Launchpad Alumni

A development and showcasing opportunity for disabled theatre makers to stage new work.

Launchpad celebrates disabled artists and makers, removed from the pressures and oppressions of being defined by non-disabled people. It builds a world outside narratives of diagnosis and medicalisation. A world in which we can imagine crip pasts and crip futures, in which we can joyfully bring our whole selves, as storytellers, dancers, musicians, magicians, and more.

2025 Launchpad Artists

A head and shoulders picture white femme presenting person with shoulder length brown curly hair. They're wearing a leopard print dress.

Caitlin Magnall-Kearns

Caitlin Magnall-Kearns is a writer from East Belfast known for her warm, witty, and deeply human storytelling that centres often-overlooked experiences of fatness, queerness, and disability. In 2025, her acclaimed radio drama Safe Space aired on BBC Radio 4, earning praise from The Observer, The Sunday Times, The Mail on Sunday, and Radio Times.

Caitlin was selected from over 1,300 applicants to join the BBC Comedy Collective 2024 and also took part in BBC Belfast Voices 2024. Her work spans theatre, audio, and digital formats, with her work being performed at venues including The New Theatre, Dublin, Theatre 503, London and The Lowry, Manchester. She is represented by Kate Haldan Management.

The Ache of It

Set in a seaside B&B in Northern Ireland, The Ache of It follows Simon, a married cab driver with osteoarthritis, and Fiona, a fat, bisexual widow, as they embark on a complex, decade-long affair.

The Ache of It places older, disabled, and fat bodies at the heart of a romantic narrative, exploring themes of desire, guilt, aging, and care with humanity, craic and honesty.

Originally developed as part of Bewley Cafe Theatre’s Percolate Scheme.

Kathrine Payne

Kathrine Payne (they/them) is an award-winning playwright and performer from the North West, whose work spans theatre, clown, and interactive performance. They create bold, form-bending shows that explore identity, connection, and violence with dark humour and surrealism.

Kathrine’s debut solo show plewds premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe to 5* reviews, won Summerhall’s Mary Dick Award 2024, and was shortlisted for Soho Theatre’s Tony Craze Award, Brighton Fringe Award for Excellence, and BingeFringe’s Queer Performance Award.

Kathrine is a founding member of Sweet Beef, a queer theatre company and Pleasance Associate Artists. Sweet Beef’s devised show Crying Shame was a London Borough of Culture Queer Arts Commission and won the Charlie Hartill Award in 2024. Their debut show I Hate It Here was shortlisted for the Les Enfants Terribles Award and has toured the UK twice.

Kathrine trained as an actor at LAMDA, where they received the Lionel Bart Foundation Scholarship and the Stanley Picker Trust Scholarship. They’ve performed at the National Theatre, New Diorama Theatre, Nottingham Playhouse and Oxford Playhouse.

Kathrine works part-time at Clean Break, a theatre company supporting women with experience of the criminal justice system. Outside of theatreland , they perform drag in queer nightlife spaces including Riposte and Duckie—often involving a lot of mess and a lot of food.

Body Job

The number of ‘lonely deaths’ (those undiscovered for weeks or more) is on the rise in the UK. Body Job is a play about death and disconnection, from the perspective of the people who clean up the mess we leave behind.

Body Job follows two cleaners working for a private firm that clean up death sites: old age pensioners, violent crime scenes, they’ve seen it all – until this job. Bodies, shame and violence merge in a messy exploration of the dirty jobs that no one else wants to do.

Tatum Swithenbank

Tatum is a queer, disabled working-class actor, performer, and producer from the midlands based in London. They are influenced by folklore, the entanglement of myth and reality, and how the passing down of stories shapes us. Tatum has performed in theatre shows with CRIPtic Arts, Camden People’s Theatre, and the Roundhouse and has featured in a wide range of creative campaigns. Tatum has produced engaging narratives for BBC Radio 4, Audible, and BBC Sounds, including the award-winning series WITCH. Tatum’s ongoing project, Honey and the Hex, explores the origins, traditions, and intersections of folklore and where they lie today.

As a DEI speaker and consultant, Tatum has collaborated with major names including Dazed, Kew Gardens, and Doc Martens. In 2020, they completed Bloomberg’s Creative Leadership Programme and became a Trustee at the Roundhouse. Named one of The Dots Rising Stars, Tatum is recognised for driving change and inspiring future leaders. They are passionate about community, culture, and accessibility.

REALMS

REALMS is a genre-bending show that shifts through ritual, disability, magick, and belonging. It explores how folklore and the wheel of the year intersect with my existence as a working-class witch living with a progressive disease. This entanglement takes me on a journey through portals where I come across folklore creatures who help guide me on my quest.

Grounded on pagan sabbats, the story unfolds different aspects of the cyclical nature of existence, the creatures and monsters that reside there, and the simple yet complicated nature of life and death. REALMS isn’t just a show but a spell with the audience, one that challenges people to sit with discomfort, to see the awe and magick in the everyday, and to recognise the portals we pass through constantly between body and spirit, memory and myth, reality and lore.

SO SHA

SO SHA is a neurodivergent, alcohol-sober Filipina artist working across songwriting, performance, sound design, and storytelling. Her multidisciplinary practice explores themes of displacement, recovery, and softness as survival, often blending emotional pop, improvisation, and surreal humour.

Born in the Philippines and raised in the energy of underground music spaces, she spent her early adulthood shaping dance floors across Asia and the UK — from promoting Tiësto at sixteen to co-owning a club while still in university. A former world champion figure skater and national cheerleader, her movement roots inform the dynamic, embodied quality of her performances today.

Now alcohol-free and committed to slower, more intentional creative practices, she reimagines live performance as a space for reflection, belonging, and co-creation.

A recipient of the UK Global Talent Visa, SO SHA has performed at venues like Southbank Centre and fabric London. She brings her lived experience of housing instability, sobriety, and cultural hybridity into every project — inviting audiences into sonic spaces where recovery and resistance can coexist.

Pruu the Pidge

I once saw a pigeon building her nest on anti-pigeon spikes. Not confused — committed. Balanced. Soft twigs pressed into metal teeth like it was nothing. I thought: that’s what I’ve been doing my whole life.

This piece is music-led, but it isn’t a concert. It’s more like a quiet ritual. A sonic shelter. Something stitched from stories, rhythms, and the sharp things I never thought I’d survive.

I grew up inside basslines. Co-owned a club before I even knew how to stay. But these days I’m sober, unhoused, and done with pretending that performance has to be spectacle. This is about the in-between moments: the ones you don’t post about, the ones where your voice shakes and you sing anyway.

I don’t know the form yet. I’m not interested in tidy shapes. I’m interested in what happens when you make something tender out of what was meant to keep you out.

There will be music. There will be breath. There will be space for grief, for laughter, for listeners to come as they are. I’m building something strange and gentle and alive. Being at home within ourselves 🩷

2024 Launchpad Artists

A.C. Smith

A.C. Smith is a playwright and songwriter who has won awards from the RSC and Soho Theatre. She has previously developed work with the Bush Theatre, HighTide, the Old Vic, and RADA. She loves exploring the boundary between real life and art, and has a specialism in cross-medium experimentation, collaborating regularly with artists from the worlds of dance, photography, mime, and film.

To Rose On Her 18th Birthday

To Rose On Her 18th Birthday is an autobiographical play, written as a love letter from a mother to her young daughter. Writer A.C. Smith was on maternity leave when she discovered a lump in her breast – which turned out to be cancer. The play explores the life-altering experience of going through cancer treatment as a young mother – and then having to do it all over again when the cancer returned mid-pandemic. When Rose turns 18, she will be able to decide whether she wants to be tested to know whether she carries the genetic mutation that made her mother so prone to getting cancer. This is a play written to speak to her in that moment, ultimately asking the question: how do we live joyfully in the face of uncertainty?

ASYLUM Arts: Stephen Bailey, Theo Angel, Evlyne Oyedoukn, Kat Dulfer

ASYLUM Arts is a CiC company that creates opportunities and platforms neurodivergent/disabled artists. We make work that reinterprets and critiques social perceptions of disability & neurodivergency – subverting mainstream narratives and expectations of disabled-art. ASYLUM work in a collaborative format – centralising different artists dependent on the project.

Previous credits include Surfacing (**** Londontheatre1, VAULT Origins nominee), which will tour nationally in 2024; creative producing the development of FlawBored’s It’s a Motherf**king Pleasure and its runs at VAULT and Soho (***** The Times, Untapped Award winner); Who Plays Who, a comedic critique of cripping up (the Barbican Centre and closing Liberty Festival 2022); Covered in Jam’s That’s Not My Name, which mixes cabaret with structured facilitated discussion to explore the effects of receiving diagnoses of personality disorders (***** National Tour). They also run training schemes and have provided mentoring to various neurodivergent artists.

Autistic as Fuck

Autistic as Fuck is a meta-theatrical piece about autistic performers trying to put on a show about autism. Over the course of the show, internal conflicts underline both the lack of public understanding
about autism but also the complexities and contradictions within such a large group. At its heart (and with a lot of comedy) Autistic as Fuck argues that the ‘tell your story’ show just involves masking in a different way – being pushed into a performance of identity which doesn’t reflect what you feel and maybe, when seen by a non-disabled audience, is harmful. It’s dark, it’s funny, it asks questions about what people laugh at, it’s angry at points but ends optimistically though pointedly emphasising the impact of anti- autistic discrimination in the world.

Stephen Bailey - a white man with blonde hair. Smiling. Wearning a grey T-Shirt in front of a brick wall

Hugh wearing a red top in a blue seated wheelchair is on the left, grinning, with Steve in black setting up
a mic on a stand. Behind them, Sam, in a grey jumper is looking at their notes, and is standing next to a
doorway with light shining out from a projector. You can just see Nat in black taking a photo.

Hugh Malyon and Steve Sowden

Hugh is a disabled artist whose practise bridges space between personal, political and the universal. His creative work aims to directly disrupt categorisation, shifting perceptions of disability towards positive identity, unleashing the power of care as practise. Steve is a neurodivergent, multidisciplinary artist working with live and recorded soundscape, music and voice, to find multi-layered stories with and through the community around him.

Humetheus and the Quest for the Bronze Cloak

Humetheus and the Quest for the Bronze Cloak will see Humetheus in jeopardy, encountering mayhem and myth. Questions on which way to turn or who’s story is being told seem contradictory. As we journey towards the dead end of Paignton Pier, an almost too remarkable tale of heroes and monsters unfolds; will our hero’s insatiable desire to prove his worth divert him from his true destiny? The end is in sight, but never in touching distance. What if we get stuck in a loop of trying, and never find a way home? Have we been here before? Intertwining classical myth with raw and knotty reality, this emotive semi-autobiographical journey take us to the seaside long after the holidays have ended.

Peyvand Sadeghian & Matthew Robinson

Peyvand Sadeghian is a neurodivergent performer and maker from and London native, working across stage and screen. A Goldsmiths College alum and ex-National Youth Theatre GB member, Peyvand is an
Associate artist with Camden People’s Theatre, Nouveau Riche, Tamasha and has undertaken residencies with Barbican Open Lab, and artsdepot through which she’s evolving a multi-disciplinary practice with performance at its core. Previous works include Dual دوگانه (VAULT Festival 2020 Show of the Week, Keep it Fringe 2023 recipient); The Art of Uprising (MENA Arts UK short film); Restless (Terrifying Women).

Matthew Robinson is a neurodivergent visual artist whose experience spans teaching, filmmaking and screen arts, with a particular focus on experimental film and narrative theory. During an arts fellowship & residency in Berlin at Z/KU Center for Art and Urbanistics, Matthew co-created Baden Projekt, a series of installations that combined documentary and projection to create an immersive sensory experience that explored perspectives of nature and the city through the changing state of water and its impact on wellbeing. Other works include Glacial Waters,(Goethe Institut & EU Creative Commission), an experimental film installation using holographic multi-channel projections exploring global warming and the importance of waters from the Bogdanovich Glacier to the city of Almaty, exhibited at Art Bat Fest in
Kazakhstan.

Over the Moon

Over the Moon is a theatrical exploration using immersive projections and original NASA archive material of the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing, to navigate the interplay between awe and despair, along with the search for NASA’s top-secret mental health checklist in the quest for wellness. Using this cultural marker for human progress so deeply embedded into our collective psyche, we ask: What perspective has space travel really given us on our place in the universe, our relationships with each other and in understanding ourselves?

A close-up photograph of Peyvand and Matthew at a Wes Anderson film exhibition. Peyvand on the left is a woman has a blue-tinted bob haircut, septum ring, and is wearing a vintage orange-striped shirt. On the right is Matt, a man with short light coloured hair wearing a tan-coloured shirt.

Ro, a white non-binary person with short black hair, black cropped shirt, jeans and tattoos, and Marcella, a white non-binary person with long ginger hair and a pink cropped shirt and green jeans sit in a black box studio space, holding scripts and smiling at one another.

Marcy Rick & Ro Lewis

Marcella Rick and Ro Lewis are a duo of queer, neurodivergent artists creating work that spans theatre, spoken word, cabaret and stand up comedy. Driven by scouse and northern humour, their work is bold, funny and often chaotic.

A graduate of the Everyman & Playhouse Playwrights Programme, and with previous projects supported by Homotopia and Unity Theatre, Marcella’s recent credits include; Who The F**k is Shakespeare (20 Stories High), Arden Winter Tales (Writer, Box of Tricks) and Sober Curious (CRIPtic Arts).

Currently part of the Everyman & Playhouse Young Writers Programme, and previously supported by Unity Theatre and Young Homotopia, Ro’s recent credits include; Potato Milk (Unity Theatre), Lydia Mcmannus & The Red Headed Girl (Hope Mill Theatre), and Femme (Young Everyman & Playhouse) Both regularly curate, host and perform at events for Unusual Art Sourcing Companies Birkenhead Arts Palace, with a focus on new and emerging artists.

Wellness Seminar (Title TBC)

We’re all overworked & underpaid, overloaded and under appreciated, but thank god for workplace wellbeing culture! Who needs work/life balance when we have lunchtime yoga and wellbeing webinars?

On Launchpad, we’re going to pull this culture apart at the seams, and put a spotlight on the inaccessible, uninspiring, proper shit ways that workers are often let down by their employers. For too long now, employers have gotten away with pocketing the profits of their employees’ work – and all we got was this lousy wellbeing seminar.

By satirizing the many World Mental Health days that we, mentally ill disabled artists, have spent being told ‘it’s okay not to be okay’, immediately followed by ‘now get back to work’, we’re going to put
workplace wellbeing culture where it belongs – in the bin.

2023 Launchpad Artists

Jasmin Thien

Jasmin Thien is a fully blind, Bruneian born Chinese actor, writer, spoken word poet and stand-up comedian. She earned a degree in Education, English, Drama and the Arts from Cambridge University. Her work often explores narratives of intersectionality. She is especially keen on approaching difficult subjects in ways that are truthful and nuanced while staying accessible to all.

We Close Our Eyes

We Close Our Eyes is a play exploring memory, loss, inter-generational trauma and what it means to repeatedly start a new life for the sake of the next generation. It takes a raw and sometimes even funny look at how being Chinese means to be stubborn, to be headstrong, to never be afraid to begin again, and above all, to never, ever talk about trauma.

Meet Jasmin

Jessi Parrott

Jessi Parrott is a non-binary, disabled and neurodivergent performer, playwright and poet based in London. When making their own creative work, they are particularly interested in exploring the intersections of their identity, and understanding what it means to navigate the world as a wheelchair user with Cerebral Palsy who is part of the LGBTQIA+ community.

Bumps

Bumps explores the joy and pain of journeys (literal and figurative) towards accepting and embracing your body and brain, when society – and your own mind – tells you that you shouldn’t.

Meet Jessi

Ada Eravama

I’m a Nigerian woman who is visually impaired, based in Manchester. I studied Performing Arts at Hope University, Liverpool. I’m inspired by the creative potential of audio description and believe access tools such as AD and BSL should continually be experimented with to ensure they complement their visual counterparts. I’ve worked with companies such as Leeds Playhouse, Mind the Gap, Extant, DaDaFest, and The National Youth Theatre – as a trainee, performer, assistant director, and Inclusion facilitator. These years of experience have inspired a career in directing and the playful exploration of multi-sensory, access-integrated work.

Fragments

Exploring themes from my Nigerian culture, age, and youth, the piece follows Grace and her grandma who are struggling to connect before something more than personal differences expand the distance between them.

Meet Ada

Ashleigh Wilder

Ashleigh Wilder (they/he) is a Black trans masculine actor-poet-thinker from Yorkshire. They delight in speaking about the unspoken, and as a disabled activist channel multiple disciplines into creating art, facilitating workshops, and educating. Acting credits include: Macbeth (Leeds Playhouse), Brassic (Sky Max), The hatterleys (BBC R4), The Film We Can’t See (BBC Sounds) and Left Behind (Sky Arts).

Touch

On International Women’s Day, a non-binary trans masc person walks into a holistic therapy space for their first ever full-body massage. We watch them navigate introductions to the cis white massage therapist as a Black disabled non-binary person in recovery from a recent sexual assault.

Meet Ashleigh