Who is DAO?
Trish Wheatley is DAO's Director and works three days per week. Working in the arts sector since 2005, she has developed a passion and specialism in working with and supporting disabled artists having started her career at Holton Lee curating and managing the Disability Arts programme. In 2009 she moved into freelance work and has a significant portfolio which includes: Shape, London, LinkUpArts in Salisbury, consultancy work for DAO, project development for many individual disabled artists and the creation of Freewheeling. Her other part-time work is currently as the Project Manager and co-producer for Freewheeling which is producing Sue Austin’s Unlimited commission, ‘Creating the Spectacle!’.
Colin Hambrook is DAO's editor. He is a disabled artist with a substantial background in media and publishing. He has worked in the field of disability arts for 15 years, having previously managed and edited DAIL (Disability Arts In London) Magazine from 1994 - 2000.
Since then he has worked for a variety of web and print based publications including NorDaf News, Channel 4 Programme Support and ArtsOnline. He has also been involved in various projects supporting and promoting the work of disabled artists, including Arts Council London's Innovate Programme and more recently Birmingham City Museum and Art Gallery’s Rethinking Disability Representation Project.
Colin set DAO up initially in 2002 and has strived towards his vision for the site as a journal dedicated to work by deaf and disabled artists, which reflects on disability as a social and political construct.
DAO Board members
Caroline Cardus is a visual artist, speaker and writer who makes work about her own and other people’s experience of disability. Her work makes a point of focussing on the times we are currently living in by exploring significant aspects of disability history and culture. She has worked in the arts since 1999, launching her own career as an artist in 2002.
Caroline is committed to promoting Disability Art and is pleased to be a board member for dao as it transforms into an essential reference for historical and contemporary disability arts practice. You can see her work at www.carolinecardus.com
Marc Steene is Head of Learning at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester and has been employed at the Gallery for eight years, initially as an Outreach Officer. In his role as Head of Learning Marc initiated ‘Outside In’ - a biennial open exhibition of art work by marginalised artists, which he manages alongside a steering group comprising of marginalised artists, private donors, Creative Response (a local arts organisation for people with mental health issues) and HMP Ford (a category D open prison in West Sussex)..
Outside In was set up in 2006 to offer opportunity to artists who are marginalised due to health, disability or because their work doesn’t fit a prescribed art norm. Outside In held its first open art exhibition for marginalised artists in 2007, with over 100 artists taking part submitting over 200 pieces of work.
Marc believe passionately in challenging barriers that I perceive in the art world and society. He sess his work as enabling peoples creativity and developing opportunity for everyone who wants to take part in the cultural life of this country.
You can find out more about Outside In at www.outsidein.org.uk
Tony Heaton
English, North West in place and spirit. Father, artist, sculptor, fiddler of bits, likes animals but not pets, likes people but from a distance.
Currently CEO of Shape – disabled and deaf people and the arts – based in London. Prior to this Tony spent ten years as Director of Holton Lee in Dorset, creating short-stay residential accommodation with exhibition spaces, gallery, and studios and NDACA (the National Disability Arts Collection and Archive).
Board and Access group involvement with Tate, Whitechapel Gallery, The National Archive and the Richard Attenborough Centre.
Previous incarnations with NACAB, Citizens Advice and RADAR, the Royal Association for Disability and Rehabilitation, an independent record retailer and graduate of Lancaster University.
- Lead Artist on the Art-Plus Art in Public Places Award with Zoe Partington-Sollinger and Dada South. This £50,000 award resulted in the creation of the sculpture, “Squarinthecircle? 2008, situated outside the school of architecture at Portsmouth University.
- Regional finalist in the Unipart Reflections of technology award for original sculpture - Yorkshire Sculpture Park.
- Commissioned by London Disability Arts Forum to perform "Shaken not stirred" a time-based installation of a pyramid constructed from 1,760 red charity collecting cans - then destroyed as part of the Block Telethon demonstration.
- Exhibitor "Unleashed", Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle.
- Solo show "Great Britain from a Wheelchair" Diorama Gallery, London.
- Collaborator in partnership with Armley Resource Centre, Leeds "Buried Over Ground" project.
- December 1997, public sculpture commissioned by Manchester City Council, "Grey Mare Project"
Work featured in DAO, DAM, DAiL and Disability Now magazines, profiled in “From the Edge" programme for BBC TV, Director David Heavey and "Moving from within" video, Director Chris Ledger
You can see more of Tony's work at www.tonyheaton.co.uk
Dr Colin Cameron is a Senior Lecturer in Disability Studies at Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne. He has been active in the disabled people’s movement since 1992 within organisations including the Northern Disability Arts Forum, Inclusion Scotland, Lothian Centre for Inclusive Living and Shaping Our Lives.
As well as writing sardonic short stories and poems, a number of which can be found on DAO pages, his more serious work includes book chapters and journal articles on Disability Arts and identity in, e.g., Emerging Issues and Insights in Disability Studies, The Community Development Journal, Popular Music, and Parallel Lines. His PhD thesis, ‘Does Anybody Like Bing Disabled?’, involved clarifying and developing the affirmation model, a non-tragic framework for making sense of the experience of living with impairment in a disabling society. He is currently working on Disability Studies: A Student’s Guide, to be published by Sage in 2013.