Event Details
Join journalist, author and disability advocate Kristen Lopez as she speaks with particular authority on how disability is represented—and too often misrepresented—in movies. It’s all examined in her book, Popcorn Disabilities: The Highs and Lows of Disabled Representation in the Movies.
Popcorn Disabilities is Lopez’s impassioned, yet fun and engaging survey of how Hollywood has dealt with disability over the last century. She reveals that, even when they're not just narrative props to help an able-bodied protagonist, movie characters with disabilities are overwhelmingly white, affluent, and conventionally attractive, obscuring the variety of disabilities and the experiences of those who deal with them. But she also explains where films have gotten it right, and how the power of the medium can enlighten... and educate in the future.
From little-remembered gems such as Tod Browning's Freaks (1932)—one of the earliest attempts to show dimensionality in characters with disabilities—to contemporary films such as CODA (2021), My Left Foot (1989), A Different Man (2024), and many others, it challenges popular assumptions about disability while never losing sight of movies' unique power, influence, and potential as a tool for social good.
Location
Ted Mann Lobby, LL1
Schedule*
2-3pm | Conversation
3:15-4pm | Book signing and meet and greet
Ticket types
The conversation ticket does not include access to museum galleries or a copy of the book.
You must purchase a book-signing ticket to participate in author meet and greet and signing. This ticket includes the conversation and a copy of the book.