Art/Access Lab:
How to Sustain your Practice & Present New Work
Navigating space, funding, collaborations, and more as an artist with disabilities
Guest Panelists:
Gabriel Chalfin-Piney-González, Ry Douglas, Alison Kopit, John Rich
Moderated by Terri Lynne Hudson and Tsehaye Hebert
Hybrid Event–Attend in person or via Zoom
Doors at 1:30pm*
Event starts at 2:00pm
Event ends at 4:00pm
*This event occurs during Chicago’s Air & Water Show, which may create additional traffic and noise.
Join UDF and HCL for a dynamic conversation exploring the many elements that must come together when creating and presenting new work, from finding funding, rehearsal space and a presenting site to promotion, outreach, and production support.
This session will feature a panel of individuals with direct experience developing and presenting work as an artist with a disability or in collaboration with artists with disabilities. A panel of artists, funders, curators/producers, and arts organization staff will share their advice, insight, and cautionary tales about navigating collaboration and sustaining a creative practice across time. As with all Art/Access Lab events, there will be time to connect with fellow attendees, ask questions, and interact with panelists and moderators.
Who Should Attend
Art/Access Labs are centered around artists with a lived experience of disability including Deaf, disabled, sick, neurodivergent, and Mad artists, and those working through their relationship to these categories, working in all mediums, with anyone who is invested in fostering a vibrant creative ecosystem inclusive of artists with disabilities.
Do you know someone with a disability, exploring their relationship to disability, or invested in fostering a vibrant disabled artist ecosystem? Please bring them along to this free community gathering!
Meet the Panelists
Gabriel Chalfin-Piney-González (they/them) is a ceramicist and choreographer from Poughkeepsie, NY. World building, oral and ecological histories, prison dismantling futurism, self taught artistic practice and multi-sensorial reciprocal performance centers much of their artistic practice. They have been in recovery and sober from addiction since 2015. After a series of malpractice surgeries in 2021, disabling chronic pain entered their life to stay. They have performed at The Design Museum of Chicago, The Dorsky Museum of Art, and The Whitney Museum of Art. They are the founding director of the Jewish Museum of Chicago, a diasporic liberation-focused artist community. They work as the Exhibitions and Residency Manager at Hyde Park Art Center, running the publishing wing and several artist residencies.
Ry Douglas (they/he) is a Chicago-based artist and cultural worker from Detroit. Moving primarily between performance art, activations, fashion, and textile art, their work explores spirituality, disability, death, labor, and Black migrations. They are a recent alum of the inaugural Bridge Performance Incubator Cohort at Hyde Park Art Center. Ry is a graduate of Columbia College Chicago where he studied Arts Management with a minor in Black World Studies. He’s also a proud grad school dropout after completing some coursework towards a Master of Arts degree in Museum and Exhibition Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago with research interests exploring the connections between disability justice and labor justice in critiques of the nonprofit industrial complex and the impact of these relationships on justice-centered arts organizations. Ry is a co-steward of The Axis Circle, a small collective using arts and culture programming to contribute to a culture centering Black, LGBTQ, disabled communities.
Alison Kopit is a queer and disabled access worker and access dramaturg based between Chicago and New York City. Alison’s access dramaturgy practice approaches access as central to the creative process, and integrates access into all levels of a performance. Her access dramaturgy credits include The Bengsons’ Ohio (2025 Edinburgh Fringe Festival), Maggie Bridger’s Radiate (2025, Red Eye Theater), Ryan J. Haddad’s Hold Me in the Water (2025, Playwrights Horizons) and Dark Disabled Stories (2023, The Public Theater; The Bushwick Starr), and Dan Fishback’s Dan Fishback is Alive, Unwell & Living in His Apartment (2024, Joe’s Pub). She directs the Pay Rate for Access Workers Now (PRAWN) project with Madison Zalopany, which advocates for the value of access work and more consistent pay rates.
She was awarded the Michael Feingold award for Dramaturgy in the 2023 Obie Awards and holds a PhD in Disability Studies from the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Learn more at https://www.alisonkopit.com/.
John Rich is the Dance and Theatre Coordinator for the City of Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (DCASE) where he advocates for the performing arts, curates programs, and develops and manages funded artist residencies in dance and theater. He earned an MFA in Writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he taught for nearly 10 years, and a BFA in Painting from Grand Valley State University. Prior to DCASE, John served as Manager of Performance at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Director of the Guild Literary Complex, company manager for Goat Island Performance Group and founder of the Chicago Book Expo for independent publishers. He is a recipient of the Vaclav Havel Fellowship in Playwriting from Western Michigan University and a Ragdale Foundation residency in writing. He has performed with Every House Has a Door in Chicago and was an active performer and producer in Grand Rapids, Michigan prior to locating to Chicago.
Meet the Facilitators
Tsehaye Geralyn Hébert (she/her) is a self-described "bona fide gumbo girl." The nationally acclaimed playwright triaged between her grandparents’ rural Louisiana family seat, her Baton Rouge birthplace, and her mother’s beloved New Orleans. Steeped in her African-Creole culture, she relishes quiet world-changing moments that live on stage alongside the hyperbole and spectacle of Mardi Gras. With a rich polyglot larger-than-life-world full of music, dance, activism, and storytelling, there’s no wonder Hébert found her way to the theater.
The Northwestern University and School of the Art Institute of Chicago alum penned The Chicago Quartet, a series of works set across 19th and 20th century Chicago. Fearless in scope, Hébert's work is highly imaginative and might include Lucy Parsons, Ida B. Wells, Jane Addams, Chicago's Black avant-garde arts communities, or the lady sitting next to her at the salon.
The citizen artist is committed to inclusivity and sustainability. Hébert's writings and performances center race, gender, disability, and the economics and geography of making art. She brings communities and demographics together to grieve, heal, celebrate, and move boldly forward.
Terri Lynne Hudson is a disabled, chronically ill queer actor and multidisciplinary artist and disability rights advocate living and working in Chicago. She has a BA in General Studies in the Humanities concentrating in theatre, film and dramatic literature, from University of Chicago. She has studied at Second City, Vagabond School of the Arts and Acting Studio Chicago. She has performance credits with, among others, Citadel Theatre, Strawdog Theatre Company, Accidental Shakespeare Company and Wildclaw Theatre. She is a Fall 2024 3Arts/Bodies of Work fellow. She recently performed as part of the SHIFT video installation, led by Barak Ade Soleil, at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. Her voice can also be found reading creepy stories on Audible and on the Random Acts Scary Stories Around the Fire and the Chilling Tales for Dark Nights podcasts.
Art/Access Lab Program Team
Aquil Chartlon
Sydney Erlikh
Terri Lynne Hudson
Angee Lennard
Amanda Lautermilch
Access Information
This event is intended to be relaxed, welcoming and comfortable for everyone. We will have multiple forms of seating available, as well as stim materials and ear defenders. You are welcome to come and go, bring your own access tools, and move about the space as needed during the event.
ASL interpretation and open AI captions are provided both in person and virtually. All speakers will use microphones. Agendas will be provided to all registrants in both text and symbol-based formats. The main event space will not use fluorescent lighting.
Face masks are requested except when this presents a language barrier or when one is performing. Please refrain from wearing any scented perfume, cologne, lotion, etc.
For questions or requests regarding accessibility, please contact Angee Lennard, HCL’s Accessibility Coordinator, at angee@highconceptlabs.org or 312-374-1117.
Co-presented by High Concept Labs and Unfolding Disability Futures.