Sheila Heti + Aimee Mullins

Aimee Mullins is an actor, athlete, and noted storyteller. She won a full academic scholarship to Georgetown University, where she double-majored in history and diplomacy, and there she became the first amputee in history to compete in NCAA Division 1 track and field. Competing in integrated meets at the national and international level, she ultimately set three world records as a United States Paralympian at the 1996 Atlanta Games.  She was the first person in the world to use the iconic “Cheetah” sprinting legs, and continues to collaborate on cutting-edge prosthetic development at university labs around the world.  After school, Mullins explored issues of body image and identity by working with legendary fashion designer Alexander McQueen – launching her runway career on hand-carved wooden legs – and was recently signed as a new global face of beauty brand L’Oréal Paris. She has spent nearly two decades as a pioneer and passionate advocate for a new kind of thinking about "disability," and has been the driving force behind global conversations about the cultural role of both technology and aesthetics in prosthetics.  Her writings have appeared in such publications asWired, Harper’s Bazaar, and Gizmodo.  She made her acting debut playing six different characters in Matthew Barney's Cremaster 3, and she continues her work with Barney today, currently starring as Isis in a film adaptation of Ancient Evenings, an abstraction of Norman Mailer’s novel of the same name.  She is based in New York City.