Disability/Arts Founder Simi Linton to Deliver 2016 Rudin Lecture

A reception for all attendees will follow the lecture.

There is a wheelchair accessible entrance to the college on the 72nd street side of the campus and the back row of The Theresa Lang Theatre can accommodate wheelchairs.

Linton’s lecture will be the culminating event of a full day of activities, which will include a screening of Invitation to Dance at 1:00PM in The Regina Peruggi Room.

Marymount Manhattan College is grateful for the support of the Rudin Foundation for this event.  

About the Lecture

Throughout history the arts have served as a testing ground for society’s most sacred beliefs and aspirations. The arts have played a vital role in shaping democracy – by provoking, revealing, reimagining, showing a new path. 

While ideas about disability have been “tested” on audiences since Sophocles’ character Oedipus blinded himself, the contemporary art world, including major cultural institutions as well as those on the fringe, have done little to open up ideas about disability, and explore the subject (as well as the subjects!) in a meaningful way.  

Linton’s talk will explore the roots of this dilemma, and the indicators of recent shifts – a reshaping of disability in the cultural imagination and growing recognition of the cultural authority of disabled people.

About Simi Linton

Simi Linton is an author, filmmaker, and arts consultant. Her writings include Claiming Disability: Knowledge and Identity, My Body Politic, and the essay “Cultural Territories of Disability” in Disability. Dance. Artistry., published by Dance/NYC.She is the subject of the documentary film Invitation to Dance, which she and Christian von Tippelskirch directed and produced. Linton’s consultancy practice, Disability/Arts, works to shape the presentation of disability in the arts. Projects include events at the Public Theater, Writers’ Guild of America, HBO headquarters, the Smithsonian, Margaret Mead Film Festival, as well as ongoing advisor to Inclusion in the Arts (2006-present), and DanceNYC [2015-present]. Linton holds an undergraduate degree from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. from New York University. She was a Mary E. Switzer Distinguished Fellow, US Department of Education (1995-1996), Co-Director of the University Seminar in Disability Studies at Columbia University (2003-2007), and Presidential Visiting Scholar at Hofstra University (2006).  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 recently appointed by Mayor Bill de Blasio to New York City’s Cultural Affairs Advisory Commission.

About The Jack and Lewis Rudin Distinguished Visiting Scholars Program

The Jack and Lewis Rudin Distinguished Visiting Scholars Program was established at Marymount Manhattan College in 2000 through a grant from The Rudin Foundation, Inc. Both Jack Rudin and the late Lewis Rudin have been well known throughout New York for the extraordinary contributions they have made to enhance the quality of living and working in New York City, and for their generous support of education, health, the arts and other civic, religious and cultural causes. Marymount Manhattan is honored to be the recipient of this special grant. This lecture builds upon the College’s commitment to academic excellence and its distinctive undergraduate programs in the liberal arts.

Published: September 09, 2016