Naomi Ortiz

Complicating Conversations

Complicating Conversations between Disability Justice and Eco-justice in the Arizona Borderlands is a multidisciplinary project using poetry, prose and paintings to describe the personal struggle of artist, Naomi Ortiz, to bear witness to climate-change and support the protection of the borderlands. Using a lens of disability justice from the artist's lived experience as the daughter of formerly undocumented, indigenous and multiracial peoples, a series of interactive workshops and discussions were facilitated by Ortiz to contemplate climate change and the ways disability justice, eco-justice and immigration within the borderlands are in conversation with one another.

Naomi Ortiz (they/she) explores cultivating care and connection within states of stress. Reimagining our relationship with the US-Mexico borderlands and challenging who is an environmentalist is investigated in their new collection, Rituals for Climate Change: A Crip Struggle for Ecojustice (Punctum Books). Sustaining Spirit: Self-Care for Social Justice (Reclamation Press) provides informative tools and insightful strategies for diverse communities on addressing burnout. Ortiz is also a co-editor of the forthcoming anthology Every Place on the Map is Disabled: Poems and Essays on Disability (Northwestern University Press).

As a 2022 U.S. Artist Disability Futures Fellow and a Reclaiming the Border Narrative awardee, they emphasize interdependence and spiritual growth through their poetry, writing, facilitation, and visual art.