Sandie (Chun-shan) Yi

Sandie (Chun-shan) Yi is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art Therapy and Counseling and Program Director of the Disability Culture Activism Lab (DCAL) at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). She has a Master of Art in art therapy from SAIC and an MFA from the University of California Berkeley. She is a disabled artist and disability culture worker whose work focuses on wearable art made for and with self-identified disabled people. As a part of the Disability Art Movement, Yi’s project Crip Couture explores the issue of intimacy, desire, and sexuality of the disabled body-mind. The wearable art objects and their wearers call for a recognition of disability as an aesthetic choice and suggest the possibility for a new genre of wearable art: disability fashion. Yi recently defended her Ph.D. dissertation in Disability Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago. Her research interests include Disability Arts and Culture; disability fashion; accessibility design and programming for arts and cultural venues; and social justice-based art therapy.