Sam Brewer & Aarian Mehrabani (Sam, a white man with closely shaved blonde hair wears a pink and yellow floral blazer and grasps a very resolute Aarian. Aarian is a Middle Eastern man with slim build, clean shaven with short jet black quiffed hair. He is wearing a yellow jumper and denim dungarees).

Breakthrough

For creatives who are ready to break into the mainstream.

Breakthrough is about moving from the disability arts scene to the mainstream. We’re looking for practicing creatives who’ve “done it all” in disability arts, who are mid-career and achieving success, and yet are still facing huge barriers to entering the mainstream. It’s about saying “we see your track record” and investing in you – to develop something tiny, perfect, and that truly showcases who you are and what you do. We want to support you in creating a calling card to mainstream recognition whatever that looks like for you.

Who we’re looking for

We are looking for a disabled* creative to produce a sample of professional quality work to be distributed by CRIPtic. When we talk about disabled people, we mean “people who face disableist [including audist] barriers”, or “people who identify themselves as deaf or disabled – or are identified by others as deaf or disabled in society”. To find out more about what we mean by this, please look at our website.

What we want to support

This is your opportunity to create at the highest quality. As disabled creatives, we’re used to working on a shoestring, making a budget go as far as possible. The funding from this award should be used to create something tiny at the highest possible quality, rather than trying to create “as much as you can”. This might be a 5 minute video, a single song, a lighting plan for part of a show, a showreel archive of your work, a pitch for a book or novel, an individual painting, a 5 minute segment of a play, a proof-of-concept for a larger creative piece – or something else entirely. The purpose is for you to do it exceptionally – to show what you could achieve if you had the mainstream support and funding you should.

This can be anything from a 5-minute scene from a play, to a song, to a lighting portfolio, to a short video – we want to nurture your creativity and support you in creating something that showcases the absolute best you can achieve.

What the programme involves

Over one year, the chosen creative/company will be paid to develop a commission and attend support and development sessions with CRIPtic Arts’ Artistic Director, Jamie Hale. They’ll also be linked up with an industry mentor of their choice, to learn from them over six mentoring sessions. At the end, they’ll have a high quality calling card to showcase their potential.

Support and development sessions and mentoring sessions will take place online, with captions, rest breaks, and BSL interpretation where required, and we aim to meet other access requirements across the programme as far as possible.

Payment

Breakthrough artists will be paid £6,000 to fund their time and costs to develop their commission and attend the four support and development sessions. They’ll also receive a further budget of £1,500 for six sessions with an industry mentor.

More information

If you want to hear more about this opportunity, we are hosting a drop-in to discuss the project with Artistic Director Jamie Hale on DATE 2025. Book your space for the drop-in here.

Please also read our FAQs below, which contain more information about the programme and what we’re looking for.

Apply to become a Breakthrough artist

To apply, please fill in the below forms by 5pm on DATE 2025:

Application form (with BSL)
Diversity & monitoring form

You can also submit an audio or video file in spoken English or BSL (7 minutes max), or download and send the questions as a Word document to team@cripticarts.org. Please find the Word versions of these forms below:

Word version of application form
Word version of diversity & monitoring form

If you need access support to input answers into the form, we can help out – just email team@cripticarts.org. We’re able to support applicants with transcribing answers on a 1:1 Zoom, but cannot provide or fund individualised access support for applications beyond this, except in exceptional circumstances. If you have any queries about this, please contact us on team@cripticarts.org to discuss.