Steve Cribb was an English disability rights activist, artist and coin collector.

Cribb was in public office as a London Borough of Hounslow councillor and later as a development officer for the Disabled in the same borough. He is particularly well known for his artworks, working with the London Disability Art Forum and Shape Arts.

Cribb became disabled after contracting Polio in 1945. He grew up in Brighton, and then Hounslow, where he attended Martindale Road School, and was the first pupil to pass GCE exams at the school. Steve had no formal arts training but had been working since the 1970s creating numerous paintings, drawings and cartoons. Steve’s impairment gradually meant he was unable to work with a paintbrush, and so, in 1989, he started using his Mac computer to convert head movements into cursor moves to create images.

He subscribed to the Social Model of Disability, and saw disability as the failure of society to remove barriers, a theme which was often present within his digital art, and gave strength to his political activism. He participated in direct action, risking arrest during a Campaign for Accessible Transport (CAT) bus protest in 1990 which blocked traffic in central London. In 1991, he was given a national platform on BBC2’s ‘Video diary- keep them off the streets’, which presented a unique opportunity to broadcast his message to a much larger audience.

Steve remained a passionate supporter of the Disability Arts Movement until his death in 1994. He believed it gave disabled people the confidence to express the many emotions they were denied, and described it as ‘one of the highlights of our struggle’.