sarah] Cavar is a third-year PhD student in Cultural Studies and Science & Technology Studies at the University of California: Davis. A queercrip/transMad writer, editor, and scholar, their work across genres uses the speculation, surreality, and strategic opacity as tools for writing against the psychiatric gaze. Their work can be found in Electric Lit, Bitch Magazine, Disability Studies Quarterly, and elsewhere, and their website is www.cavar.club.
Image description: A white person with short layered blonde hair smiles slightly at the camera. They are wearing a grey, purple, and brown collared button down shirt and standing in front of shiny teal fabric.
Avianna Miller
Avianna Miller (she/her/hers) is a chronically ill artist working primarily in photography and video. She is a strong proponent for accessibility and access practices in all artists’ spaces, having previously been involved with Drew University's Arts Access Coordinators programs, which aim to work within institutional structures to build accessible, equitable, and inclusive spaces for patrons of the arts. She graduated from Drew University in 2023 with majors in Studio Art and Media & Communications and minors in Photography, Film Studies, Art History, Humanities, and Literature. Miller’s work has been included in shows at Drew University in Madison, NJ, Anthropology of Motherhood: Culture of Care exhibitions in Pittsburgh, PA and Rochester, NY, and published in the Guggenheim Museum’s e-book Volume III: Reimagining and Reinventing Rituals.
Image description: Headshot of Martina, a white woman with brown hair, wearing a black t-shirt. Lighting from above/behind her head adds a glow and beam of light across her face, which stares out at the viewer with a slightly tilted smirk
Martina Svyantek
Dr. Martina Svyantek has an earned doctorate in a self-designed and highly-individualized interdisciplinary program where she conducted institutional countersurveillance via accessibility-related policy documents. Her research focused on policy and procedure documents related to Disability at three U.S. institutions of higher education over a 25-year time frame. She earned her Bachelor of Science in civil engineering in 2011 from Auburn University, complemented by her MS from Virginia Tech in May 2018. She has over five years of experience advocating for and promoting accessibility in real-time physical spaces as well as in digital and asynchronous situations.
Image description: A mixed race Burmese/white American with light skin smiles at the viewer against a background of green trees and grass and sky. They have a rounded face, slight dark stubble, large round gold-framed glasses, and a receding hairline with dark brown hair slicked back so that it looks very short in this picture. They wear a black collared shirt whose open collar reveals a slice of floral tattoo, and on one shoulder they clutch a large three-dimensional foam-and-fur sculpture resembling a sleeping white tiger’s head, with fantastical spines and frills and feathers in metallic golds, blues, greens, and pinks.
Amery Wyn Sanders
Amery Wyn Sanders (they/them/theirs, he/him/his) is a nonbinary trans, multiply-queer, autistic and disabled, mad, mixed race Burmese/white second-generation American. They have a BA in Anthropology from Vanderbilt University, an MA in International Relations from the Maxwell School at Syracuse University, and interdisciplinary cross-training with the humanities and wet sciences. As an activist and academic their interests center around teasing apart relationships between white supremacy, colonial/imperial violence, ableism, and queer and trans self-understandings—especially as those connections manifest in international infrastructures and institutions, including healthcare and the human rights industrial complex, as well as the modern Western concept of transness itself.
Image Description: White person with rosy cheeks, green tortoise shell glasses, and brown hair buzzed short. Looking off into the upper left distance. Sitting outside in the sunshine. In the immediate background there is an old peeling brick wall and a shiny metal pipe.
carmen Cutler
Carmen Cutler is sick & disabled, neurodivergent, and currently a graduate student in Disability Studies at the University of Illinois-Chicago. She uses thematic analysis and participatory action research methodologies as a chronically ill researcher studying chronic illness community knowledges. Her doctoral research explores rest as a survival strategy against capitalism within chronically ill communities like ME/CFS and Long Covid. Previous work includes masters research at ASU on the lived experiences of ME/CFS, and co-leader of advocacy and community work with MEAction Arizona. Ongoing interests include community care organizing in Chicago and bed space activism.
Image Description: A South Asian person with light brown skin stands in front of a stone wall, facing the camera and smiling. They are bespectacled, have a nose piercing in their left nostril, and their long wavy brown hair is folder over their left shoulder. They have dark red highlights in the tips of their hair, are wearing a red turtleneck sweater, and have on a black winter coat over it.
Jiya Pandya
Archival consultant
Jiya is an academic and activist with experience in trauma-aware organizing, anti-colonial and post-colonial research methodologies, and care-driven pedagogy, community engagement, and advocacy. She is currently doing a PhD in History and Gender and Sexuality Studies at Princeton University, doing a dissertation project which focuses on social welfare, disability, and caste in independent India. Her broader research interests include disability history, queer and crip theory, South Asian history, US history, and oral and public history. Jiya's work and writing both within and beyond academia aim to offer context-driven critique, decenter white and Western-centric epistemologies, and forge creative solidarities within crip and queer communities.
Critical Access Primer project
Image description: Hannah Wong, a Chinese-American woman with albinism, sits in front of a blurred-out Alexander Calder sculpture. She has pale skin, a white bob, blue eyes, and is wearing a large black hat and a black lace-trimmed shirt.
Hannah Wong
Project manager, Critical Access Primer
Hannah Wong is a current student at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) receiving her master's degree in architecture. She is the first legally blind student to be accepted to the GSD where she founded design.able, a student-run organization focused on design and disability. Her research interests include the non-visual aspects of the built environment and access in circulation and transportation. In addition to her work for the Lab, Hannah works for the Institute for Human Centered Design (IHCD) on accessibility in the architectural and digital realms. Prior to returning to academia, she worked in environmental engineering with Transsolar KlimaEngineering on thermal comfort and sustainability and as a data analyst and DEI consultant for a social media marketing company. She holds a B.A. in applied mathematics with a concentration in civil engineering from UC Berkeley.
Image description: a white person wearing an orange shirt and purple baseball cap with a bassett hound embroidered on it. they have round glasses and a silver septum ring and are looking at the camera contentedly. their cheeks are slightly flushed with pink, and there is office furniture in the background.
Kate hall
Kate Hall (they/them) is a white, queer, nonbinary, disabled, fat, and autistic survivor and organizer with Fat Rose. They’re a pisces sun, aquarius moon, and taurus rising, and make sense of the world through their relationships. Kate is passionate about accessibility advocacy and helping people in their community design and implement creative access measures that work for them, particularly when conflicting access needs are involved.
Image Description: A photo of Paul, a low-vision white American man weaing a t-shirt and a tan jacket. The photo has been painted over and blurred with an iris blur, leaving the upper half of his face legible.
Paul DiFazio
Paul DeFazio (he/him) is a Masters of Architecture candidate at Rice University. He has previously edited architectural publications such as PLAT 11: Soft, PLAT 10.5 Reflect, and Paprika Vol. 7: Reading the Room. Paul holds a BFA from Edinboro University of Pennsylvania in painting. His interests include blind or non-visual forms of visual creative practice, writing, and disability culture. Most recently Paul has worked as a consultant at MG&Co and as a research assistant at Rice.
Labs for Liberation
image description: a white femme-presenting person with blunt, chin-length red hair donning golden rimmed aviator-style glasses, a burgundy tee shirt, and silver hoop earrings. They smile softly.
Katie Sullivan
Katie Sullivan is a disabled/mad/neurodivergent undergraduate student and organizer. Sullivan is committed to exploring the junctures of academic research, creative practices, and community organizing. Broadly, Sullivan is interested in feminist disability studies, critical pedagogy, internet cultures, and medical humanities. Previous projects include coalitional involvement in creating the UW Madison Disability Cultural Center, research on linguistic elements of online ableism, and netnography of virtual medical resources.
social media interns
Image description: Headshot of Laisha. Latina with light skin, dark brown hair with highlights and dark brown eyes. She sits in front of a cream colored backdrop. She looks upwards and left wearing a big smile. Laisha wears a white shirt, a polka dotted headband in her hair and a pearl necklace that she holds up with her right hand.
laisha González
Laisha González (she/her) is a resilient performer with a deep commitment to accessibility. She holds an Associates in Performing Arts from Bronx Community College. Despite being legally blind and having lupus, she thrives as a member of NYC's "Epic Players" theatre company, advocating for inclusive opportunities. Laisha's dedication extends to community outreach through Charla De Lupus and Lupus Therapeutics, as well as supporting the visually impaired as a guest speaker in various seminars. Her impact expands online, where she shares her visually impaired journey while promoting inclusivity. She is resolute in her mission to create a more accessible world.
Remote Access Party Collective
[Image description: a light-skinned person with a brown beard and eyebrows looks at the camera. His eyes have the letters O and K painted on them with black glitter paint. He wears a backwards cap made of grey fabric. Behind him are large fronds of a plant.]
Kevin Gotkin
Organizer, Remote Access Party Collective
Dr. Kevin Gotkin is an academic, activist, and artist whose teaching and artistic practice currently focuses on equitable and inclusive DJ artistry. He organizes the Remote Access Party Collective and is also an organizer at Kinetic Light. Formerly, he was a Visiting Assistant Professor of Media, Culture, & Communication at NYU, where his research examined disability and media in the U.S. in the late 20th century. He also co-founded Disability/Arts/NYC, an arts advocacy organization supporting New York’s emerging disability arts scene.
Member network / Past members
Headshot of Julia wearing a black sweater and pearl necklace; she has light brown skin and dark brown curly hair pulled up in a bun. She is standing in front of a leafy wall in a garden, with a slight grin.
Julia Rose Karpicz
Julia Rose Karpicz is currently a doctoral candidate in UCLA’s Higher Education and Organizational Change program. Her scholarship uses critical disability theory to examine access labor in university settings, with a primary interest in how racism and ableism shape the access and advocacy experiences of disabled Students of Color. As a Black, neurodivergent scholar and former disability services practitioner, she enjoys building and sharing knowledge around equitable practices in postsecondary (college and university) spaces. She has consulted on web accessibility and accessible content creation at a range of non-profit organizations.
Image description: Krys, a light-skinned mixed race person with very long hair, looks at the camera with a slight smile while holding a black cat. The two stand inside their house in front of a sunny door. Dragonfly wind-chimes hang from the ceiling and an old barometer is mounted on the wall.
Krys Ingman
Krys Ingman is a chronically ill doctoral candidate in rhetoric and writing at the Bowling Green State University (BGSU) whose dissertation focuses on the student accessibility and accommodation from admission to graduation. Ingman recently served as a co-chair for the 21st Century Englishes Conference Research in addition to serving as a member on the campus Diversity, Equity, Access, and Inclusion Committee. Interests include the following: chronic and invisible illness, healthcare inequity, mortality, multilingualism, and popular culture/representation.
Image description: courtney wade, a white nonbinary person, sits in front of blurred greenery and smiles slightly at the camera. They are wearing gold hoops, a white tank top, and pleated, light blue slacks. They are holding a pastel, colorblocked blazer. They have buzzed, silver/brown hair; iridescent-framed glasses; a gold septum piercing; and a linework tattoo on their right arm.
courtney wade
courtney wade (they/them) is a genderqueer/neuroqueer/generally queer, disabled, sick white-settler. As a cultural worker, artist, and writer of poetry, philosophy, and historiography, courtney challenges normative conceptualizations of community by asking how these ideas shape crip and neuroqueer oppression. To use their infodumping powers for good, they founded the Disabled, Autistic, Mad, & Neuroqueer (DAMN) Solidarity Project, which engages cultural strategy to imagine access, sociality, and community otherwise. Their current work explores pandemic politics, covid-consciousness, and solidarity-building from a crip, queer, immunocompromised, and remote sitpoint. courtney is a doctoral candidate in Applied Social and Community Psychology at North Carolina State University. Their harm reduction art is utilized throughout the University of North Carolina System and in syringe access and fentanyl test strip programs across North Carolina.
Image Description: White girl with blue-grey eyes, wavy strawberry-blonde hair and very pink cheeks. She is smiling slightly with mouth closed, lips upturned, and wearing a blue beaded necklace, and you can see a bit of her matching blue spaghetti strap dress popping out from under her hair.
Margot Bell
Margot Bell (she/her) is a very queer and very anxious 20 year old working towards her BS in Special Education and a minor in medicine, health, and society, concentrating in Inequality, Intersectionality, and Health Justice. Although she plans to teach in specialized education for quite some time, her ultimate goal is disability rights policy, specifically focusing on the intersections between race and disability in education and professional settings, culturally, and in the unjust criminal legal system. Her current research centers on developing more culturally competent special education strategies for students of color with IDDs, who are impacted by disability in unique and complex ways. Her creative art and design background intersects with her strong focus on critical disability studies.
Image description: Stephanie, a mixed-race woman in her early twenties, smiles brightly at the camera. Sun shines on her tanned skin and the old brick behind her. She has brown curly hair pulled back to reveal blue earrings that match her blue button-down shirt.
stephanie farmer
Stephanie Farmer is a New York University senior studying International Media, Culture, and Communications with a minor in creative writing. She is currently researching for her thesis on disabled sound art by immersing herself in the creative disabled community. After losing half of her hearing from a brain tumor, she gained a passion for critical disability studies and prioritizes accessibility in all of her work. As a social media intern, she creates content using access tools like alt text, captions, and audio description. She writes fiction to tell her story and share the voices of people around her, she does marketing to amplify those stories and voices. Previous work includes creating a TEDx conference for her high school district, starting an art and literature magazine while studying abroad in Argentina, and ushering at The Shed in NYC.
image description: a fat, white person is seated in a car wearing clear-rimmed dark sunglasses, a green beanie and green lipstick, a white t-shirt printed with a red and black “Fatties Against Fascism” fist design, and a red bandana around their neck with black raccoons printed on it. They’re raising one eyebrow, and in the reflection of their glasses is their hand and phone taking the selfie.
Max Airborne
Max Airborne is a fat, white, disabled. queer and nonbinary activist, artist, zinester, community organizer and community scholar. Max's primary work is rooted in fat liberation and disability justice. Ki recently founded and created Fat Liberation Archive, a public, digital, people’s archive of fat liberation. Ki also co-founded Fat Rose, a group that centers remote organizing and activism with fat folks doing radical, intersectional, fat-liberation work.
Image description: Selfie of Ren taken from their Macbook camera. Pink hearts are depicted above their head. Shows Ren smiling and holding their hands under their chin palms down. Ren is a fair-skinned mixed indigenous person with thick dark eyebrows, a larger nose, and thick short black hair with two black clips on the left and right of their hairline. Ren is wearing a pink sweater, has gold dangling earrings on, and is wearing square-framed glasses.
Ren Aguila
Organizer and Founder of The Spoonie Uni Project. Heavily invested in mutual aid and community care. Pronouns are they/them/ze. I am disabled, mad, and neurodivergent. I'm a queer genderfluid mixed indigenous Mexican and Central American. I come from the Mexican and Central American diaspora and have grown up alongside my working-class immigrant family in Southern California. My life has informed my organizing and learning, and vice versa.
Image description: A person with short brown hair and glasses tilts their head downwards as they look off-screen. They are wearing an Arduino on a headband, their hands hold a pair of earbuds in their ears, and multiple wires extend downwards, out of the image. The image is grainy black & white, with the background blurred to remove extraneous information.
Jarah Moesch
Jarah Moesch (MFA, PhD) is an artist-scholar whose work explores issues of justice through the design, production, and acquisition of embodied knowledges, and then develops new models for justice to imagine new worlds. Jarah’s queer justice design practice is concerned with the ways particular values are embedded within the design of systems and ‘industrial complexes,’ from health care and bioethics, to ecologies on Earth and in outer space. Jarah’s work on the ‘apocalyptic’ event, slow disasters, and the medical industrial complex are grounded in the social and physical effects of embedded histories of racism, gender, and disability, inequitable distributions of wealth, food and water, and colonization of land and people. Jarah’s art practice ranges from traditional forms of art to contemporary new media practices and tactical social interventions. Jarah’s artwork has been shown across the United States as well as internationally in festivals and exhibitions. Jarah holds an MFA in Integrated Media Arts from Hunter College, and a PhD in American Studies from University of Maryland. Moesch co-curates Crip Ritual.
![[Image description: a light-skinned person with shoulder-length brown hair smiles at the camera while touching her hair. She is wearing a black shirt. In the background, the top of a rocky mountain is visible, as well as a few other hikers]](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5818ce7dd482e9494b94ede8/1512590203734-PI1HGZSQEP6MZ5K4KDR7/Samples+Leah.jpeg)
[Image description: a light-skinned person with shoulder-length brown hair smiles at the camera while touching her hair. She is wearing a black shirt. In the background, the top of a rocky mountain is visible, as well as a few other hikers]
Leah Samples
Leah Samples is a founding member of the Mapping Access project, which she developed with Aimi Hamraie as a Library Dean's Fellow while pursuing her M.A. in Community Research and Action at Vanderbilt University. Currently, Samples is a second-year Ph.D. student in the Department of History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Her areas of interest include the history of disability, medicine, and technology in the mid-twentieth century. In addition to the Critical Design Lab, Samples is at work on two research projects. One explores the roles and experiences of families and students as participants in the production of mental deficiency in postwar America at the Elwyn Training School in Media, Pennsylvania. The other looks at the history of rehabilitation engineering in the U.S. with a particular focus on Warren Bledsoe and his influence on orientation and mobility practices, such as the long cane technique, in the mid-twentieth century.
Image description: a light-skinned with medium-length brown hair and bangs looks at the camera at an angle. She has large, light blue glasses on, and is wearing a red shirt with a black cardigan. The background is a green wooded area.
Image description: Harsha, a South Asian woman with dark curly hair in a braid, faces forward. She wears a colorful shirt with repeating patterns and a backpack with black straps. Behind her is a blurred green background.
HARSHA Balusubramanian
Harsha Balusubramanian is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Anthropology at UCL, and she collaborates with advisors at the Royal College of Art. Harsha’s PhD explores the experiences of artists adopting virtual reality (VR) in the UK, asking how they contribute to shaping ideas about what and whom VR is for. A defining feature of her research so far has been foregrounding experiences of disability to collaboratively develop critiques of VR, as well as rethink the normative aesthetics and methods of ethnographic fieldwork. Drawing on a background in performance and journalism, Harsha experiments with multimedia tools to capture intimate co-production of knowledge with interlocutors, such as through art installations, workshops, and documentaries.
Image description: Josh, a light-skinned, disabled man, sits in an industrial-style room. He wears a black T-shirt and round glasses. Looking out the window, he is front-lit. Behind him are a row of white chairs and a couple round tables. A bouquet with pale pink flowers rests on one of the two tables.
Josh Halstead
Josh Halstead is a design leader and disability advocate blending theory and praxis. A brand and design expert, he has created impactful experiences for clients in the technology, financial services, consumer electronics, energy, nonprofit, and professional services sectors. In addition to teaching graphic and user experience design at UC Berkeley Extension, Josh has been an invited lecturer and panelist at Stanford University, UC Berkeley, California College of the Arts, AIGA Design Conference, Society of Disability Studies, and Google among others. Committed to local and widespread social change, he is a board member at the Center for Independent Living in Berkeley and a member of the Advisory Council to the Aging and Adult Services Commission in San Francisco and the AIGA Diversity & Inclusion Task Force. Josh holds a BFA from Art Center College of Design and is an MA candidate in disability studies at CUNY.
Image Description: Iris, a light skinned Asian person with long, wavy black hair and gold and black rimmed hexagonal glasses, is smiling directly at the camera. They are wearing a deep v neck light-medium gray t-shirt.
IRIS XIE
Iris Xie (they/them/theirs) is a disabled, neurodivergent, queer trans nonbinary 2nd generation Chinese American multi-discipline writer, artist, and designer from the Bay Area. Iris is currently a Design MFA candidate at the University of California, Davis. Iris also graduated with a double B.A. in Gender, Sexuality, Women's Studies and English from the University of California, Davis. Iris designs interactive installations that include literary forms of lyric games and visual poetry and stim objects that explore neurodivergence and invisible disabilities through the framework of crip technoscience. Their knowing-making practice centers on finding rest and self-trust while traversing liminality through discovering their political identities as a disabled queer trans person of color. You can follow them on Twitter at @irisxie and on Instagram at @irisxie_makes.
![[Image description: a light-skinned person with short dark hair and red glasses looks at the camera, wearing a pink tank top. The background is bright green]](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5818ce7dd482e9494b94ede8/1513273421708-V44UTIOV2BETGMGQERA9/CH+profile+pic+green.jpeg)
[Image description: a light-skinned person with short dark hair and red glasses looks at the camera, wearing a pink tank top. The background is bright green]
Cassandra Hartblay
Dr. Cassandra Hartblay is Assistant Professor in the Interdisciplinary Centre for Health & Society at the University of Toronto Scarborough and graduate faculty in the Department of Anthropology. As a lab member, Hartblay contributed to the Contra* podcast and co-curated the #CripRitual exhibition.
[Image description: an olive-skinned person with cropped brown hair and bangs looks at the camera at an angle. She is wearing a black-and-white striped turtleneck with her hand in pocket and leans against a white wall. There is a wooden picture frame hung on the wall beside her.]
Rebecca Rahimi
Rebecca graduated from Vanderbilt University with an MA in Medicine, Health and Society. Her research interests center on narrative and music therapies, the medical humanities, elderly populations with Alzheimer’s and dementia and notions of culture and identity in Iranian memory.
Catherine Terrace
Catherine earned an MA from Vanderbilt University’s Center for Medicine, Health, and Society. Her research interests primarily center on critical access studies, particularly on the relationship between accessible design, architectural aesthetics, and historical preservation
[Image description: a light-skinned person with dark brown glasses is leaning into the camera. Her eyes are partly closed from smiling. She wears a light green dress with an open navy jacket over the top. Behind her are open areas of grass and trees.]
[Image description: a lightly tan person with medium-length dark brown hair parted to the right looks straight at the camera. She is smiling with teeth and wears a pair of red glasses. Her photo crops below the elbow and she is wearing a grey, long-sleeved shirt with a block of black near the top. The background is white marble.]
Louise Hickman
Louise Hickman is an activist and scholar of communication, and uses ethnographic, archival, and theoretical approaches to consider how access is produced for disabled people. Her current project focuses particularly on access produced by real-time stenographers and transcriptive technologies in educational settings. She uses an interdisciplinary lens drawing on feminist theory, critical disability studies, and science and technology studies to consider the historical conditions of access work, and the ways access is co-produced through human (and primarily female) labor, technological systems, and economic models and conditions. She holds a PhD in Communication from the University of California, San Diego, and is currently working on her first manuscript: “The Automation of Access.”
![[Image description: a white person with shoulder-length brown hair, hoop earrings, a necklace, and a black shirt smiles at the camera. The background is a tree-lined sidewalk.]](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5818ce7dd482e9494b94ede8/1510597216307-1FK3HSBJ824AU0HU2Q05/APearson.jpeg)
[Image description: a white person with shoulder-length brown hair, hoop earrings, a necklace, and a black shirt smiles at the camera. The background is a tree-lined sidewalk.]
Alessandra Pearson
Alessandra Pearson is currently a graduate student in the University of Denver's Emergent Digital Practices program, where her research focuses on art/tech/disability. She is particularly interested in cultural and technological access and how they effect agency and identity. Prior to school, she spent time working at many different arts organizations, most recently at Fractured Atlas. She is also a visual artist with a love of pen drawing, but is learning to take her work off of the 2-D surface with creative coding and motion graphics.
Maggie Mang
Maggie is currently a PhD student in Science and Technology Studies at Rennselaer Polytechnic. Her research interests revolve broadly around intersectional and interdisciplinary feminist scholarship, biopolitics, science & technology, and disaster politics.
![[Image description: a white person with wavy, shoulder-length dark blond hair smiles at the camera, wearing a black shirt with tiny crescent moons on it. The background is a beige wall]](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5818ce7dd482e9494b94ede8/1512662682214-5TVJU5PFMB3G1JFI3OBA/headshot+LJones.jpeg)
[Image description: a white person with wavy, shoulder-length dark blond hair smiles at the camera, wearing a black shirt with tiny crescent moons on it. The background is a beige wall]
Lauren Jones
Lauren is a former undergraduate at Vanderbilt University studying Medicine, Health, & Society and Biological Sciences. Her research focuses on the intersections of homelessness and reproductive justice. In the lab, her project addresses menstrual inequalities.