Or Vallah (she/her/hers)

I am a doctoral candidate in Art History and hold a certificate in Disability Studies. My 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, I recenter 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, I 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.

I am a co-founder and organizer of the Dismantling the Canon Graduate Research Cluster. My 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. While at UW, I was selected as a recipient of several awards, including the national AAUW American Dissertation Fellowship and the UW Presidential Dissertation Fellowship. I have presented my research at several conferences, including the Renaissance Society of America annual meeting.