Mindscapes and Mad Methods with Chanika Svetvilas

Interdisciplinary artist Chanika Svetvilas shares her art practice and intersection with disability justice, Mad Pride as a Thai American woman. Her work explores the affects of stigma and the inequity of access to care. Her diverse range of materials include medication guides, prescription bottles, charcoal, historical and psychiatric resource materials that reflect mental health conditions, treatment, and systemic and historical legacies to find strength in vulnerability. Svetvilas uses personal narrative as a way to share experiences to disrupt stereotypes and to reflect on neurodiversity, contemporary issues and an intersectional identity through installation, multimedia, video and performative actions and ultimately to make the invisible visible and animate the inanimate.

Chanika Svetvilas is an interdisciplinary artist and cultural worker whose practice focuses on mental health difference. She was the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab Artist-in-Residence at Princeton University, 2022-23;  Visiting Scholar at Asian/Pacific/American Institute at New York University, 2024-2025; and inaugural artist-in-residence at Mercer County Community College. Svetvilas has presented her work at the College Art Association Conference, the Society for Disability Studies Annual Conference, and the Pacific International Conference on Disability and Diversity. Her work has been published in Disability Studies Quarterly, Studying Disability, Arts, and Culture: An Introduction by Petra Kuppers, and A Body You Can Talk To: An Anthology of Contemporary Disability, edited by Tennison S. Black. Svetvilas was the co-founder of ThaiLinks, a collective that was based in New York City and promoted awareness about issues affecting the Thai American community. Svetvilas was born in Buffalo, NY to Thai immigrant parents. She earned her B.S. from Skidmore College and an MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts from Goddard College. Svetvilas currently resides in Princeton, NJ.

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