Interdisciplinary artist Priyanka D’Souza explores disability in her multi-media work as USF’s newest visiting artist in residence, through the Ann Getty Institute of Art and Design. With her use of textiles, typography, projection and painting, D’Souza creates interactive works made to explore how disabled bodies fit into our society. On Feb. 4, D’Souza gave an artist talk at McClaren Hall introducing herself and her work to students and faculty.
The Ann Getty Institute of Art and Design is USF’s institute for the arts, offering BA’s, MA’s, MFA’s and minor programs in a plethora of art disciplines such as architecture, media studies, design, fine art, writing, art history, museum studies and more. Artists in residence are given a stipend and dedicated working space to support their work, and artists are selected based on how their practice contributes to USF’s creative work across the arts. The institute is named after renowned art collector and California native Ann Getty, and is funded by her husband, philanthropist Gordon Getty.
In 2021, D’Souza earned a Master’s of Arts degree in art and aesthetics at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, India, and most recently completed a Master’s of Fine Arts at UC Berkeley in art practice in 2025. She is part of the artist duo “Resting Museum,” alongside Shreyasi Pathak, which explores the intersection of art and the body, focusing on physical acts like sitting down or going up stairs. She currently lives between Mumbai and Berkeley, Calif.
Placed on every chair at the event was a fold out pamphlet which featured pieces of D’Souza’s piece “b. Call in Sick,” which examines the way non-normative bodies operate in social justice. The pamphlet featured the first lines of a document issued at the 1964 Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley, along with a map of the route that protesters took on the campus. She criticizes the demand, asking “What happens to the archive if all the bodies in it have called in sick or cannot access the site of protest?” On the other side of the pamphlet was D’Souza’s exigence for her artistry, leaving readers with a hard-hitting question: “What then, is the political validity of a sick body if it cannot take to the streets?”
While in residency at USF, D’Souza will develop her new project “SpinelessSpeak” which will be centered around the historic 504 sit-ins. In 1977, differently abled people sat outside of 50 UN Plaza in downtown San Francisco for upwards of 26 days in protest of the vagueness of Section 504 of the 1973 Rehabilitation Act, becoming one of the longest sit-ins in history. Using city history, she’ll explore how activism operates in congruence to disability, challenging and transforming what it means to speak up.
Language takes a large role in D’Souza’s work, using the idiom “walk a mile in someone’s shoes” as an example to how normal inaccessibility is in everyday life, right down to the things we say. She shows some excerpts from her work “Disabled Dictionary” where she shows that the word “reedh” in Hindu means “spine,” but the word “reed” in English means spineless, a word with a much more negative connotation. D’Souza also comes from personal experiences with ableism, having had her disabled-related speech impediment mistaken for improficiency in the English language.
D’Souza observes accessibility through all parts of her work, playing with the idea of mobility. She challenged the idea of prosthesis by introducing machinery into her work due to her limited dexterity, explaining that the machine then becomes an extension of her hand. She compares the way these prosthesis work in her art to other physical bodies, concluding that able-bodied advocacy can operate similarly to the machines she uses in her work.
When asked what she hopes to gain from D’Souza’s residency, senior art history major Hannah Clute said that she hopes “the student body gains a better understanding of how disability appears in art,” especially how it appears on USF’s campus. She noted how D’Souza talked about the impact of language and how “it is a player in how we think about disability.”
Another senior art history major, Kathryn Clarke Garcia, says she hopes D’Souza’s work “bring[s] more attention to the 504 protests” as she admits she herself wasn’t familiar with the movement prior to D’Souza’s talk.
