Ashley Cowan D'Ambrosio is a Mad/Mentally Ill, Chronically Ill, Disabled activist, educator and entrepreneur. She is a graduate of the UW Disability Studies program (class of 2019) and a current student at the City University of New York (CUNY) pursuing a Masters of Arts in Disability Studies.
She is the founder and CEO of Crip Riot, a disabled-owned and led company committed to bringing expressions of disability pride to the world, through unapologetic clothing, media, education and activism.
Her research interests center around incorporating theories of "Crip Spacetime" into higher education instructional design (Universal/Inclusive Design), through distance learning integration, self-paced, asynchronous instruction, etc. It is her experience as a non-traditional, first-gen, chronically-ill, mad/mentally-ill high school-dropout, which has motivated a desire to explore the narratives and contexts of disabled students who have been criminalized, pathologized, and/or traumatized as part of their educational journey.