The Barry Corbet Community Voice Award

Barry Corbet (1936-2004) was a genuine polymath: a filmmaker, an author, an adaptive sports pioneer, and the editor of our membership publication New Mobility from 1991-2000.

He was part of the first American expedition to summit Mount Everest in 1963, the crowning achievement of a youth spent adventuring in the mountains after dropping out of Dartmouth College. He quite literally blazed new trails in the Rockies and helped establish key infrastructure in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. He and his confreres pulled off more firsts in the heights of Antarctica.

He also married his creative spirit to his pioneering sense of adventure, starting Summit Films and directing features like Ski the Outer Limits that appropriately pushed the technical boundaries of documentary filmmaking in its depiction of the cutting edge of skiing. It was during a 1968 film shoot in Colorado that he sustained a life-changing spinal cord injury.

Corbet's sense of exploration brought him back to filmmaking and adventure sports, trading in his skis for a kayak. He turned his camera from the mountains and rivers towards something more quotidian in his documentary, Changes-everyday life for wheelchair users in rehab, figuring out the next stages of their lives. He became an advocate.

In middle age, he picked up the pen, and began the next phase of his life as a writer. He was the author of 1980's Options, a groundbreaking collection of accounts of life using a wheelchair. As editor of New Mobility, he continued to challenge received wisdom and push boundaries to show his community-and the world-what is possible, and what is authentic, in seeking a life fully lived.

In Corbet's life and work following injury, creativity and social concern met in a way that felt wholly natural. His earlier work depicted the radical limits of what we would now call extreme sports, and his mature work showed that writing and filmmaking that frankly and boldly documented life using a wheelchair can also be a radical gesture.

With our Barry Corbet Community Voice Award, we seek frank, bold, and authentic creators who are invaluable members of our community and blur the lines between service and creative ingenuity. With this award, we salute Corbet's contributions.