Arts and Disability Initiative

Cara-Ann Simpson is an artist, curator, cultural heritage expert and consultant, with a background as an executive director, property manager, conservation manager, and educator. She is a multidisciplinary artist with a focus on sensory engagement, digital technologies, space and the participant. Cara-Ann is engaged with cultural heritage, landscape, sensoria and how people interact with their environment.

In 2017, Cara-Ann became extremely ill, spending close to a year in hospital with an extreme brain infection, eventually being diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis and Neurosarcoidosis. She spent a number of months in rehabilitation learning how to walk again and become stronger. During this period picking flowers and going for short walks outside became a lifeline to regaining optimism for the future and finding her way back to creating art. She currently lives with her partner Michael, and their two dogs – Sebastian and Eddie – on the lands of the Jarowair people of the Wakka Wakka nation on a farm in Queensland.

My multi-disciplinary art practice explores Critical Disability Aesthetics. As a woman with dwarfism, I work collaboratively to experiment with the representation of my embodied difference. The focus of my art to date, has been upon features and dynamics of interactions and relations within physical and social environments that define the dwarf person as an Other. By experimenting with the power of the gaze and changing point of view, I emphasise the politics of visible difference. Employing the mediums of performance, video, VR, photography, and sculpture, my oeuvre has evolved to culminate in cross art-form works. I explore the capacities of each medium to communicate a different and dynamic perspective of lived experience.

My approach to Critical Disability Aesthetics experiments with shifting point of view to engage with and immerse participants and audiences into my world. I constantly challenge traditional stereotypes about those who look different, and to date, the subject of my work in this endeavour is my lived experience. As my art practice evolves, I aim to move beyond the perspective of the individual. My current works explore the experiences of those who share my body type from the four corners of the world, different gender identities, ages, strata of society and those at intersections of disadvantage. Experimenting further with cross art-forms – visual and auditory – I aim to produce work that invites audiences to engage with these different perspectives and points of view to gain new insight and understanding of what it is like to be “a different kind of different”.

As an artist and academic my experimental approach to Critical Disability Aesthetics has been exhibited in both National and State galleries and festivals, published in chapters, discussed in interviews, presented at conferences and workshops.

I am a lecturer at Western Sydney University in Humanitarian and Development Studies, and my first PhD was in Psychology on the subject of Dehumanization. Currently studying for my second PhD in Visual Arts at Art & Design UNSW, my research focuses upon developing a Critical Disability Aesthetic through the representation of the female dwarf.

My practice is primarily focused on projects that involve story-telling at their core and reveal unique perspectives. First beginning in the screen industry, I am quite organically moving into theatre and performance-making. In 2020 Back to Back Theatre invited me to work as an associate producer for five months in the lead up to their first feature film Shadow. The film was created in collaboration with an ensemble of actors with perceived intellectual disabilities. Intertwined with the making of the film was an ambitious internship program, which I helped set up and run. The program supported 30 artists identifying as having a disability to work as paid interns across all departments. Back to Back have since employed me as a Guest Artist and Research Consultant, and have asked me to represent the company and film in Athens, New York City and Norway.

This project will develop a new work, INFLUENCE, exploring the effects of social media and publicity on our daily life and interactions with others. I will develop the new work alongside my professional skills in three phases:
1: Month-long Professional Development Residency with Back to Back Theatre;
2: Artistic Research Residency with Mammalian Diving Reflex;
3: Final writing phase, with mentorship by Rhian Hinkley.

Emma Holland is a 35-year-old comedian, writer and aspiring screenwriter living with cerebral palsy. She made her comedy debut in 2020 and from there has seen her career go from strength to strength taking out joint first place in the National Final of the Raw Comedy Competition at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival in 2022. Later that year she was invited to take part in a writers’ room for Wil Anderson’s ABC panel show Question Everything (produced by CJZ). She had an incredible 2023 so far being invited to give a TEDX talk (2022) as part of their TEDX Byron Bay Women programme where she shared her experience of owning her sexuality as a woman living with disability.

This funding will support a live show & creative screenwriting development, promotion and accessibility project.

Dr Bon Mott is a transdisciplinary artist, curator, and educator based in Naarm (Melbourne). Their artistic practice revolves around site-specific process-driven sculpture installations incorporating performance art, drawing inspiration from Indigenous and Western European science of lightning.

The project supports R&D into the science of lightning to create and document process-driven installations and activations. This is a one-year transdisciplinary research-based project with an outcome of mixed-media ceiling installations and activations. Through the intersection of art and personal experience, the project focus is the science of lightning informed by my nonbinary identity and neurological disability. The project involves research and development in the studio, on the ancient lands of Australia and building upon existing relationships of trust and collaboration with artists and arts workers, fostering a fast response and creating a diverse network of collaborators through mentorship from First Nations creatives and lightning and cosmic ray scientists in and Turtle Island (USA) to expand my networks while creating innovative artworks that explore themes of identity, science, and social change.

A killer music director, MC, composer, sound designer, DJ, music dramaturg and performance maker, Kim ‘Busty Beatz’ Bowers has been making fearless art to activate, pollinate and liberate for over 30 years. Of Xhosa heritage and living on Yuggera country, she creates sonic experiences intersecting disciplines, politics and soundlines with a focus on giving voice to stories which are unseen and unheard.

This project supports Bowers to research and develop ‘Confessions of the Brutally Blessed – A Survival Handbook’ giving voice to the untold story of Legacy, Medicine, and Revolution. By developing a series of electrifying performances, theatrical captures and sonic collaborations, this new work is a journey of love, loss, death and joy as Busty Beatz confronts her past, present, and future after being diagnosed with Breast Cancer, undertaking chemotherapy and a left breast mastectomy. With themes of body sovereignty, historical pathologising of Black Female Body throughout medical history and finding joy, ‘Confessions of the Brutally Blessed’ is an honest and unflinching exploration of what it means to be an artist living in the space known as the in-between.

Luke is a director, movement, and multi-disciplinary artist. Luke is also an artist living with Down Syndrome and he is not happy about it. He longs to be seen and critiqued as an artist – not as an artist living with a disability. In III he is putting his art to the test through anonymity, abstraction and distance.

III is a trilogy of cross art form investigations directed by Luke John Campbell. In the winter of 2025 The CHAIN [2021], The BRIDGE [2022] and the BOND [2023-24] will be presented in a fully immersive experience at Plimsoll Gallery at the University of Tasmania School of the Arts Hobart Campus. Through the use of performance, installation, motion capture, audio and video manipulations, III confronts reality, space, time and the ties between place and people. The work explores the conceptual space between who we think we see and our expectations of them; Where we think we are and where we belong. Viewers are invited to question what and who they are seeing and consider whether they judge a book by its cover.

Destefano is a Deaf multi-disciplinary artist living and working in Victoria. She works with performance art, dance performance, sculpture, textile, poetry and Auslan poetry, drawing and painting. She recently completed a Masters of Contemporary Art at VCA at Melbourne Uni. She moved towards multi-disciplinary practices in 2019, delving into her Deaf history and experiences to realise there was a lot of unresolved issues with the Deaf community around oppression, audism, and displacement and her personal experiences as a Deaf person.

This project involves developing a large scale works on paper through a printmaking residency informing her perspectives. Her project will focus on informing her personal perspectives and experiences using drawing, painting and printmaking practice, including textile elements on a large-scale watercolour paper around 3-4 m long and 1 m high. She will be exploring and unpacking her identity and issues with housing using houses and buildings as stories on paper. She will be in residency using the printmaking facilities at Baldessin Press in St Andrews, Melbourne to develop further her printmaking skills under the mentor support of Silvi Glattauer and to create the new work at Baldessin in July 2024.

Coddington is a disabled artist practicing opera in Sydney. As a part of her performance practice, she recently finished a Bachelor’s Degree on full scholarship and with first class honours at the Sydney Conservatorium. She has also recently completed a Diploma of Language Studies at the University of Sydney. She has several performances lined up, including Mrs Grose in Britten’s ‘The Turn of the Screw’, and Donna Elvira in Mozart’s ‘Don Giovanni’. She is also undertaking private study with teachers from the Sydney Conservatorium of Music in the interim between her bachelor’s and master’s degree.

She is planning to undertake a Masters of Arts (Vocal Performance) commencing in September this year at the Royal Academy of Music, London, with a partial scholarship. She will be working with some of the most esteemed pedagogues and professionals from the international opera community in order to continue to further foster her development as a young opera singer. She will be working closely with international mezzo-soprano Catherine Wyn-Rogers as her teacher, as well as a number of other professionals including Yvonne Kenny AM for the study of Mozart and Handel arias and Kate Paterson as the head of vocal studies. The program will run for two years, and will lead her to further opera study or work.

Major’s artistic journey spans over a decade and includes significant international recognition in contemporary dance. He’s had the privilege of working with renowned dance creators including Akram Khan, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, Russell Maliphant, Hans van den Broeck, Damien Jalet, and Hofesh Shechter. His drive is to create and present surprisingly real dance works to diverse audiences, with a “local focus, global outlook” ethos. He runs a project-based dance company – the only disability and First Nations-led arts organisation in the country, from his home base in regional SA.

This project is a 12-month mentorship with acclaimed artistic director and choreographer, Russell Maliphant OBE. It involves a comprehensive development of artistic skills, leadership capabilities, and capacity building for international arts leaders. Activities include structured professional development sessions, individual project creation, and guidance in operating a 21st-century dance company. The mentorship includes a blend of physical and virtual interaction, with periods spent in the UK and Australia. The outcome is a new choreographed work, international repertoire of a global standard performed by Australian artists with a disability with performance outcomes, and refined operational strategies for his dance company, contributing to the global dance arts landscape.