As part of the annual arebyte Open Screen open call, we invite Open Screen winners Uma Breakdown and Tilly P-M to discuss their commissions alongside Shape Arts creative producer Elinor Hayes, and writer / bodyworker Omikemi.

The discussion will be moderated by arebyte Gallery curator Rebecca Edwards and former arebyte Gallery assistant Emily Roderick. The event discusses arebyte’s Open Screen open call, as well as disability arts programming, funding and access, and the wider context of working in the disability arts space.

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Elinor Hayes is Creative Producer at Shape Arts, a disability-led arts organisation working to remove barriers to creative excellence. Elinor also works on the communications team at Unlimited, the world’s largest commissioning programme for disabled artists, co-lead by Shape Arts and Artsadmin.

Omikemi is a writer and bodyworker based in London. They currently work as a freelance writer for Disability Arts Online and run Heartwood, an online and in-person Black LGBTQIA+ centered bodywork service.

Uma Breakdown is an artist/writer/researcher working around horror studies, feminist literature, and videogames living in the North East of England. In 2020 Uma finished a PhD about The Evil Dead, care, trans* écriture féminine, disaster, and additionally presented a plant horror RPG at Kim? Contemporary Art Centre, Riga/Latvia; a video game about sleeping on the ground next to animals for FACT, Liverpool/UK; and a short story about SSRIs and Artaud for Ma Bibliothèque.

Between Glasgow and the Isle of Skye, Tilly P-M is interested in queering play and how this materialises within the blur of physical and digital spaces. They are a shark enthusiast, interested in the cultural horror that surrounds these animals that keep to themselves, this links to their interest in folk mythologies that can be born from routine, they look at how we build our own fantasy of self, objects, and our surroundings in the mundane. Special thanks to Marcel Hirshman for BSL.