Breakthrough

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

For creatives who are ready to break into the mainstream. 

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.

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. 

*By disabled, we mean “all people who face disableist [including audist or neurotypist] barriers”, or “people who identify themselves as disabled and/or are identified by others as 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

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

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

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

We will upload the transcript & slides from our artist Q&A Session to the FAQs page.

Apply to become a Breakthrough artist

To apply, please fill in the below forms by 5pm on Sunday 11 May 2025:

Application form (with BSL)
Diversity & Monitoring Form (with bsl)

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.

Don’t worry about neuronormative applications and what you think is “expected” in terms of spelling, grammar and structure – your application will be read by a disabled team and will be assessed on its creative or organisational merits. Just tell us about the things we’ve asked you to tell us about, in the way that works best for you.

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