Rachel, a white woman with short cropped hair wearing a skeletal skirt with syringes hooked around, stands looking out at the audience with arms raised and a triumphant look. Behind her is a bright painting out of focus.

Breakthrough

A one-year commission for a mid or late-career creative to break the barriers to mainstream success.

Breakthrough is about disabled artists succeeding in 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.

Key information
Who we’re looking for
What we want to support
What the programme involves
Payment
More information
Apply to become a Breakthrough artist

Key information

Applications open: Friday 13 February at 12pm
Applications close: Friday 13 March at 5pm
Informal chats/interviews: w/c Monday 23 March, by arrangement

Please note these chats are for candidates whose applications we would like to know more about. You may be accepted onto the programme without a chat with the team, or we may invite you to talk to us about your idea if we feel we need further clarification.

Programme start date: April 2026
Award: £6,000

Who we’re looking for

We are looking for a mid- to late-career disabled* creative with a clear idea of what lies between them and mainstream success, and how a commission and partnership with CRIPtic Arts would help them achieve that.

*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 see our FAQs.

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 lighting plan for part of a show, a showreel archive or portfolio of your work, a pitch for a book or novel, 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.

What the programme involves

The chosen creative 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, paid for by CRIPtic. 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

The Breakthrough artist 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 to pay for six sessions with an industry mentor of their choice.

More information

If you want to hear more about this opportunity, we are hosting a Q&A to discuss our programmes with Artistic Director Jamie Hale on Tuesday 24 February, 1-2pm. Book your space here.

We also have a limited number of 1:1 sessions available with our team on the afternoon of Tuesday 24 March, reserved for disabled people from groups who are underrepresented in the arts: wheelchair users who are unable to work in spaces that aren’t wheelchair accessible; People of the Global Majority; people from working class backgrounds/working class people; and people with parenting or caregiving responsibilities (including parents and guardians of young children).

Book 1:1 info sessions for wheelchair users between 2pm-3pm here: https://calendly.com/cripticarts/cp26-wu
Book 1:1 info sessions for People of the Global Majority between 3pm-4pm here: https://calendly.com/cripticarts/cp26-gm
Book 1:1 info sessions for working class people between 2pm-3pm here: https://calendar.app.google/RhkBQX5rVSnPDacD8
Book 1:1 info sessions for people who have caregiving responsibilities (including parents and guardians to young children) between 3pm-4pm here: https://calendar.app.google/LRv5K7Th2vKRAhFNA

Note: the number of sessions for each group is limited by team capacity. Please only book into a 1:1 session if you identify as being part of the group described.

You can also read our FAQs here, which contain more information about the programmes and what we’re looking for.

We have also created a guide to our friendly application process here.

Apply to become a Breakthrough artist

To apply, please fill in the below forms by 5pm on Friday 13 March:

Application form (with BSL): https://forms.gle/2AeKHoA4jevuKMTB6

Diversity & monitoring form: https://forms.gle/ucDW4F1jMZfzoGS18

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 artists@cripticarts.org. Please find the Word versions of these forms below:

Word version of application form: Saved here

Easy read application form: Saved here

Word version of diversity & monitoring form: Saved here

For information about what we’ve put in place to make our application process as accessible as possible, see information about our friendly application process.

Feedback

We will always try to be transparent about where we can offer feedback and where we can’t to applicants who we don’t take onto our programmes that year. For 2026, if we have interviewed a creative about the programme, we will offer feedback via email on request.

If we didn’t take your application through to the interview stage, we will not be able to offer feedback, but we will create an overall guidance document, explaining why we took certain work and why we couldn’t take other pieces forward, and publish this on our website.