Carleton Convo with Jerron Herman | January 19, 2024

Award-winning dancer, writer, model, and disability rights advocate Jerron Herman delivered the convocation address, “EMBRACE: On kinship,” at Carleton's Skinner Chapel on Friday, January 19.

Herman’s artistic process is supported by his personal history with disability as well as the social legacies of disability aesthetics; this process leads him to create art that undermines notions of production—the simple facts of how the art is made—in favor of creating something welcoming. Herman views art as a form of empowerment, reflecting in a feature video by Great Big Story that he has “always been an advocate for those to pursue the antithesis of the thing that is their limitation.”

Herman has performed, collaborated on, and choreographed many original works, including his most recent piece, “VITRUVIAN,” which premiered in 2022 as a modern interpretation of Leonardo da Vinci’s Virtruvian Man. Through Herman’s expert expression, the Virtruvian Man is portrayed as a Disabled Black Man.

Herman received the Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship in 2021 and the Grants to Artists Award from Dance/NYC’s Dance and Social Justice Fellowship Program in 2020. His writing on art and culture has been published in the U.S. and internationally and his play “3 Bodies” was published in Theater Magazine in 2022. He has also featured as a cover story of Dance Magazine. As a model and disability rights advocate with hemiplegia cerebral palsy, Herman has partnered with brands including Nike, Tommy Hilfiger, The Jewelry Library, FFORA, Samsung, and Google.

Herman is a trustee and vice chair of Dance/USA. In the spring of 2022, he became an Artist/Scholar in Residence at Georgetown University. He earned his BA in Media, Culture and Arts from The King’s College in 2013.

Herman’s convocation talk coincides with the Perlman Teaching Museum’s exhibition Towards A Warm Embrace by artists Ezra Benus and Finnegan Shannon ’11. Open January 11–April 14, 2024, the exhibition explores disability justice and accessibility practice with the underlying premise that access is something everyone has a responsibility toward.

Learn more about Carleton Convos at go.carleton.edu/convocations