Location: Oakland, CA
Medium: Sculpture, video, performance
Website: jilliancrochet.com
Jillian Crochet is a disabled interdisciplinary artist, writer, and activist based in Oakland, California. Originally from the Gulf Coast, she earned her BFA from the University of Alabama in 2007 — where her sculptures were commissioned as the physical award for the Morris Dees Justice Award — and her MFA in Fine Arts from California College of the Arts in 2020. Her practice is rooted in a lifetime of navigating medical institutions and built environments as a wheelchair user, and she has described her work as driven by “the unceasing work of self-advocacy.”
Following her MFA, Crochet completed a 2020–21 artist-in-residence at Art Beyond Sight’s Art & Disability program and was a Graduate Fellow at Headlands Center for the Arts. In 2021 she received an Emerging Artist Fellowship from the California Arts Council. In 2025 she was selected for the Center for Craft’s Teaching Artist Cohort, which awarded her a $10,000 grant to support her ongoing work at the intersection of art-making and disability pedagogy.
Crochet works across sculpture, video, and performance to confront grief and disability, combining elements found in nature with medicalized objects. Her sculptures engage haptic and embodied aesthetics — velvet, moss, foam, organic materials — to challenge the hierarchy of the senses and center the experience of bodies that are routinely excluded from public space. She questions the medical model of disability, the desire for control, and the complex ethics of genetics and experimentation, asking which bodies society deems valuable and how built environments enforce that judgment.
Her video and performance works extend these concerns into durational and relational registers, using touch and tactility as a means of deeper human connection. Across all media, her practice functions as both institutional critique and advocacy, seeking to carve out space for the disabled body to find pleasure, comfort, and recognition.
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