Composing Kin: Teaching Neurodivergent History through Community-Engaged Art
Mar 18, 2026 3:00-4:00pm Eastern/noon-1:00pm Pacific
Alexis Riley, Assistant Professor of Theatre & Dance at the University of Michigan, presents the first in an ongoing series of webinars on neurodiversity in the arts.
Historical sites associated with neurodivergence are often painful, characterized by isolation and exclusion. From institutions to alternative schools, these locales—and the carceral histories they cite—are often obscured in our current landscape, transformed into luxury apartments, shopping districts, and city parks. This obfuscation presents neurodivergence as a contemporary phenomenon, one wholly detached from its broader historical context. How might the arts help us to render that context more perceptible, offering access to neurodivergent pasts while imagining neurodivergent futures?
In this webinar, neurodivergent artist Alexis Riley introduces attendees to kinsong: ode to disability ancestors. Crafted alongside a team of over 20 neurodiverse undergraduate and graduate students, kinsong served as a belated memorial to the roughly 2,000 people buried in the Austin State Hospital Cemetery—their graves unmarked and remains unclaimed, likely due to ableism. Throughout the process of creating kinsong, Riley and her collaborators used their bodies to draw attention to the site, prompting passersby to pause and engage the cemetery located (in some cases, literally) in their backyards. At the same time, it also offered the community an opportunity to interrogate their own relationship to that history—and the responsibilities that may result.
Blending media from the performance with resources for creative engagement, this webinar ultimately offers neurodivergent and neurotypical attendees alike a framework for engaging arts-based approaches to neurodivergent histories in a range of settings.
Registration
Registration for a2ru webinars is free for a2ru individual members and for faculty, students, and staff affiliated with a2ru institutional and departmental members. Please use your institutional email when registering at the link below.
Registration for non-members is $20; registration for non-member students is $10.
About the Speaker
Alexis Riley (she/they) is is a white disabled psychiatric survivor and interdisciplinary performance artist from Shawnee and Osage Land (colonial West Virginia). She specializes in theatre, dance, and performance studies, disability studies, and mad studies, with particular interests in practice-based research methods and accessible pedagogy.
Her current book project, Mad Memory: Performance, Psychiatric Survivorship, and the Unfinished Work of Repair explores the legacy of medical incarceration—and its impact on disability communities—through the lens of performance. This research has earned numerous awards, including a generous grant from the American Theatre and Drama Society and year-long fellowships from the Charlotte W. Newcombe Foundation and the University of Michigan President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program. She has published this research in Performance Matters, Theatre History Studies, and IRQR, among others.
In addition to presenting her work in conventional scholarly forums, she also directs the Mad Memory Project, a multi-year performance series aimed at making disability archives and histories accessible to a wider audience. This project informs her approach to teaching, which centers accessibility as a strategy for fostering inclusion in and beyond the theatre classroom.
Alexis is currently an Assistant Professor of Theatre Studies at the University of Michigan.