Writer, Visual Artist

Arizona

Naomi Ortiz (they/she) is a poet, writer, and visual artist whose work explores cultivating care and connection within states of stress. Their current focus is on self-care for activists, climate action, disability justice, and relationship with place. They are a highly acclaimed speaker and facilitator with a leadership style emphasizing inclusion and spiritual growth. Ortiz noted: “Disability adds richness and layers to my work. Going slower means I have the opportunity to be attentive to each element or step in the process. Disability also offers a lot of instruction in context. As a disabled person of color, living in the U.S./Mexico borderlands, I understand my work in context to place, the Sonoran Desert, and to the interconnected communities that I belong to. Sometimes these connections are nourishing and other times they are exclusionary, but all feed my work.”

Ortiz’s work has been described as “cracking apart common beliefs to spill out beauty.” They are a disabled Mestize (Indigenous, Latinx, White) who was raised embracing Latinx cultural practices and histories. They currently live with their partner in the Arizona/Mexico borderlands, integrating acts of advocacy directly reflected in their work. The National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures awarded Ortiz a Border Narrative Change Grant for their multidisciplinary project, Complicating Conversations, which uses poetry, prose, paintings, and community-based workshops to contemplate climate change and the ways disability justice, eco-justice, and immigration within the borderlands are in conversation with one another.

Ortiz expresses their artistic identity, advocacy, perspective, and experiences through communal workshops and literature. They conduct workshops with individuals and groups delving into the substance of self-care, as well as arts-based programming exploring the intersections between disability justice, the borderlands, and eco-justice. Ortiz is the author of Sustaining Spirit: Self-Care for Social Justice (Reclamation Press), which offers powerful, thoughtful, transformative insight into self-care. By weaving together social justice activist interviews with personal experiences in class, race, and disability advocacy, Ortiz provides informative advice on dealing with the risks of burnout. Reimagining our relationship with the U.S./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). They are also a co-editor of the forthcoming anthology Every Place on the Map is Disabled: Poems and Essays on Disability (Northwestern University Press). 

Ortiz has been selected by the Ford and Mellon Foundations as a 2022 U.S. Artist Disability Futures Fellow for their work advancing the cultural landscape.

Ortiz is grounded in social justice work through their tenure as director of the disability justice organization, National Kids as Self Advocates, and as the former Southern Arizona director of the anti-violence projects, Help Increase the Peace and Alternatives to Violence. They are passionate about organizing with the Southern Arizona Community Care Collective (Colectivo de Beinestar Comunitario) and focusing on their creative projects exploring disability justice, intersectionality, and connection to place.