Or Vallah (she/her/hers)

Or Vallah is a doctoral candidate in Art History and holds a certificate in Disability Studies. Her dissertation, titled (Dis)ability and the Making of the Early Modern Artist, operates at the intersection of art history and disability studies, aspiring toward a fuller understanding of the early modern (dis)ability experience by acknowledging pain and disempowerment but also resistance and gain, to disrupt historical stereotypes about disability. By considering the corporeality of early modern artists with the methodology offered by disability studies and affect theory, she recenters the artists' bodies to reveal their role in constituting their identities and deconstructing the binary of disabled and non-disabled experiences to expose the productive power of disability in defining the processes and conceptualization of artmaking and self. Before joining the University of Washington, Or gained museum and public-facing cultural work experience from the Negev Museum of Art in Beer-Sheva, the Ilana Goor Museum in Jaffa, and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.

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. She has won numerous awards during her time at UW, including the AAUW American Dissertation Fellowship. She has presented her research at several conferences, among them the Renaissance Society of America annual meeting.