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A Portland, Oregon teen will not let her physical limitations keep her down. Kiera Brinkley is a quadruple amputee, who has never considered herself handicapped.
"I am in a wheelchair, but that doesn't stop me," states Kiera plainly.
When Kiera was 2 years old she caught pneumococcosis, a deadly bacterial infection. Doctors were forced to amputate both her arms and legs.
"When she opened her eyes and asked if she could go back to her room and watch 'Lion King,' I was like, she's still Kiera but a little shorter," said her mother, Elesha Boyd.
What this 16 year old is not short on is her passion for dancing.
"It touches me in a way I hope it can touch someone else," said Kiera.
"It blew me away," said Kiera's dance teacher, Tricia Bachelor. "That was not what I expected."
Bachelor's student internship is a group called "Dream Factory," a, organization that helps critically and chronically ill children fulfill their fantasies.
Kiera's life-long dream is a trip to the prestigious Juilliard Dance School in New York City.
"I wanted to her to reveal something really special, so I pressed her and she said, 'Ok, I want to dance. I want to dance at Juilliard,'" said Tricia Bachelor.
"It's a miracle honestly, as a dancer to be able to go there," said Kiera. "It will help me to grow stronger in my dance career."
The trip may help grow her love for dance, but those seeds have already been planted.
Kiera and her family leave for New York City next Tuesday. During her week at Juilliard, she'll get a tour, sit in on classes and, of course, perform for the students.
Beth Haller, Ph.D., is Co-Director of the Global Alliance for Disability in Media and Entertainment (www.gadim.org). A former print journalist, she is a member of the Advisory Board for the National Center on Disability and Journalism (https://ncdj.org/). Haller is Professor Emerita in the Department of Mass Communication at Towson University in Maryland, USA. Haller is co-editor of the 2020 "Routledge Companion to Disability and Media" (with Gerard Goggin of University of Sydney & Katie Ellis of Curtin University, Australia). She is author of "Representing Disability in an Ableist World: Essays on Mass Media" (Advocado Press, 2010) and the author/editor of Byline of Hope: Collected Newspaper and Magazine Writing of Helen Keller (Advocado Press, 2015). She has been researching disability representation in mass media for 30+ years. She is adjunct faculty in the Disability Studies programs at the City University of New York (CUNY) and the University of Texas-Arlington.
From WRCB-TV in Oregon:
