Michaela Oteri, Disabled Beauty Series, 2020, Digital Illustration [Image Description: A digital portrait depicting a fat white woman with blue/purple dyed hair pulled back into a ponytail. She is wearing a crop top that reads “The Future Is Accessible” and a black plaid skirt. She is holding up a pen in her right hand while sitting in a wheelchair and holding a pair of forearm crutches. The background is a blue/purple and art nouveau inspired with vining purple wisteria flowers. She looks confident and has a slight smile with black lipstick.]Michaela Oteri (she/they) is a Disabled digital artist who has spent their entire self taught artistic career, drawing from bed. Since the age of 17, Michaela has lived a very hard life full of illnesses, doctors offices, surgeries, hospitals, and treatments that have usually made her sicker. But through all of that she has had her drawing to keep her company. In 2016 she discovered the Cripple Punk Movement. A Movement centered on disability rights that reject inspirational portrayals and infantilization of those with physical disabilities, created by the late Tyler Trewhella. Michaela soon began the Disabled Beauty Series (formerly the Cripple Punk Series) after realizing the lack of disabled representation that was actually for disabled people, not just of them. Since then Michaela has been featured and published many times including in museums, anthologies, and on book covers. They won a CripCamp and Adobe fellowship grant in 2020 and even created 150 stock images for Adobe. In summer of 2021 they began their Portraits for Disabled Kids, a little passion project that they were not able to continue in summer of 2022 due to health reasons but have every intention of continuing this year, health permitting.
If you would like to see more of Michaela’s work, see her website, ogrefairy.com
