Alice Wong, a disability rights activist, author whose writing inspired countless others, and founder of the Disability Visibility Project has died at 51. Wong died of an infection on Friday (November 14) at the University of California, San Francisco hospital, family and friends said.
Wong, a trailblazing writer and disability rights advocate, reshaped national conversations on accessibility and representation. Wong was born 1974 in Indiana to immigrants from Hong Kong. Born with muscular dystrophy, she used mobility aids from an early age, Wong transformed her lived experience into a powerful catalyst for cultural and systemic change, using storytelling as both resistance and revolution.
In 2014, Wong founded the Disability Visibility Project, an oral history initiative created in partnership with StoryCorps to document the stories of persons with disabilities across the United States.
Her 2022 memoir, Year of the Tiger: An Activist’s Life, detailed her life history and the experiences of living as a person with disability and she often described herself as a “disabled cyborg” connected to life-sustaining technology.
Recognized with a MacArthur “genius grant” in 2024, Wong also co-founded the online movement #CripTheVote, a nonpartisan effort to engage voters with disabilities on U.S. elections and has even participated in a White House event through telepresence robots, becoming the first person to do so at the White House using this technology.
