A wide shot of a ceramics studio, featuring students working with pottery wheels and other tools.
Portrait of a person dancing

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Maggie Bridger

Lecturer

Contact

Professional Site

Bio

Education: BA, 2011, Columbia College Chicago; MS, 2021, University of Illinois Chicago; PhD Candidate, University of Illinois Chicago. Performances: The Steppenwolf Theatre LookOut Series, 2024, Chicago, IL; The Art Institute of Chicago, 2023, Chicago, IL; Unfolding Disability Futures at The Plant, 2022, Chicago, IL. Publications: Bridger, Maggie, Sydney Erlikh, and Amanda Lautermilch. "Unfolding Disability Futures: Enacting care and transforming professionalization through disability art practices." Sociographe 4 (2023): 81-95; Bridger, Maggie. "Sick: A Memoir by Porochista Khakpour." Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies 17.2 (2023): 263-265; 2021 Bridger, Maggie, Sydney Erlikh, and Chun-shan Yi. "Reverberation! A New Wave in Disability Art." Canadian Journal of Disability Studies 10.2 (2021): 7-26; Bridger, Maggie. “Maggie Bridger: Responding to Netta Yerushalmy’s Paramodernities #6.” On the Ground, The Dance Center of Columbia College Chicago, https://dance.colum.edu/pararesponse-6; Bridger, Maggie and Sydney Erlikh, “’We Are Distinctive Forms’: Disability Dance, Activism and Aesthetics in Chicago,” Dancing on the Third Coast edited by Lizzie Leopold and Susan A Manning. Forthcoming from University of Illinois Press. Exhibitions: The Steppenwolf Theatre’s LookOut Series, 2024, Chicago, IL; Cripping the Galleries: Dance Performance, The Art Institute of Chicago, 2023, Chicago, IL; High Concept Labs, 2023, Chicago, IL; Unfolding Disability Futures, The Plant, 2022, Chicago, IL; Elevate Chicago Dance, Chicago Cultural Center, 2022, Chicago, IL; CounterBalance, MOMENTA Dance Company, 2021, Chicago, IL; Synapse Arts New Works 2021, Virtual Bibliography: Block Club Chicago, Performance Response Journal, Stance on Dance. Awards: Artist in Residence, 2023 Production Residency Program, Chicago Dancemaker’s Forum in partnership with Links Hall; 2023 Fellow Artist in Residence, High Concept Labs; 2022-2023 Administrative Fellow, Membership, Dance Studies Association; 2022 Artist in Residence, The Learning Lab at the Chicago Cultural Center; 2022 Artist in Residence, High Concept Labs; 2022 Ethel Louise Armstrong Grant, Department of Disability and Human Development, University of Illinois at Chicago; 2022 Individual Artist Program Grant, Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events; 2021 New Works Artist, Synapse Arts; 2020-2021 Schweitzer Foundation Fellow for Life Seed Grant; 2019-2020 Chicago Area Albert Schweitzer Fellow; 2019 Member of UCLA Dancing Disability Lab Inaugural Cohort

Personal Statement

Maggie Bridger (she/her) is a sick and disabled dance artist, fiber artist, access worker, and scholar interested in reimagining pain through the creative process. A PhD Candidate at the University of Illinois Chicago in Disability Studies, Maggie is Membership Manager with the Dance Studies Association. Her creative practice is deeply connected to and informed by the disability arts and culture movement and the development of “disability aesthetics,” a term used by disabled artists to articulate the particular ways that disability appears in the content, form and process of their work. Maggie's classrooms cultivate an ethic of collective access, wherein access is achieved only through the enthusiastic collaboration of everyone in the space. She understands the classroom as an essential space to explore and build a more just, caring, accessible world.

Courses

Title Department Catalog Term

Description

This studio course will examine the ways that disabled artists use their experiences of impairment to create their work. Through showings and critique, group discussions, engagement with work by and about disability art, and critical reflections, we will explore disability and access as political, social, and deeply embodied phenomena. Together, we will embody and explore practices developed by disabled artists, ultimately reaching toward a disability-informed method of making, rehearsing, and producing performance. We will engage with disability art emerging across various mediums and historical moments, such as work by Kinetic Light, Sins Invalid, Finnegan Shannon, Kayla Hamilton, Alex Dolores Salerno, Andy Slater, Matt Bodett, Jerron Herman, Molly Joyce, Shireen Hamza, Alison Kopit, Christine Sun Kim, Risa Puleo, Larissa Velez Jackson and others, as well as historical sites of disability performance such as freak shows, institutions, and medical spaces. Course work will consist of engagement with assigned materials, a personal Access Statement, one presentation on a disabled artist of your choosing, participation in class discussions, and three short performance projects.

Class Number

2145

Credits

3

Description

What is disability? How do we see, read, hear, smell and feel about disability? How does society represent disability and illness? How do artists theoretically and conceptually engage disability in their own practices? This course offers students critical thinking tools to examine the meanings of disability created by current social, cultural, economic and political systems. Over the course of the semester, students develop artistic vocabulary in relation to visual and cultural representations of disability found in mainstream society and in Disability Culture/Disability Art contexts. Readings include the following topics: disability frameworks, disability as intersectional identity, and representations in art, media, fashion, and design . Students learn about the range and complexity of disability representations through the works of contemporary artists such as Riva Lehrer, Laura Swanson, and Christine Sun Kim, and through the work of dance and performance art groups. Students also read the work of disability scholars including Carrie Sandahl, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Eli Clare, Alison Kafer, and Petra Kuppers. Coursework includes bi-weekly writing responses, a disability culture event paper, a media report, and a final art and writing project.

Class Number

1260

Credits

3