The Ford Foundation is an American private foundation with the stated goal of advancing human welfare. Created in 1936 by Edsel Ford and his father Henry Ford, it was originally funded by a US$25,000 gift from Edsel Ford. By 1947, after the death of the two founders, the foundation owned 90% of the non-voting shares of the Ford Motor Company. Between 1955 and 1974, the foundation sold its Ford Motor Company holdings and now plays no role in the automobile company.
Naomi Elizabeth "Nomy" Lamm is an American singer-songwriter and political activist. Lamm has described herself as a "bad ass, fat ass, Jew, dyke amputee." Her left foot was amputated at age three, to be fitted with a leg prosthesis, to treat a bone growth disorder. This trauma influenced Lamm's later work concerning body image. She is also known for her activism on the issue of fat acceptance.
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is a U.S. /Canadian poet, writer, educator and social activist. Their writing and performance art focuses on documenting the stories of queer and trans people of color, abuse survivors, mixed-race people and diasporic South Asians and Sri Lankans. A central concern of their work is the interconnection of systems of colonialism, abuse and violence. They are also a writer and organizer within the disability justice movement.
Judith Ellen "Judy" Heumann is an American disability rights activist. She is recognized internationally as a leader in the disability community. Heumann is a lifelong civil rights advocate for people with disabilities. Her work with governments and non governmental organizations (NGOs), non-profits, and various other disability interest groups, has produced significant contributions since the 1970s to the development of human rights legislation and policies benefiting children and adults with disabilities. Through her work in the World Bank and the State Department, Heumann led the mainstreaming of disability rights into international development. Her contributions extended the international reach of the independent living movement.
Teresita Fernández is a New York-based visual artist best known for her public sculptures and unconventional use of materials. Her work is characterized by an interest in perception and the psychology of looking. Her experiential, large-scale works are often inspired by landscape and natural phenomena as well as diverse historical and cultural references. Her sculptures present spectacular optical illusions and evoke natural phenomena, land formations, and water in its infinite forms.
Kay Ulanday Barrett is a published poet, performer, educator, food writer, cultural strategist, and transgender, gender non-conforming, and disability advocate based in New York and New Jersey, whose work has been showcased nationally and internationally. Their second book, More Than Organs received a 2021 Stonewall Honor Book Award by the American Library Association and is a 2021 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Literature Finalist. They are a 2020 James Baldwin Fellowship recipient, three-time Pushcart Prize Nominee, and two-time Best of the Net Nominee. Barrett's writing and performance centers on the experience of queer, transgender, people of color, mixed race people, Asian, and Filipino/a/x community. The focus of their artistic work navigates multiple systems of oppression in the context of the U.S.
Leroy F. Moore Jr. is an African American writer, poet, community activist, and feminist. Moore was born November 2, 1967, in New York City. Moore is one of the founders of Krip Hop.
Sins Invalid is a disability justice-based performance project that incubates artists with disabilities, centralizing artists of color and LGBTQ / gender-variant artists. Led by disabled people of color, Sins Invalid's performance work explores the themes of sexuality, embodiment and the disabled body. In addition to multidisciplinary performances by people with disabilities, Sins Invalid organizes visual art exhibits, readings, and a bi-monthly educational video series. Sins Invalid collaborates with other movement-building projects and provides disability justice trainings.
Alice Wong is a disability rights activist based in San Francisco, California.
Superfest International Disability Film Festival is a juried film festival held in the San Francisco Bay Area. Superfest is the longest-running disability film festival in the world. In addition to featuring films developed by and starring people with disabilities, Superfest aims to be inclusive. The directors also coach the film makers about accessibility of films to people with disabilities. During the film festival, the organizers provide sign language interpreters and film narrators to allow for the attendees with various disabilities to appreciate the films. All of the judges for Superfest are people with disabilities from various community roles, including disability community organizers, disability studies scholars, and film aficionados. Superfest closely follows the disability rights slogan: Nothing About Us Without Us.
Jos Boys is an architect, activist, educator, and writer. She was a founder member of Matrix Feminist Design Co-operative and co-author of their 1984 book Making Space: Women and the Man-Made Environment. Since 2008 she has been co-director of The DisOrdinary Architecture Project with disabled artist Zoe Partington, a disability-led platform that works with disabled artists to explore new ways to think about disability in architectural and design discourse and practice.
Carolyn Lieba Francois Lazard is an American artist based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Lazard uses the experience of chronic illness to examine concepts of intimacy and the labor of living involved with chronic illnesses. Lazard expresses their ideas through a variety of mediums including performance, filmmaking, sculpture, writing, photography, sound; as well as environments and installations. Lazard is a 2019 Pew Foundation Fellow and one of the first recipients of The Ford Foundation's 2020 Disability Futures Fellows Awards.
Disability justice is a social justice movement which focuses on examining disability and ableism as they relate to other forms of oppression and identity such as race, class and gender. It was developed in 2005 by the Disability Justice Collective, a group including Patty Berne, Mia Mingus, Stacey Milbern, Leroy F. Moore Jr., and Eli Clare. In disability justice, disability is not considered to be defined in "white terms, or male terms, or straight terms." The movement also believes that ableism makes other forms of prejudice possible and that systems of oppression are intertwined. The disability justice framework is being applied to a intersectional reexamination of a wide range of disability, human rights, and justice movements.
Crip, slang for cripple, is a term in the process of being reclaimed by disabled people. Wright State University suggests that the current community definition of crip includes people who experience any form of disability, such as one or more impairments with physical, mental, learning, and sensory, though the term primarily targets physical and mobility impairment. People might identify as a crip for many reasons. Some of these reasons are to show pride, to talk about disability rights, or avoid ranking types of disability.
Max Saunders is a British academic and writer specialising in modern literature. He is the author of Imagined Futures: Writing, Science, and Modernity in the To-Day and To-Morrow Book Series, 1923-31, Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life, and Self Impression: Life-Writing, Autobiografiction, and the Forms of Modern Literature. He is the editor of the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Ford’s The Good Soldier, and of four volumes of Ford Madox Ford’s writing including Some Do Not …, the first book for Ford’s First World War tetralogy Parade’s End for Carcanet Press.
Mia Mingus is an American writer, educator, and community organizer who focuses on issues of disability justice. She is known for coining the term "access intimacy". She advocates for disability studies and activism to centralize the experiences of marginalized people within disability organizing. She is a prison abolitionist, and she advocates for transformative justice in her work against child sexual abuse.
James LeBrecht is a filmmaker, sound designer, and disability rights activist. He currently lives in Oakland, California.
Paul Darke CF is a British academic, artist, filmmaker, podcaster and disability rights activist. Darke is an expert on disability in film and politics.
Eli Clare is an American writer, activist, educator, and speaker. His work focuses on queer, transgender, and disability issues. Clare was one of the first scholars to popularize the bodymind concept.
Jerron Herman is an American choreographer, dancer, performance artist, writer and a teacher for the Dream Project at National Dance Institute for children with disabilities. He grew up in California as part of a religious and art loving family. He has the movement disorder Cerebral Palsy, the symptoms of which he has absorbed into his dance movements.
