Image Description: Q, a white person with short dirty blonde hair, wearing a black toque, big circular sunglasses, a small dangly mushroom earring, red knit sweater, beige wool vest, and loose blue jeans. On its vest are several pins: one is a 3D-printed shelf mushroom, another says “Dangerous Dyke,” and the third has illustrated fungi and says “Weird But Wonderful”. It’s standing among ferns and bracken, one hand resting on a dead branch, smiling at someone out of frame.
Q Lawrence
Pronouns: They/it
Role: Project Lead and Researcher
Q is a disability justice educator, accessibility & culture consultant, and grassroots death doula on the land of the Pilalt and Ts’elxwéyeqw tribes of the Stó꞉lō Nation.
Image Description: Fenrir looking up, with bare tree branches against an overcast sky reflected on their sunglasses. Fenrir is a white person with short dark hair and knuckle tattoos below their fingernails, wearing a wide-brim black hat, black denim shirt and pants, and a low-hanging jawbone necklace. They are sitting by the side of a house, one arm draped over a knee, their other arm propped up with their hand on their face.
Fenrir Cerebellion
Pronouns: They/them
Role: Access Coordinator and Co-Researcher
Fenrir is a technical and fiction writer on the land of the Pilalt and Ts’elxwéyeqw tribes of the Stó꞉lō Nation. Their technical work is focused on access and accessibility, from documentation and instructional guides to timing captions and writing image descriptions. They write genre fiction and games centered on disability, mental illness, and queerness.
Image Description: Photo of Jenna Reid, a pale skin, straight-sized person with short dirty blonde hair, wearing wide rim glasses, a beige sweater, grey shirt, pink lanyard, black pants, and brown blundstone shoes sitting cross legged on a big canvas in a studio with textile making supplies around her.
Jenna Reid
Pronouns: She/her
Role: Administration Support, Kickstart Disability Arts & Culture
Jenna Reid (she/her) is a fibre artist who works primarily with the practices of quilting and natural dyes as a way to engage with activist based aesthetics. With a studio based PhD in Critical Disability Studies at York University, Jenna’s teaching and research specializes in the emergent field of Mad Studies.
Image Description: Photo of Kait Blake looking at the camera, smiling. She is pale skin, fat person with short-medium length purple hair. Kait is wearing black cat-eye rim glasses, a silver nose ring, a stretched, spiral dark earring and a black shirt visible to shoulders.
Kait Blake
Pronouns: She/her
Role: Administration Assistant, Kickstart Disability Arts & Culture
Kait Blake (she/her) is a crafter / DIYer, an enthusiastic dog & cat mom and is a lover of all things food related. Kait lives with severe depression & anxiety, learning disabilities and chronic pain. She is also a proud member of the Fat (yes, fat!) and Health At Any Size communities. She is vehement about breaking down the stigma associated with fatness, disability, and most specifically mental illness.
Image Description: Taz, a white person with pink and purple chin length hair, looking at the camera with a full teeth grin. They are wearing a thin green flannel shirt and holding Cappucino a black cat with white fur on her chest and golden amber eyes looking into the camera. They are in front of a white door with stickers and an orange wall.
Taz Soleil
Pronouns: They/them, Iel/iels
Role: Lead Web Designer and Social Media
Taz is a neurodivergent disabled spoonie, web designer, singer-songwriter, artist, D.I.Y. maker and gardener on lands of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and Sel̓íl̓witulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.
They dedicate their work on this project to their beloved cat Cappucino who lived to around age 22.
Image Description: Nikki looking below the camera, smiling. They are a dark skin person with long purple hair, wearing round pink glasses in gold frames and a white sleeveless shirt. She is in a white room with doorways visible. A flat screen tv is to the right and two posters in frames are visible in the background.
Nikki Walker
Pronouns: She/they, Iel/iels
Role: Interview Audio Narrator
Nikki is a mad creative from Kenya and Rwanda. Recently settled on the ancestral and unceded homelands of the hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ and Sḵwx̱wú7mesh peoples, they are passionate about community, connections, disability, and art and are grateful to have participated in this project. They are always seeking stories; their soul is fed by being able to listen to and share them. They are currently learning about the relationship between internalized ableism and work and all the struggles that come with them. In the future, she wants to explore grief, complex trauma and madness in the fibre art format. Asante.
