Jacqui is a black woman with black waist-length twists, She is wearing a green velvet tracksuit. She is sitting in her powered wheelchair and singing into a microphone with her eyes closed.

Incubate

A leadership development programme for disabled people creating cultural change in the arts.

Disabled people in the arts are carving new ground and leading change, as individuals, or running small organisations. Successfully leading projects, organisations, campaigns, and movements requires an understanding of everything from brand and pitch to finance and project management.

Incubate takes Jamie’s journey and the development of CRIPtic, and supports four emerging disabled arts leaders or organisations through everything they had to learn – from successes to failures and mistakes to experiments.

Key information
Who we’re looking for
What the programme involves
Programme dates
Payment
More information/FAQs
Apply to become an Incubate member (Now closed for 2026)

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: Monday 20 April
Fee: As a mentoring and development scheme, this programme is not paid. It is free to attend and CRIPtic will cover the access costs associated with joining the programme

Who we’re looking for

Incubate is a leadership programme for four UK-based emerging disabled* cultural leaders.

We’re looking for disabled people leading change or building small organisations in the arts – people developing and communicating ideas and making an impact. The impact could be sector-wide or community-specific, as long as you’re adding to a shared ecosphere of disabled people and organisations.

*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 the programme involves

Incubate is an 8-month programme of monthly peer-facilitated sessions. These are structured and led by CRIPtic, but participants will be expected to prepare and present from their own experience and expertise at most sessions. Incubate invests in individual leaders – even if you’re leading an organisation made up of a team of people, the same person is expected to attend each session.

Peer-faciliated sessions will all 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.

Programme dates

Incubate sessions will be held on the following Mondays, from 6pm–8.30pm and including a 15-minute break:

Monday 20 April
Monday 11 May
Monday 1 June
Monday 29 June
Monday 6 July
Monday 3 August
Monday 14 September
Monday 28 September
Monday 12 October
Monday 26 October
Monday 9 November
Monday 23 November

Payment

As a mentoring and development scheme, this programme is not paid. It is free to attend and CRIPtic will cover access costs associated with joining the online programme sessions as required, e.g. a notetaker, BSL interpreters, etc.

More information

Artistic Director Jamie Hale held an online Q&A on Tuesday 24 February. Unfortunately, due to technical issues, we don’t have a complete live recording of the event but Jamie talks through the programmes and what we’re looking for in the video below.

You can also view the slides from the Q&A here:

If you have questions regarding applying or how the programmes work, you can always email artists@cripticarts.org.

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 Incubate member

Applications for our 2026 programme have now closed. We aim to be back in touch with all applicants by the end of March 2026.

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.