Strategies for Seeing Differently

White, disabled, and genderqueer, Eli Clare lives near Lake Champlain in unceded Abenaki territory (also known as Vermont) where he writes and proudly claims a penchant for rabble-rousing. He has written two books of essays, the award-winning Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure and Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation, and a collection of poetry, The Marrow’s Telling: Words in Motion. His next book, a mixed genre volume titled Unfurl, will be released in September, 2025. Additionally he has been published in dozens of journals and anthologies.

Eli works as a traveling poet, storyteller, and social justice educator. Since 2008, he has spoken, taught, trained, and consulted (both in-person and remotely) at well over 150 conferences, community events, and colleges across the United States and Canada. He currently serves on the Community Advisory Board for the Disability Project at the Transgender Law Center and is also a Disability Futures Fellow (funded by the Ford Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation). Among other pursuits, he has walked across the United States for peace, coordinated a rape prevention program, and helped organize the first ever Queer Disability Conference.

Julie Forrest Wyman’s work engages issues of embodiment, body image, and the possibilities and problematics of media spectatorship – all informed by her experience of living with hypochondroplasia dwarfism. Her 2012 documentary Strong! premiered at AFI Silverdocs and was broadcast nationally on PBS’s Emmy award-winning series, Independent Lens, where it won the series’ Audience Award. Wyman’s work has been supported by Sundance, Sandbox, IDA, SF Film Society, Points North, ITVS, the Creative Capital Foundation, The Princess Grace Foundation, California Humanities, and NEH. She has been a fellow at the UC Davis Feminist Research Institute and a resident of SF Film Society’s Filmhouse, Siena Art Institute, Logan Nonfiction, and Points North. Her films, including FatMob (2016), Buoyant (2005), and A Boy Named Sue (2000), have aired on Showtime, MTV’s LOGO-TV, and have been exhibited on five continents. She serves as Associate Professor of Cinema and Digital Media at UC Davis.

Reid Davenport makes documentaries about disability from an overtly political perspective. His first feature film, I Didn’t See You There, won the Directing Award for U.S. Documentary at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. The film won the Grand Jury Prize at Full Frame Documentary Film Festival and the McBaine Bay Area Documentary Award at San Francisco International Film Festival. It had a national broadcast on POV in 2023. The film has been hailed by critics as “first-person poetry in captivating motion, expressed with a singular, assured artistic voice” and a “must-see.” In 2020, Reid was named to DOC NYC’s “40 Filmmakers Under 40.” His short film, A Cerebral Game, won the Artistic Vision Award at the 2016 Big Sky Documentary Film Festival for “creating a visual landscape that is at once disorienting and nostalgic – and the result is so raw and compelling it’s impossible to turn away.”

Along with A Cerebral Game, his short documentaries Wheelchair Diariea and Ramped Up are distributed by New Day Films. Reid was a 2017 TED fellow and gave a TED Talk about incorporating his own literal body into his filmmaking. His work has been featured by outlets like NPR, PBS, The Washington Post, MSNBC, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. Reid holds an MFA in Documentary Film & Video from Stanford University and a BA in Journalism and Mass Communication from The George Washington University.