DANA COMBS
LEIGH

Dana Combs Leigh writes fiction and nonfiction, often pushing the boundaries of form. Her work examines identity, temporality, and the very nature of experience, reality, and being. Searching for the unique and peculiar in the everyday, and the beautiful within the profane, she confronts the human condition directly and unapologetically, but also with empathy and care. With her critical work focused intently on discovering connections and uncovering meanings, her creative work displays an appreciation for subtlety, quiet profundity, and the multitudes of interpretation. 

Whilst completing her PhD on the topic of narratives of chronic illness, Dana’s methodology expanded as she developed her ‘illness studies’ framework. From the more traditional approaches to literature and creative writing to disability studies, critical health psychology, philosophy of medicine, phenomenology, autoethnography, and more, she began reaching far beyond her own arts practice and lived experience and to contextualise herself and her work within wider disciplines and debates and respond more directly to contemporary sociocultural concerns.

Dana’s work has appeared in publications such as The London Magazine and David Bolt’s Metanarratives of Disability: Culture, Assumed Authority, and the Normative Social Order (2021, Routledge). She also presents at various venues, including universities and community workshops, and interdisciplinary events such as the 2023 Congress for the Northern Network for Medical Humanities Research and the International Society for Critical Health Psychology 2025 Biennial Conference.

Currently an independent researcher and writer, Dana is now working on identifying the specific ways she can utilise her previous research, connect and collaborate with other scholars, and design and apply new research to make meaningful impacts on those living with chronic illness and other non-normative identities. This will soon culiminate in the launch of The CINDERS Project (The Chronic Illness, Neurodivergence & Disability Experience, Representation & Stories Project), a social action research initiative working to raise awareness of the realities of long-term conditions amongst the public; open dialogues with healthcare professionals & medical educators; find common ground and combat stigmatising stereotypes through sociocultural narratives and media; and improve institutional and governmental policies.

Dana has lived with the multi-systemic disease sarcoidosis for twenty years now. It has profoundly impacted her life in many negative ways but also led to her embracing her new identity as a cyborg in 2007. In previous lives, Dana’s been a metalsmith and jewellery designer in America, an event coordinator at a winery in New Zealand, and worked more minimum wage jobs in more mountain ranges and beach communities than she can recall. Now settled in the south of England, she spends her time in constant awe of Iron Age & Roman ruins, the historic horrors of Victorian hospitals, the statistically inclined mind of her son, and her partner’s delectable cooking (except on the rare occasion when he prepares convenience foods, which he inevitably incinerates past possible identification and which, if she’s honest, then inspires awe of a whole new kind).