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Kalyn Rose Heffernan
Rapper and performer
Kalyn Rose Heffernan has built a career out of refusing the terms by which disabled people, queer people, and working-class communities are often represented.
A rapper, performer, educator, community advocate, and founding member of the experimental group Wheelchair Sports Camp, Heffernan’s work moves across music, theater, film, television, museum interventions, creative direction, performance art, permanent installations, politics, and public protest.
Her practice is confrontational, humorous, loving, and deliberately difficult to categorize. Heffernan has performed internationally and locally, bringing a voice rooted in disability justice, queer liberation, and community accountability into spaces that have not always known how to hold it.
Her work insists that accessibility is not simply a technical accommodation but a cultural and political question: who is allowed to belong, who gets to lead, and who gets heard without being translated for comfort.
The work
Watch
Directed and produced by Anthony Grimes, with Leland Schmidt, Brandon Smith and Lawrence Dvorak.
What the award went toward
Unrestricted award
$35,000 in unrestricted support for the artist.
Project grant
$15,000 toward a socially engaged project, completed within a year.
Wheelchair Band Camp, an inclusive, artist-led space for disabled young people to make noise, express themselves, and take up space with support from local musicians.
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