This 3-month virtual program includes a disability arts residency with guest artists, a mentorship program, and public workshops and meetups.
This program is made possible by Canada Council for the Arts Digital Now and Sector and Innovation program.
About our guest artists-in-residence!
Andy Slater is a blind Chicago-based media artist, writer, performer, and Disability advocate/loudmouth. Andy’s work focuses on advocacy for accessible art and technology, Alt-Text for sound and image, the phonology of the blind body, spatial audio for extended reality, and sound design for film, dance, and digital scent design. Most recent, Andy was acknowledged by the New York Times in their article, “28 Ways To Learn About Disability Culture.” His research on Crypto Acoustic Auditory Non-Hallucination was published in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern volume 61. Learn more about Andy by visiting his website: https://www.thisisandyslater.net/
Iris Xie (they/them/theirs) is a disabled, neurodivergent, queer trans nonbinary 2nd generation Chinese American multi-discipline writer, artist, and designer from the Bay Area, currently living in Davis, CA. Iris designs interactive installations involving lyric/poetry games, solo live action role playing games (solo LARPs), and stim objects that explore neurodivergence and invisibilized disability through the framework of crip technoscience and disability justice. Their knowing-making practice centers on finding rest and self-trust while traversing liminality through discovering their political identities as a disabled queer trans person of color.
Iris is also a member of the Critical Design Lab, which centers collaborative access research on disability culture and crip technoscience. They are also part of QT Labs at UC Davis, and are creating an interactive Augmented Reality installation to highlight queer and trans international grad student experiences. You can learn more about Iris by visiting their website: https://www.iamtruetomyoscillations.com/
About our guest mentees!
We’re excited to announce the Sensory Shift mentee artists! Mentee artists will be working as a group with guest artists throughout the residency.
Lisa Marielle Cooper (she/her) is a multidisciplinary artist and educator from the Jamaican diaspora interested in the intersections of art + design, technology, accessibility, and justice. Through writing, performance and visual art, programming, and interactive installations, Lisa engages audiences in conversations surrounding identity, liberation, resilience, Afrofuturism, Caribbean Futurism, and Black joy.
Nat Decker (they/them) is a Chicago-born Los Angeles-based artist situating their work within queer disability arts as an inherently political practice. From a desire for catharsis and connection, they express the intimacies of lived experience as provocation toward collective care and liberation. Operatively creating between digital and material mediums, they identify the computer as an assistive tool affording a more accessible practice unencumbered by the physicality of traditional studio techniques. Often from bed, they use digital 3D software to trace serpentine connections between the body and technology, reimagining fantastical mobility devices as cultural celebration and agitation of conventional desirability politics.
Having grown up surrounded by home-spun makers and all-around crafty folk, Monique Francis finds tinkering in the realm of creativity is her default setting and where she feels most comfortable. In recent years, the profoundly healing qualities of time spent in quiet contemplation with creativity have brought visual art to the forefront in an ever-expanding outer articulation of her inner world. A self-taught artist, Monique’s process is intuitive and her work has a naive quality. Her expression often finds form through fibre arts, mixed media collage, monotype printing, and website design. She shares her passion for creativity by hosting art hives and curating a free little art gallery. Monique has spent decades in devotion to various contemplative arts and is an experienced retreat and workshop facilitator, and a retired counsellor and somatic therapist. She finds creativity life-affirming and believes everyone is creative in their own ways.
Harmeet is a fat, trans, Disabled, Sikh-Panjabi multidisciplinary artist based in Tkaronto and their focus is illustration, collage, and textile arts. They use a Disability Justice framework in their art, by creating visuals that sensorily activate feelings of slowness and pleasure. Harmeet is currently a MA student in the Critical Disability Studies program at York University, where their research further explores the themes of their arts practice: ritual, intergenerational crip archives, Panjabi survivorhood, aunty aesthetics, and fat temporality.
