Project Participants: Artists & Activists

Amy is a performer, creator, and writer with lived experience of blindness, neurodiversity, chronic illness, and chronic pain. She describes herself as an artist of opportunity: She collaborates with anyone who wants to make art, in any form.

Emma Kivisild is a BC writer, artist, performer, and disability activist living with multiple sclerosis. She was the Artistic Director of Kickstart Disability Arts and Culture for 3 years.

Mariya Lepp is a disability activist and advocate, a community organizer for mental health act reform and safe supply, and a visual and performing artist. She lives and works on unceded Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh territory.

Miki Aurora is an artist, writer and esotericist based in Vancouver BC, the unceded land of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples.
The themes Miki presents in her work are often inspired by her occult practice and investigations into emancipatory politics. After a period spent living on the street, Miki became involved with a group of ascetic esotericists also experiencing homelessness. Their time together had an impact on her occult practice and activism.

Persimmon is a sculptor who has made disability art from the 1970s to now. She started making art as a way through a breakdown in her early 20s, and art and disability have been entwined for her ever since. She's a queer femme with a learning disability, a psych diagnosis and kidney disease. All these things are reflected in her artwork.

Regan is an artist, curator, educator, and consultant. They live on the traditional and unceded lands of the Lekwungen-speaking peoples, currently known as the Songhees and Esquimalt Nations (Victoria, BC). Their work as a curator and educator focuses on making the arts more accessible for oppressed communities.

Ivy is a fashion force of nature. Living & breathing on unceded Coast Salish territory, they work to create art thoughtfully with others around them.
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Most of Ivy’s looks are handmade monsters for the ‘Bizarre’ category in their Ballroom community.

They are beginning to create work that shows their own time being disabled, by weaving their ongoing life with long covid into their more recent pieces.

Judy Woo is a first-generation Chinese Canadian Abstract Intuitive artist, indigenous to Hong Kong, China and a descendent of a head tax payer.

She/They live and grew up on so-called Vancouver Island, known as Lekwungen territories. Judy is always experimenting with multimedia and street art.

Keimi is an immigrant settler of mixed heritage. He was born on the lands of the Pur’hépecha, the Coca, and the Tecuexe. She spent most of her youth in Amiskwacîwâskahikan.
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Keimi is a Disabled, bilingual, learner, worker and artist. Her art practice incorporates creative access, reading, writing, weaving, printmaking, and more. His work and worldview have been shaped through his learning of Disability Justice, and Black Feminist theory. They are interested in anti-colonial research and learning, accessible spaces, and liberated futures.

Queer, loud, funny (-lookin’), knitter, beader, kiju’, white l’nu, fat, extreme left, complex PTSD & ADHD & neurospicy, woman.

She has been making art her whole life, with a focus on wearable art: knitting, embroidery, sewing, felting, and spinning yarn. She came to beadwork through the recent death of her mother and the enormous bead stash that she inherited.

SD Holman is an award-winning, queer dyslexic mad Pagan Jewish Artist and curator born in Hollywood, California. Holman is a graduate of ECUAD Vancouver Canada; laureate of the YWCA Women of Distinction Award; and Founding Artistic Director Emeritus of the multidisciplinary QAF+SUM gallery.

Valen Onstine is a two-spirit Dane-Zaa & Cree artist based in Burnaby, BC. He creates colourful and confrontational work that takes inspiration from his Indigenous experience, nature, & feelings that are better explained through imagery than words.