Meet our Embark Project Board

Meet the people who’ll be helping shape our new project, Embark!

I’m desperate to completely overrun this industry with disabled people

Miggy Barker

Embark is our brand new year long programme where disabled young people with high physical access are helped to kick-start creative careers. From 2026-2030, CRIPtic Arts will be supporting two writers and two directors each year to create new, paid work for the stage; bringing fresh ideas to life. Supported by Youth Music’s Shift the Scene Fund.

Lozza Gilbert

Lozza Gilbert is an award-winning northern, trans & disabled performer, consultant and writer. They are a member of the National Youth Theatre working across video games, audio drama and stage, and use their background in advocacy to push for a more accessible industry and advise game developers on the movement, story and design of disabled characters. Lozza is also working towards a career in performance capture as a mobility aid user, and is passionate about increasing authentic disability representation in games. As a writer, they discuss the games they play, disability and performance, and after performing their first self-written piece ‘Not a person’ in 2024, are now hoping to develop their own play and video game.

Lozza recently worked with Cast Doncaster on the R&D for a new play, and their upcoming acting work includes playing lead character Reflex in Rusty Quill audio drama ‘Rez High’, Dee in Eastshade Studios’ next game ‘Songs of Glimmerwick’, and a supporting role in Hipflask Games’ debut title ‘The Bureau of Fantastical and Arcane Affairs’. They were nominated for Best Non-Binary Voiceover Performance at the 2026 One Voice Awards.

They graduated with a degree in Astrophysics from Newcastle University in 2023, and worked as Disability Officer at the Student’s Union and a member of the NHS Youth Forum while studying. Since then, Lozza has worked with charities, delivered talks and panels and hosted events, and as a result were awarded Influencer of the Year by Sense in 2022, and a Pride of Newcastle University Award in 2023.

Simi Roach

Simi Roach is a Jamaican-British actor, writer, and Disability justice activist. Their work explores Disability culture, history, and innovative Disabled representation through both written fiction and live performance. Simi has also performed as a spoken word poet, public speaker and educator, and is both an experienced stage and screen actor. They are queer and use they/them pronouns.

Simi has both written and starred in the sold out two-hour solo show Cirque du Handicap which has been staged at Bloomsbury Theatre, Soho Theatre, and St. Paul’s in Cambridge. They’ve performed in a production of Ayo as the titular main character at the Bolton Octagon, and a Dutch production of Romeo and Juliet produced by Ilse Wouters. For three years, Simi has been a member of Vital Xposure’s VX Labs’ artist panel where they work with them on numerous theatre projects.

Their screen credits include main character roles in both the short film But Still We Move and De Bushalte, as well as background roles in the Dutch CBS show Bestseller Boy and the Dutch Netflix film The Takeover.

Anna Landre

Anna Landre is an activist, researcher, and artist. She works across disability rights, justice, and culture, moving between systemic critique and creative expression to interrogate nondisabled/Normate culture. She is drawn to disability arts as a site where culture is remade: where crip aesthetics, interdependence, and access are understood as generative. Her practice spans fields including humanitarian response, social care, transport access, human-computer interaction, and more.

Anna is a PhD Candidate at the UCL Global Disability Innovation Hub, where she studies Disabled People’s Organizations (DPOs) globally. She is also the Global Research and Response Advisor at The Partnership for Inclusive Disaster Strategies, where in Ukraine she spearheaded the first-ever wartime evacuation mechanism for disabled people. Anna’s work has been featured in The New York Times, Washington Post, Forbes, Vogue, and more.

As much as she is a maker, Anna is a connector, curator, and committed audience member in the disability arts space. She brings to Embark a grounding in disability studies, a researcher’s instinct for measuring impact through crip-centred methods, and a belief that art is key to addressing the root causes of ableism. Anna is also an American immigrant to the UK who enjoys facilitating the exchange of crip ideas across the Atlantic.

Miggy Barker

Miggy Barker is a multidisciplinary artist whose work blends intense realism with surrealism, using extended metaphor and unexpected imagery to explore the realities of being disabled, trans and queer.

Their practice spans theatre, performance and visual art. They are particularly interested in using absurdity, fantasy and weirdness as tools for communicating complex lived realities.

They are co-producer of Drag on the Borders, a drag performance fundraiser, and are currently developing Standing Ovation, a solo show exploring the pressure to perform to survive as a disabled person. They are also an emerging Director, and mostly recently worked as Assistant Director on The Acts 2026 (CRIPtic Arts, Bristol Old Vic). They first began their journey as a theatremaker through their training with Above the Nerve Theatre.

A collage of four headshots with text under reading "Meet our Embark Project Board" followed by the CRIPtic Arts and Shift the Scene Logos. The headshots are as described:
Headshot of Lozza, a 24 year old, white non-binary person with a bright pink mullet wearing a funky shirt that is green, blue and black. They're smiling like they're mid-laughter.
Simi. A dark-skinned Black person stares seriously at the camera. They’re wearing a colourful patterned headwrap, hoop earrings, and a white t-shirt as they sit in a wheelchair in their dining room.
Anna, a white woman in her twenties with long dark hair, smiles at the camera.
Miggy, a white non binary person with orange and blue hair smiles at the camera. They have purple eyeshadow and are wearing patterned red and yellow and brown dungarees, with a grey long sleeve shirt. They have a frog earring that's balanced on a tiny pumpkin

Here’s what they had to say about being on the board:

I can’t wait to take on a more formal role supporting disabled artists to make their best work. The arts are a key way that culture gets questioned and remade, and disabled people are well-positioned to be at the forefront of such processes. I hope to help artists root their work deeper in disabled thought and think of creative ways to make and measure impact.

Anna Landre

I’m incredibly excited to become an Embark Project Board member because it means being a part of helping to uplift the voices of young writers and directors who use wheelchairs. As a wheelchair-user in the theatre industry myself, I recognise the constant barriers that we are forced to face. I struggle to see myself reflected in the creatives who get a chance to bring their artistic vision to life, even if their vision includes characters who are wheelchair-users. Training opportunities often aren’t accessible, or the price of getting us through the door is usually seen as ‘too high’.

Disabled writers and directors have invaluable contributions to make to the theatre industry – it is our innovation and creativity that continues to challenge the expected norms of theatre and push the artform forward. It is not the case that it would be ‘ideal’ for wheelchair-users to have more opportunities, it is in fact essential that space is created for us to be supported to reach our full potential. Which is exactly what CRIPtics will be achieving through Embark.

I am truly honoured to help provide support for the next generation of wheelchair-user writers and directors with CRIPtic. It is our time.

Simi Roach

As a working-class disabled creative there are very limited opportunities in the arts that are both affordable and fully accessible, nevermind ones that are exclusively for us and built by us. After training with National Youth Theatre last year thanks to bursary support and my course being accessible for me, I’ve truly realised how essential these opportunities are, but also how much more widespread and informed by a variety of experiences and backgrounds they need to be. So I’m mega excited to join the Embark Project Board and assist in designing such a programme for a bunch of young wheelchair-using creatives!!

I’m especially looking forward to collaborating with and learning from the other board members, and seeing the work of the selected scriptwriters & directors. In these politically shit times, we need projects like Embark more than ever that value us as the professionals that we are and give us full creative freedom to tell whatever stories we fancy telling. Ones that don’t confine us to only talking about disability, or expect us to work for free or train organisations on access when things go wrong. No more patting us on the head for being the good little non-disruptive disabled.

Lozza Gilbert

You can read more about the project here: