“Access in Content and Form” is a conversation with and between Creative Capital Awardees writer Kenny Fries and visual artist and filmmaker Alison O’Daniel. As artists who identify as disabled, Kenny and Alison know the importance of access to buildings, sound, films, books, websites and, especially during the current pandemic, protection and care. However, what is most important to their practices is work that focuses on disability in both content and form. Kenny and Alison will talk about how their intersectional identities enter their work, the importance of disability representation and role models, and their upcoming creative collaboration on a film based on Kenny’s poem sequence In the Gardens of Japan.

ASL interpretation and live-captioning will be provided for this event.

*Although this event is free, we encourage you to pay what you can to make this and future programs possible. Your contribution helps to compensate the panelists for their time and offset other production costs. Thank you!

Kenny Fries (Creative Capital Awardee 2009) is the author of In the Province of the Gods, his Creative Capital project; The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin’s Theory (Outstanding Book Award, Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights); and Body, Remember: A Memoir. He edited Staring Back: The Disability Experience from the Inside Out and was commissioned by Houston Grand Opera to write the libretto for The Memory Stone. His books of poems include In the Gardens of Japan, Desert Walking, and Anesthesia. He created the Fries Test for disability representation in literature and film. His work has appeared in many places including The New York Times, Granta, The Believer, Evergreen Review, and LitHub. Twice a Fulbright Scholar (Japan and Germany), he was a Creative Arts Fellow of the Japan/US Friendship Commission and the National Endowment for the Arts, and received a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Arts and Literary Arts Fellowship, as well as grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, and Toronto Arts Council. His most recent project is What Happened Here in the Summer of 1940?, a series of six interrelated videos based on his forthcoming book Stumbling over History: Disability and the Holocaust. He will soon collaborate with fellow Creative Capital Awardee Alison O’Daniel on a film based on his poem sequence In the Gardens of Japan.

Alison O’Daniel (Creative Capital Awardee 2019) is a visual artist and filmmaker. She has exhibited internationally at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow; Centre Pompidou, Paris, FR; Centro Centro, Madrid, Spain; Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha; Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles; Art in General, New York; Samuel Freeman Gallery, Los Angeles; Centre d’art Contemporain Passerelle, Brest, France; Tallinn Art Hall, Estonia. She is a recipient of the 2019 Louis Comfort Tiffany and Creative Capital Awards, and has received grants from the Rema Hort Mann Foundation; Center for Cultural Innovation; the California Community Foundation; and Franklin Furnace Fund. She has attended residencies at the Wexner Center Film/Video Studio Program, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Writing on O’Daniel’s work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Artforum, Los Angeles Times, BOMB, and ArtReview. Her film, The Tuba Thieves, was supported by the Sundance Creative Producing Lab and she was included in Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film. She is represented by Commonwealth and Council in Los Angeles and is an Assistant Professor of Film at California College of the Arts in San Francisco.

Banner photo is a still from The Tuba Thieves, 2013-ongoing. Written, directed, edited by Alison O’Daniel. Starring Nyke Prince, Produced by Rachel Nederveld, Cinematography by Meena Singh and Judy Phu.