an Interview with Artist Lohitha Kethu (Visual Poetry Workshop @ RestFest Film Festival 2026)

Meet artist Lohitha Kethu and learn about their virtual workshop in the 2026 RestFest Film Festival program.

The 2026 Festival begins in just over 2 weeks! Click here to learn more about how to stream the films & join our virtual events. :)

As part of the upcoming 2026 RestFest Film Festival, artist Lohitha Kethu will be facilitating Visual poetry: multidimensional technologies for expression and access. A virtual workshop on Sunday, February 8.

Read on for an interview with Lohitha. Learn about what visual poetry means to them, about being part of Crip community, and their background in the arts.

ID: This is the final image still from an animated visual poem called "sick portrait I" made of ASCII (computer key) elements. The visual is image of an unclothed person with long hair wearing a mask and floating in a sea (made up of blue text) with their head laying on a pillow. The person's chest and abdomen features a large gash opening that extends to their pelvis. On either side of the person are ASCII swirl motifs and text, surrounded with a border or ASCII motifs. The text inside the person's chest reads "every time things get worse, I am born again and again and again and". The writing on either side of the person floating in the ocean, interspersed around the swirl motifs, reads "spacetime, as told to me by god, exists on a spectrum (under the duvet) between honey and water. thickening in and out of flagellation and negotiation (just like how I ended up here again) the debt too, the sea, crests and falls, every time anew". Words in the border around the image and text elements include "honey", "water", "zenith" and "nadir" as if offering compass orientations. Overall, sick portrait I builds a meditative, collapsing narrative around bed-bound illness and explores the warped, isolated, and often frozen or fast-flowing temporality of queer disabled life. The bed becomes an ocean of grief and guilt as the subject tries to ground themselves one more time in their own deserving and resilience.

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Meet Lohitha

What sparked your interest in visual poetry?

I started making visual poetry by accident and out of necessity to witness myself in a more accessible way than my usual art forms. Last year, I spent long periods of time mostly bedbound and more incapacitated than I had ever been since childhood. I thought I was dying and I was so confused and lost for answers and I was grieving, in so much pain, and felt so isolated. I was having these life and death negotiations with g*d in my bed and bathtub, the two of which I kept having these visions of being like dimensions or axes by which to plot the psychic coordinates of one’s deteriorating self. I wanted to make these huge paintings–I had been drawing all of my life and that is a huge part of my job as a medical artist so I was also grappling with possibly losing the ability to draw and the identity loss that comes with bodily decline. I was desperate to make meaning of what was happening to me but writing in coherent essay form was too much and drawing was also too much for me. I realized I could work with the very low energy I had–to press keys on my laptop in shifts, while laying on my side–to type images and “coded” poetic compositions in the ASCII style (American Standard Code for Information Exchange). Since then, I taught myself more about visual poetry and read more. I think life is constant renegotiation, especially for queer and trans sick, mad, crip, disabled people. It is so painful for decline and access to have to shape your survival and creative practice, but sometimes you stumble into something really cool and exciting enough to feel alive again.

What does visual poetry mean to you?

I’ve since been creating visual poetry in multimedia formats including audio, textile and fiber art, print-making, and collage, but I love seeing it as a way to expand access to the experience of art or poetry. Working in visual poetic forms allowed me to deconstruct and feel more free from traditional form or linear ways of reading, for example, creating poetry that has no defined beginning or end, such that whoever is reading can approach the work however and wherever they would like. Access means different things to everyone though, and the above example may feel freeing for one person but frustrating for another. I also really want to underscore that “visual” poetry also is also not solely visual and there are so many beautiful examples of multisensory (audio, touch, smell) based poetics, where meaning is enriched, not lost, between modalities.

I am no expert by any means and I am still experimenting, but I think it can also be a really interesting way to think about poetic archiving. Your Notes App speech-to-text poetry dictated on the floor being unable to move, the blood spots you make patterns on a tissue with after checking your blood sugar–all feel poetic in a way that is incapable of defining genre or form because they are created of the moment. A living archive!

ID: A triptych featuring a floating, white, cotton tapestry in the center, hanging by clear wire 2 inches from the wall, with two smaller risograph prints pinned on either side. Composed of printed black and magenta computer symbols with overlaid embroidery and beadwork, a humanoid figure laying on a pillow features a large gash resembling a cave or portal that opens from their forehead down to their limbs, which appear glued together. Inside the gash is a large “at” symbol, from which a magenta cord reminiscent of guts snakes down and out of the figure to surround it in a protective fashion. The two risograph prints feature the same poem composed in the shape of the artist’s right index finger print, printed inversely in black and red ink. The borders feature a pattern created by scanned clumps of their hair.

What does being part of a Disabled/Crip arts community mean to you?

Witnessing the creativity of my disabled friends and larger communities is a beautiful, hard, life-giving thing that has impacted me in more ways than I can understand. I share with others the sentiment that being part of collective navigation of disability is a way of future-making and reimagining what it means to live interdependently and not just survive. Many fruitful lessons in unlearning and learning and navigating conflicting needs and the imagination it takes to figure it out. One realization I came to while raging a fever in the bathtub was that true creativity transcends art or what is concretely audiovisual or material. Creativity might be about how we live and make meaning, and I am so lucky to see and know this of all of my disabled friends and creatives. We are so, so alive.

What is your arts background?

I am a multimedia and medical artist and writer. Medical art refers to drawing, painting, animation, UI/UX, AR/VR and 3D modeling of didactic quality created for patient and expert (doctors, surgeons, researchers) audiences. I was inspired to get into medical art out of a long-time love of visual narrative, science, and a desire to make my own mortality-altering childhood illnesses feel less isolating. I’ve illustrated hundreds of journal articles and several health literacy books and zines that center patient narratives. My medical art background lends a visual vocabulary to my creative practice which is grounded in body horror, South Asian religious and medical iconography, semiotics, and poetry. I am especially interested in the body in terms of technological, historical, queer, trans, and metaphysical myth-making and world-building and would love to chat more if that resonates with anyone else.

ID: A drawing and handwritten words intersperse along the image of a looping red embroidery thread. Abstract symbols reminiscent of physics and made-up letters are drawn across the page. The handwriting reads: Neither wave, nor particle, only diction. Kiss kiss”

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about the workshop: Visual poetry: multidimensional technologies for expression and access

As body-minds that operate in our own timelines and sensory dimensions, we are constantly asked to translate or define ourselves by language (symbols, text, technology) that may not yet exist.

In response to this liminality and isolation, how are we co-creating new aesthetic meaning? How can visual poetry–shaped by inaccessibility–expand access and facilitate connection in a culture that disembodies artist from audience?

In this virtual workshop,

• We will explore the semiotic landscape of visual poetry as a tool for trans, crip expression; from ancient petroglyphs to contemporary computational poetry.

• We will look at techniques, devices, and a variety of multimodal poetry by disabled, queer, and/or trans artists.

• We will also discuss disability as method and share creative resources and tools.

• Participants will work with generative prompts to create their own visual poems and, if desired, share with the group.

Artist Bio:

Lohitha (they/ them) is a multiply disabled, covid-realist medical and multimedia artist and writer. They've illustrated health literacy books, exhibited artwork across the US, and have work featured in Women's Studies Quarterly, The New River Journal of Electronic Literature and Digital Art, GARLAND, and more. Their creative practice explores the body beyond the visceral as a web of desires, offerings, and connections. Currently, their interests include body horror, prehistoric art, surgery, embroidery, and code. Their work can be experienced at lohithakethu.com.

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