To mark International Day of Persons with Disability, we’re highlighting five extraordinary women who are thriving in the creative industries, across art, literature, screen and dance.
Making a living as artist is a challenging pursuit and these five women have had to manage extra layers of hardship with their disabilities, while also creating some extraordinary work.
We take a look below.
Angie Goto
As a Deaf visual artist, Goto possesses a distinct perspective on colour and images. After studying Fine Art and Graphic Design in Newcastle and Sydney, she has spent her career painting images and stories of her life through figurative and abstract art, evoking her surroundings through the visual medium.
The Sydney-based artist is also a prominent Arts Educator. At Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art and Powerhouse Museum, she delivers special projects for the deaf and hard of hearing visitors, ensuring that everyone has an inclusive and absorbing experience engaging in art. As a tour guide for the Auslan (Australian sign language) tours of exhibitions, Goto works to ensure that a ‘deaf safe space’ is created for audiences.
“Sometimes Deaf people have very different perspectives of the artwork during the tours to what we might expect,” she said in a 2020 interview. “Incorporating art activities into the tour also helps Deaf people to connect more with the exhibition.”
Her art has been nominated for several prizes, including the Ravenswood Art Prize, Paddington Art Prize, Fisher’s Ghost Art Prize, and Michael Reid’s National Emerging Art Prize. She was featured in Hugh Clark’s 2015 Tropfest finalist short film, Angie, which follows her journey putting together an exhibition.
Kay Kerr
This year, autistic journalist and author Kay Kerr published her third book, Love and Autism, a spectacularly rich and informative account of five autistic persons’ journey in finding romance and love. It’s a heart-warming, engaging book, written with tenderness and grace. It will also leave you crying. Her subjects include Love on the Spectrum contestant Michaal; Tim, who is a non-speaking autistic man of Chinese background; Noor, a Muslim woman struggling to fight for her identity in a strict religious home, and Chloe, a maths prodigy who feels completely misunderstood.
Kerr’s previous books include Please Don’t Huge Me, a YA novel that follows a young girl named Erin who is navigating the final years of high school as a person on the autism spectrum; and Social Queue, a story about an 18-year old autistic teenager named Zoe who is trying to navigate her romantic life surrounded by neurotypical students.
In a 2022 interview with the ABC, Kerr explained her motivation to write novels for young people: “If I pick up a novel and I know that it’s an autistic author, I know that I’m not going to come up against bad stereotypes or things that might frame an autistic character as being emotionless.”
Kerr’s books have been shortlisted for Book of the Year for Older Children at the Australian Book Industry Awards (ABIA) and named a ‘Notable Book’ by the Children’s Book Council of Australia (CBCA).
Jianna Georgiou
Dancing professionally since she was 16, Adelaide-based independent performance artist and dancer Jianna Georgiou has amassed an extraordinary body of work in her career. As a director and choreographer too, Georgiou, who lives with Down Syndrome, has been involved with the city’s Restless Dance Theatre since 2006. The organisation is the country’s leading creator of dance theatre by dancers with and without disability, and provides education as well as public programs for youths.
In 2010, Georgiou, was short-listed for a Young Achievers Award in honour of her work as a performer and advocate. This year, she was awarded the Ruby Award, a South Australian award celebrating artistic excellence, creative achievement, innovation and inspirational leadership.
In a recent interview, Georgiou, now 33, described dancing as “like having yourself be controlled by your emotions.”
“It’s natural because it can communicate through our bodies,” she said. “We do lots of training, keep us more energetic, and not being lazy. I do love dancing, I’ve danced for so long through Restless.”
She has performed in various events both in Australia and abroad, including DreamBig Festival, WOMADelaide, Adelaide, Brisbane and Sydney Festivals, Vivid, and the 2018 Commonwealth Games Closing Ceremony.
Georgiou is also a vocal advocate for her state’s artistic output, saying in another interview this year: “I think arts and culture are very important for our state and the rest of the world. Without arts being inclusive, I would never have had a career, and audiences would not be able to be inspired to get involved in the arts. I hope that the arts in SA continue to be supported so that more people have the opportunity to be a part of it. I think there seems to be a lot more artistic people in South Australia which means there are more opportunities to perform and view art.”
“I would also encourage young people to pursue a career in the arts as it has made me more confident and I get to do what I love all the time.”
Louise Yates (nee Philip)
At 15, Louise Yates left school to pursue acting. It was 1972, and the budding actor quickly landed a role in the ABC television series, Bellbird. On Boxing Day of that year, the teenager was a passage of a car driven by her father when it was involved in a three-car collision, leaving her paraplegic.
She’d broken her back and permanently lost the use of her legs.
She spent six months in a hospital, recovering, and has never been a ‘woe is me’ person, according to herself. “I’ve re-adjusted and got on with things,” she told the Australian Women’s Weekly in a 1982 interview, when she was 25-years old. “”I couldn’t break my father’s heart by sitting around in misery for the rest of my life. Besides, I’ve never had the time for gloom.”
She went on to become a presenter for the Melbourne ATV-10 television current affairs show, Together Tonight and toured the country delivering public lectures about sexuality for disabled people.
She’s become known as the first actor on Australian television with a disability, re-appearing on Bellbird after the show’s producers wrote her character back in as a victim of a hit and run accident to explain her use of a wheelchair.
A few years later, she would appear in a Channel 7 police show “Cop Shop” where she’d go on to feature in 281 episodes.
Last month, she appeared at Driving Change, a conference in Sydney on disability employment in the screen sector, where she described her determination during the recuperation period from the accident in 1972.
“I had the same drive, the same energy, the same commitment to my career,” she explained. “That drive that had led me to leave school at 15 and pursue my career was still there. So I didn’t even really see a difference. I just thought, ‘I’m going to go back. I’m going to rejoin the cast, and we’ll work out how it happens.’ So it’s really surprising to suddenly be cast into this role of ‘not good enough.’ That was unfamiliar territory. For a couple of days, I really had to gather my thoughts around all of that.”
“I guess the motivation was to always be the best I could be, because that’s how I would keep my job.”
Vanessa Dion Fletcher
As a neurodiverse artist living with a learning disability caused by issues with short-term memory, Vanessa Dion Fletcher has worked in performance, textiles and video to explore what it means to live in an Indigenous and gendered body with a neurodiverse mind. The Lenape and Potawatomi artist uses porcupine quills, Wampum belts, and menstrual blood to examine the physical and cultural impacts of colonialism and ableism.
“This perspective of language and communication is fractured and politicised,” she explained on her website. “Honouring that my body and mind are not separate, I address the socio-political representations and implications of menstruation, reproduction and the biological body.”
Fletcher is a graduate of The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and holds an MFA in performance and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from York University. In a 2017 exhibit titled “Own Your Cervix,” Fletcher used her own menstrual blood to explore “…what is acceptable and not acceptable, and what aspects of a female body, or a body that menstruates, are acceptable or not.”
“The conventions of menstruation have been frustrating, probably, for a lot of people for a long time,” Fletcher said in an interview. “I think it’s exciting to be part of the conversation around it. I made the work from my understanding of my physical experience, feeling the tensions and incongruities in that, and then working and trying to create a space where other people could maybe feel like they could engage.”