I’m a London-based artist, filmmaker and writer working across digital arts, writing, painting and audio description. My work moves between narrative, documentary and experiment, and often grows out of collaboration, research, archival material and questions around how we see and understand one another. Accessibility, particularly audio description, is an important element of my work, not just as an accessibility tool but as a creative strategy.
At four, my father took me to see Mary Poppins at the Westmount cinema in Montreal and my life changed forever. Other formative influences include Barbra Streisand, Joni Mitchell, Patti Smith and John Cassavetes.
I trained as an actor at Ryerson Theatre School in Toronto and began my career in theatre, co-founding Materia Prima and creating work including Nazi/Jew/Queer and Lebensborn. I also performed extensively at Buddies in Bad Times, including eight iterations of Cheap Queers, and worked with David Roche and David Bateman as All Davids Productions. In 1997 I starred in John Greyson’s feature film Uncut.
Around the same time, I began making experimental films and videos, initially through poetry-based collaborations with artist and writer R.M. Vaughan. These works screened at festivals in Canada and internationally, and a retrospective of our collaborations was presented at Squeaky Wheel in Buffalo in 2003.
Since moving to London, I’ve continued to make experimental and narrative moving-image work. Awake (2015), an existential comedy starring blind actors Alex Bulmer and Margo Cargill, received the Jury Prize at Superfest in San Francisco, Best Actresses at Breaking Down Barriers in Moscow, and Best Director and Special Mention from the Jury at Look & Roll in Basel. My later work includes Pessoa and sift.simmer.shred, alongside experiments in creative audio description. Awake also led to workshops exploring accessible filmmaking and audio description as an artistic practice.
More recently, my practice has expanded into painting and archival work. Sonder began with a collection of photographs brought from Chełm, Poland, to Montreal by my grandfather, Itche Achtman. In making paintings from these photographs, I became interested in the way history is transmitted and transformed through artistic practice, an investigation I’m continuing in current projects.
Disability arts and access run alongside and through my artistic practice. I’m a director of filmpro, a Disabled-led digital arts organisation, and I also work professionally as an audio describer. My Arts Council England Develop Your Creative Practice research explored ways in which audio description might operate creatively within a work rather than simply being added afterwards; this research led to experiments with sound and audio description in works including flying & floating and flow.
