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Thirty years after the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), how are arts organizations embracing accessibility and inclusion? How can communities bring down barriers for artists and writers with disabilities and help them thrive? Residency programs in particular are engaging with these questions more than ever, playing an active role in examining the accessibility of buildings and events, and the challenge of sharing resources - the time, space, and freedom to create - more equitably and effectively.

Join Lesley Williamson, Executive Director of the Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, and writer and disability activist Stephen Kuusisto ('15) for a wide-ranging discussion about the arts, the disability community, and the changing nature of contemporary cultural spaces.

Learn more about the construction of Saltonstall's new accessible addition and how the organization took the project from vision to reality. We'll leave lots of time for Q&A!

This is a free program, part of the Community Arts Partnership's Spring Writes Literary Festival. Registration is required: https://us02web.zoom.us/.../tZMocu2gpzgjGdEXJhh2F6GyIO7JZ....

Hope to see you!

Featuring:

Stephen Kuusisto is the author of the memoirs Have Dog, Will Travel; Planet of the Blind (a New York Times “Notable Book of the Year”); and Eavesdropping: A Memoir of Blindness and Listening and of the poetry collections Only Bread, Only Light and Letters to Borges. A graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and a Fulbright Scholar, he has taught at the University of Iowa, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, and Ohio State University. He currently teaches at Syracuse University where he holds a University Professorship in Disability Studies. He is a frequent speaker in the US and abroad. https://stephenkuusisto.com/

Lesley Williamson has served as the executive director of the Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts since 2011. She initiated the Foundation’s accessible addition project in 2015, and for the first time in the Foundation’s history, disabled artists and writers will be able to utilize the facilities starting this year. Lesley earned a BA in cultural studies at Hampshire College and an MA in Arts Management at Carnegie Mellon University. https://www.saltonstall.org/

Access notes: none provided by the host