Erin Clark

Erin Clark is a performance artist, author and world champion athlete. Erin is internationally trained in aerial dance, theatre and performance. 

In NYC, as part of the aerial comedy duo Flaming Mermaid Broken Star (2013-2015), Erin created the persona of "International Sex Icon" to explore the relationship between disability and sexuality, power and social status.

When she left NYC, Erin continued to perform as an International Sex Icon across social media using selfies to play with her place/role/positioning in physical and digital space. Her self-portraits and short films, focused on de-sentimentalizing her physical body and it’s shapes and movements, have been featured in digital art spaces such as Deaf Poets Society and Corporeal Khôra. 

While living in Spain, Erin added pole sports to her aerial repertoire and became a two-time national champion (2017, 2018), and the wheelchair parapole world champion in 2018, setting an undefeated world record. She documented and published the training and competition process as an act of resistance to the ways that her accomplishments as a disabled person were being co-opted and tokenized.

Erin became a paragliding pilot where she transformed a broken wheelchair into one that can fly. She wrote the story of her life and flying wheelchair in If You Really Love Me, Throw Me Off the Mountain (EyeCorner Press, 2020). During the Disability Filibuster broadcast in 2021, Erin performed a live reading of her book for seven, unbroken hours while lying in bed. She was accompanied by ASL interpreters and live captions. 

Erin is an award-winning nonfiction writer and the co-author of the upcoming The Breakup Artist (Audible). Her essays on disability tropes and representation in arts and entertainment have appeared in CBC, Gay Mag, and Refinery29.