Kenny Fries curated Queering the Crip, Cripping the Queer, the first international exhibit on queer/disability history, activism, and culture (Schwules Museum Berlin 2022-23) and the ongoing A Picture of Health: Jo Spence, a Politics of Disability and Illness (online, 2023). He is the author of In the Province of the Gods (Creative Capital Literature Award); 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. Twice a Fulbright Scholar (Japan and Germany), he has received a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Arts and Literary Arts Fellowship, was a Creative Arts Fellow of the Japan/US Friendship Commission and the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Heinrich Böll Foundation/Cultural Vistas DAICOR Fellow in diverse and inclusive public remembrance, as well as grants from the DAAD (German Academic Exchange), Canada Council for the Arts, Darstellende Künste (Performing Arts Fund), and Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe. His work-in-progress is Stumbling over History: Disability and the Holocaust, excerpts of which have appeared in The New York Times, The Believer, and Craft, and are the basis of his video series What Happened Here in the Summer of 1940?. He is a Disability Futures Fellow of the Ford Foundation/Mellon Foundation/USA Artists.
Photo by Michael R. Dekker
