Arts and Disability

The Ford Foundation and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation launched Disability Futures, the only financial award in the US for disabled creatives from all disciplines, according to the announcement.

"All funders across the philanthropic spectrum should work to ensure that the projects we fund are made accessible to people with disabilities," states in a recent post Rachel Pardoe, program officer for Older Adults and People with Disabilities at The New York Community Trust.

Judy Heumann, an internationally recognized disability rights leader, joined in 2017 the Ford Foundation for a yearlong fellowship, working with the foundation’s staff to integrate a disability-inclusive perspective across their work. On her own, as a blog post/interview by the Ford Foundation details, she researched the inclusion of disability in film and television.

Led by disability studies scholars and disability activists, a movement is underway to hold arts institutions accountable for the lack of accessible programming and accommodations for people with disabilities. Twenty-eight years after the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Bay Area, a major hub for both arts and culture as well as the disability rights movement, still has many museums that have done the bare minimum (or less) to welcome in patrons with disabilities, and funding to support access is rare.

From American Academy of Poets:

36 pages, February 2013. National Endowment for the Arts, 1100 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, D.C., 20506. (202) 682-5400. http://arts.gov/

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116 pages, May 2012. Partners for Livable Communities, 1429 21st Street NW, Washington, D.C. 20036, (202) 887-5990 www.livable.org.

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   Stories for Change (2.5Mb)

2007, 246 pages. The New Press, 38 Greene St., NY, NY, 10013, (212) 629-8802, www.thenewpress.com

May 29, 1998, 116 pages, Theater By The Blind (TBTB), 306 West 18th Street, New York, New York 10011, 212-243-4337, ashiotis[at]panix.com

Walking to my office in the financial district of San Francisco, I was stopped by a man who asked me if I remembered him. The man, Rick Hood, reminded me we were both students at Harkness Ballet in New York. We had not seen each other in more than thirty years.

At lunch a few weeks later we reminisced about the early days. Those were heady times for my twenty-year old self. I had arrived from Chicago and was in David Howard's class alongside Gelsey Kirkland. Once doing jumps, she landed badly and had to be carried out. Of course the class continued...