Our Mission
Sins Invalid is a disability justice based performance project that incubates and celebrates artists with disabilities, centralizing artists of color and LGBTQ / gender-variant artists as communities who have been historically marginalized. Led by disabled people of color, Sins Invalid’s performance work explores the themes of sexuality, embodiment and the disabled body, developing provocative work where paradigms of “normal” and “sexy” are challenged, offering instead a vision of beauty and sexuality inclusive of all bodies and communities.
We define disability broadly to include people with physical impairments, people who belong to a sensory minority, people with emotional disabilities, people with cognitive challenges, and those with chronic/severe illness. We understand the experience of disability to occur within any and all walks of life, with deeply felt connections to all communities impacted by the medicalization of their bodies, including trans, gender variant and intersex people, and others whose bodies do not conform to our culture(s)’ notions of “normal” or “functional.”
OUR VISION
Sins Invalid recognizes that we will be liberated as whole beings—as disabled, as queer, as brown, as black, as gender non-conforming, as trans, as women, as men, as non-binary gendered— we are far greater whole than partitioned. We recognize that our allies emerge from many communities and that demographic identity alone does not determine one’s commitment to liberation.
Sins Invalid is committed to social and economic justice for all people with disabilities – in lockdowns, in shelters, on the streets, visibly disabled, invisibly disabled, sensory minority, environmentally injured, psychiatric survivors – moving beyond individual legal rights to collective human rights.
Our stories, imbedded in analysis, offer paths from identity politics to unity amongst all oppressed people, laying a foundation for a collective claim of liberation and beauty.
WHAT WE DO:
Our goals are to:
- Promote leadership opportunities for people with disabilities within our communities and within the broader social justice movement.
- Provide a supportive and politically engaged space for both emerging and established artists with disabilities to develop and present compelling works to a broad audience.
- Develop and present strong artistic work that explores sexuality and the non-normative body, integrating the full and multi-dimensional experiences of disabled artists who are also people of color and LGBTIQ, in order to represent all of our communities and challenge dominant misperceptions about people with disabilities.
WE DO THIS BY:
- Offering political education workshops for community based organizations and other organizations that share our commitment to social justice principles as a means of integrating analysis and action around disability, race, gender, and sexuality.
- Presenting multidisciplinary performances (video, poetry, spoken word, music, drama, and dance) by people with disabilities for broad audiences in the San Francisco Bay Area and elsewhere.
- Organizing performance workshops for community members with and without disabilities.
Introducing the Sins Invalid Team
Patty Berne
Executive Director/Artistic Director
Nomy Lamm
Creative Director
Karina Camarena Heredia
Executive Assistant
Cyree Jarelle Johnson
Social Media and Community Engagement Specialist
Mordecai Cohen Ettinger
Development Director
Leticia “Lettie” Robles-Tovar
Administrative and Development Associate
Jen/Eleana (J/E) Hofer
Language Justice Coordinator
JEN/ELEANA HOFER is a poet, translator, social justice interpreter, teacher, facilitator, urban cyclist, and co-founder of the language justice and language experimentation collaborative Antena Aire (2010-2020). They publish poems, translations, and visual-textual works with numerous small independent presses and in various DIY/DIT incarnations, and have received support in many forms from many entities, including CantoMundo, the Academy of American Poets, the City of Los Angeles, the NEA, and PEN American Center. Jen/Eleana lives on unceded Tongva land in Los Angeles and identifies as a queer white Latinx/Argentinean Jewish BDS supporter who grew up mostly monolingual in a bilingual/bicultural family. They passionately believe in language justice practices as a powerful intersection between healing, solidarity work, and the transformative possibilities of language. More information: www.channeltransmitrepeat.com.
Maria Palacios
Spanish Language Communities Outreach Specialist
Maria’s work includes various genres of art ranging from written collections of rebellious poetic storytelling, to passionate spoken word pieces and sarcastic illustrations of disability themed cartoons aimed at calling out ableism.
Maria is one of the Capitol Crawlers from the iconic march of 1990 that passed the ADA. Her advocacy, since then, has taken many forms eventually morphing into her current voice –a voice unafraid of sharing the survival stories of the disabled people the world wants to forget. She is Sins Invalid’s Spanish language Community Outreach Coordinator and has been a Sins performer since 2007.
In the artistic world, Maria is known as the Goddess on Wheels.
Breana Connor
✨Community Partners✨
Dancers Group
San Francisco Women Against Rape
Health Justice Commons
Catalyst Project
Queer Women of Color Media Arts Project
Forward Together
✨Sins Invalid Funders✨
The Hewlett Foundation
The Ford Foundation
Horizons Foundation
Zellerbach Family Foundation
Blue Heart – Social Good Fund
Kindle Project
General Service Foundation
National Arts & Disability Center
Urgent Action Fund
California Arts Council
Akonadi Foundation
