We recently connected with Carina Ho and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Carina, thanks for joining us today. Has your work ever been misunderstood or mischaracterized?

As an artist with a disability, I rarely see others who look like me in media or in performing spaces. Often I’m underestimated, and people’s assumptions around people with disabilities usually leads them to hold the bar lower for me than for my non-disabled peers. Making art and putting myself in performing spaces where I often am the only disabled artist has shaped my views around using the parts of myself that I feel most insecure or uncomfortable about to inform my work.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I am music producer that creates work under the moniker ONIKHO, dancer, and choreographer. Growing up I was trained in classical dance and piano, and creativity was a large part of my life and self-expression. After becoming disabled in a car accident, I began to teach myself how to produce music using computer software since attending rehearsals with other musicians was suddenly physically impossible for me. Around the same time I joined a dance company called AXIS, a professional dance company that casts dancers both with and without disabilities. Over the past ten years I’ve been redefining myself as a musical and dance artist. Nowadays I often combine my musical compositions with dance and film that features disabled bodies as part of the process of normalizing diverse abilities in performance spaces.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

I’ve had to unlearn that there’s a timeline to achieving milestones and success, and that timeline coincides with being young. I’ve learned that people start pursuing new crafts and ventures at all ages, and oftentimes the more perspective and lived experience one has can make those endeavors richer.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

The catastrophic experience of going through a car accident in which I lost a family member, and became paralyzed was unsurprisingly an incredibly demanding test of my resilience. This event altered every single aspect of my life — from losing a loved one, to the very way I existed in a newly disabled body. There are so many stigmas and biases towards people with disabilities, and at first I had no exposure to the disability community so my initial assumption was that my life was over and that I could kiss all my hopes and dreams goodbye. Over time I’ve put my life back together and in that process have discovered that there is so much about disability, grief, and my own capability that I didn’t understand before.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.onikhomusic.com
• Instagram: @onikhomusic
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@onikhomusic

Image Credits

Photo credit to David DeSilva for two photos (photo with two other dancers, photo in white lace dress)