About

Headshot of a whitefeminine presenting person with long blue hair, glasses and nose piercings standing in front of a white wall. There is a rainbow pattern from a suncatcher cast onto the left side their hair and on the wall behind them on the right.

Brandi Rose Lewis is an assistant professor in Education Studies at DePauw University, focusing on crip (queer, trans,) and feminist dis/ability studies and care ethics through the lens of new materialism. From a science and technology studies framing, they analyze disability aesthetics, artistic practices, and disability justice as anti-ableist forms of world-making that expand inclusive pedagogical possibilities, where Lewis incorporates teaching into their research

Broadly, their teaching examines art, craft, popular media, and visual culture as pedagogical forces and how artists/activists deploy creative practice as social justice interventions. Lewis has taught courses in women's, gender, and sexuality studies, education studies, art education, art history, and studio art at DePauw University, Penn State University, the Art Academy of Cincinnati, Miami University, and Lorain County Community College. They have designed online courses attentive to access in disability studies and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies.

Lewis’s interdisciplinary and new media artistic practice explores embodiment, chronicity, pain, disability, and care. Drawing connections between digital and natural worlds, their photography, video, and digital media explores disabled and chronically ill embodiments and temporalities as a form of “malfunctioning” by paralleling glitching technologies with the unruliness of the body (Russell, 2020). They are particularly interested in atmospheric attunements—noticing the small and big ways things and people encounter each other as agents—as a starting point and method of their art practice.

Lewis received their dual-title PhD in Art Education and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies with a specialization in Disability Studies from The Pennsylvania State University in 2026; their Master’s in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from the University of Cincinnati in 2019; and their Bachelor’s in Studio Art with an Art History focus from Northern Kentucky University.

They are a Delegate Representative for the National Art Education Association (NAEA) Disability Studies in Art Education interest group, a former Graduate School Endowed Fellow at The Pennsylvania State University (2023-2024), and Chair and Co-Organizer of the 2025 Feminist Perspectives on Body, Disability, and Health hybrid conference at The Pennsylvania State University.