top of page
Still 1.png

Olivia Dreisinger

Olivia Dreisinger (b. 1991) is a disabled artist, scholar, and writer. Her own fluctuating physical abilities often dictates how she produces work

— a process that regularly leads her to new and generative mediums to explore.

  • Instagram

Artist Biography

Her past work has investigated disability representation and knowledge-sharing practices in disabled fan communities, from disabled!, an experimental 3D animated video documentary that examines the role of disability in fanfiction, to Handler is crazy, a documentary about a cosplaying service dog team. Some of her upcoming work includes Alt-Text Selfies, a collaboration with disabled artists Finnegan Shannon and Bojana Coklyat that celebrates image descriptions that accompany self-portraits online; Diagnosis Grad School, a podcast series about being disabled in graduate school; and What Kind of Mother, a documentary film about her mother’s suicide. Her work has been supported by Canada Council for the Arts and BC Arts Council. In 2021, she received the Emerging Digital Artist Award by EQ Bank. Currently, she is pursuing a PhD at the University of British Columbia in the Rhetoric of Health and Medicine.

Artist Statement

​disabled! is an experimental video documentary that examines the role of disability in fanfiction. Narrated through a fan-made avatar of River Tam from the television show Firefly—a non-visibly disabled character that serves as a stand-in for the artist’s own imperceptibly unwell body—viewers are taken on a tour of the many worlds of fanfiction. Paralleling the inherent inquisitiveness and ingenuity of the genre with the artist’s own quest for alternate ways of living, the work creates space to challenge and reimagine our understanding of disability.

bottom of page