Catherine Frazee

Catherine Frazee OC is a Canadian educator, activist, researcher, poet and writer who currently serves as a Professor of Distinction in the Disability Studies program at Ryerson University as well as a Co-director of Ryerson University's Institute for Disability Studies Research and Education. Her father was prominent Canadian banker Rowland Cardwell Frazee.

Organizations

Frazee is a member of DAWN (DisAbled Women's Network Canada)'s Equality Rights Committee and serves on the Board of Directors of the Canadian Abilities Foundation and the Canadian Association for Community Living, chairing that organization's Task Force on Values and Ethics. From 1989 to 1992, Frazee was the Chief Commissioner of the Ontario Human Rights Commission.

Honours

Frazee has been awarded three honorary degrees from Canadian Universities. She received one from the University of New Brunswick in 2002, one from Dalhousie University in 2009 and another from McMaster University in June 2015. She has also been awarded the Arnold Davidson Dunton Alumni Award of Distinction in 1990, by the Carleton University Alumni Association.

Media

Frazee, along with humourist David Roche, dancer, choreographer and impresario Geoff McMurchy, writer/artist Persimmon Blackbridge, and director and filmmaker Bonnie Sherr Klein is one of five Canadian artists with diverse disabilities profiled in Klein's 2006 NFB film Shameless: The ART of Disability.

In 1998, Frazee's lecture about the dangers of contemporary eugenics was featured on Canada's Vision TV, commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Her publications to date include numerous textbooks, academic journals, and magazine contributions, including articles in Abilities Magazine, ARCHtype, and The Womanist