About

Kelsey Maurine Brickl is a New York City-based historian, writer, critic, screenwriter, playwright, longform nonfiction writer, disability civil-rights enforcement specialist, founder, and sit-down comic. Her work spans modern European history and Holocaust historiography, theatre and film criticism, disability rights, cultural criticism, technology, public memory, institutional accountability, dramatic writing, and live comedy.

Trained in modern European history and Holocaust historiography at the University of Edinburgh, Brickl writes about the construction of public narratives and the evidence that complicates them. Her historical and critical work examines political culture, religion, war, testimony, archives, reputation, institutional behavior, disability, and the ways individuals and institutions construct accounts of themselves.

Her creative work includes the completed feature screenplay The Book of Loretta, the television pilot There Are No Comets Seen, the two-act historical play The Iron Duke, fiction, comic writing, and live sit-down comedy. Her theatre and film criticism examines performance, dramaturgy, direction, adaptation, audience culture, accessibility, fandom, and the institutional conditions surrounding artistic production.

Brickl is a contributor to The Times of Israel Blogs, where she writes on history, Holocaust memory, law, restitution, disability rights, technology, and institutional accountability. Her commentary has also appeared in the Orlando Sentinel, San Francisco Chronicle, and Chicago Tribune, and her work and advocacy have been covered by publications including the Baltimore Sun and Nevada Current. She publishes additional essays, criticism, and longform nonfiction on Substack and Medium.

As a disability civil-rights enforcement specialist, Brickl identifies, documents, and pursues correction of access failures across theatre, transportation, travel, hospitality, cultural institutions, public events, and other public-facing systems. Her work combines statutory analysis, operational accessibility auditing, documentary evidence, institutional correspondence, and public reporting. She has worked extensively on wheelchair access, theatre operations, stage-door and egress safety, accessible transportation, assistive technology, device restrictions, emergency planning, and the treatment of disability access as a civil-rights obligation rather than a customer-service preference.

Brickl is Founder and Director of Ghost Light Access, an independent disability-rights enforcement and theatre-access project covering Broadway, Off-Broadway, the West End, comedy venues, and live-performance institutions. She is also Founder and Director of Archive Voices, a historical and cultural project concerned with archives, testimony, evidence, memory, and the preservation and interpretation of the historical record, and Accessible France, an international accessibility consultancy focused on cultural travel in France.

Across nonfiction, criticism, dramatic writing, historical interpretation, disability-rights enforcement, and comedy, Brickl works repeatedly with questions of evidence, power, reputation, belief, access, public memory, and institutional narrative. Her work is particularly concerned with the distance between what institutions say happened, what the documentary record establishes, and what people experience when policies and public narratives meet physical reality.

Kelsey Maurine Brickl is available for select editorial assignments, criticism, reporting, interviews, speaking engagements, creative and production development, historical research, accessibility consulting, and interdisciplinary collaborations in New York City, London, Paris, Chicago, and internationally.