For Jessica Wallach, a photograph is never just an image. It is an invitation to slow down, look closer, and reconsider what the body knows. Wallach is a disabled artist with cerebral palsy, a photographer with more than twenty-five years of experience, and Content Manager and teaching artist with Story Tapestries. In schools, community spaces, and workforce development programs, she uses photography and tactile visual practices to help people notice, reflect, and make meaning from their lived experience. Her work sits at the intersection of art, disability, and education - approaching the body not as a problem to be solved, but as a place of vitality, adaptation, and discovery.
This month, Wallach graces our cover with an image that asks readers to travel inward: to feel breath, motion, and the energy of everything we carry inside. It is not a travel photograph in the traditional sense. But it does invite a journey - and for those who want to experience her vision firsthand, that journey leads to New York City this July.
Wallach's work will be featured at the Disability Unite Festival 2026: Love Unites at the Naumburg Bandshell in Central Park - and making the trip matters. This is more than an art event. It is a living expression of a movement that deserves to be witnessed, felt, and supported in person. To stand in that space is to understand, on a visceral level, what Wallach's photography has always communicated: that disability is not a limitation on life, but a distinct and powerful way of moving through it.
Through Story Tapestries, Wallach has guided more than 1,000 students to explore the world through a lens - teaching people to linger before explaining, and to feel the body as active, alive, and full of story. That same spirit lives in the festival's mission: to celebrate what is possible when community, creativity, and inclusion share the same stage. Showing up in Central Park is a way of saying that this work, and this community, are worth the journey.
Wallach's photography offers something rare - a moment of stillness that hums with life. Bodies, she reminds us, are never simple or still. They are always working, always adapting, always arriving somewhere new. Let this July be your reason to arrive somewhere meaningful.
Learn more and register at DisabilityUnite.org.
Article by Vivian Mammen
Photography by Jessica Wallach
Originally published in Chevy Chase City Lifestyle