Or Vallah (she/her/hers)

Or Vallah is a doctoral candidate in Art History and holds a certificate in Disability Studies. She has rich experience in museum and public-facing cultural work from the Negev Museum of Art in Beer-Sheva, the Ilana Goor Museum in Jaffa, and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art that she employs in her teaching and research.

Her intersectional study of early modern notions of art-making through the lenses of disability studies and art history is new territory for both fields. By considering the corporeality of early modern artists with the methodology offered by disability studies and affect theory, she recenters the artists' bodies to study the fluidity of (dis)ability and expose the productive power of disability in defining the processes and conceptualization of artmaking. Her intersectional approach exposes stories of disempowerment and pain along with narratives of gain, resistance, and interdependence to disrupt historical stereotypes and expose the diverse models of early modern inclusion that can enrich and complicate our understanding of art and disability history.

She is a co-founder and organizer of the Dismantling the Canon Graduate Research Cluster and a member of the founding cohort of the QueerCrip Research Collective (QCRC), both funded by the UW Simpson Center for the Humanities. Her service experience at UW includes the School of Arts' Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility Committee (DEIA) and the Arts and Sciences Advisory Council for Students (ASACS), which advises the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences.