[Banner says, “Questions Access” on top of blue tinted photo of two brooms leaning on each other to form an arch.]
About Us.
At the Curiosity Paradox, we consider the seemingly benign aspects of gathering people together and reframe them as a fertile ground of solidarity, resistance, learning, and creativity.
Systemic oppression is often hiding. Power imbalances are baked into everyday decision processes like meeting agendas, work schedules, and event registrations.Â
We work with our clients and audiences to slow down, expose power dynamics, and experiment with power redistribution.Â
Through consulting, creatively led workshops, and interactive artworks that center and model Disability access, we support essential and embodied changes in the ways groups of people make everyday decisions.
Some Things We Do.
[Image Description. Photo of a woman wearing virtual reality goggles while sitting in a chair outside a house.]
[Image Description. Drawing of a colorful human body that is merged with its graphical background.]
[Image Description. Blurry group of people on a stage sitting and standing around a pile of colorful items.]
Acknowledgements.
Land
We are located in the Willamette Valley, at the head of the garden Lenore Evermore. Beside the house where we write this, there is a 70-year-old fig tree that was likely planted by families of Italian and Jewish immigrants who were displaced from SW Portland due to racist urban “renewal” programs.
These programs continue to displace immigrants, Black, Indigenous, poor, and Disabled people. We recognize these efforts as a continuation of the land theft instigated nearly 170 years ago by the Donation Land Claim Act. As we resist these historical forces, we recognize that we also benefit from the stolen and unceded territory of the Multnomah and Clackamas bands of Chinook and Tualatin Kalapuya people as well as other bands, unnamed. We honor the lives of all who endured, and continue to endure in the face of settler-colonialism and white supremacy, and enable us to create a more livable planet.
Lineage
The Curiosity Paradox emerged from more than the bodies of its instigators, Grant Miller and Jonathan Paradox Lee. We proudly follow the legacy of radical Disabled-led expertise which suggests that we are the best designers of our liberation, and Disabled living has worth and beauty.
We hope that our work honors those whose imagination and labor created space for our own, particularly the organizing of the Disability Justice Collective, the transmedia productions of Calling Up Justice and Claudia Alick, the theater service organization Unsettling Dramaturgy, the Open Access art works of Carmen Papalia, the transformation of Disability Art and Culture Project, the work of Rebel Sidney Black, and the artistic crisis of Grotto Worlds, the structure of Threshold Practice, and the garden Lenore Evermore.