Sandra Alland

Sandra Alland (they/them or just ‘San’) experiments with form and integrated access in writing, film, performance and interdisciplinary art. San lives in Glasgow, and retains ties to Edinburgh, Toronto/Tkaronto (Dish With One Spoon treaty territory) and Cobourg (Williams Treaties First Nations).

San is interested in language and translation, mourning, and archive. Their work explores feminist, queer, gendered, classed and disabled politics / poetics. San is committed to slowness, and to their communities thriving beyond ‘diversity crumbs’ from arts institutions.

Birds of Paradise Theatre Company awarded San a Locked World Commission 2021-22, to write a multimedia essay with creatively-embedded access. The essay, “Writing from the Groin: How Non-disabled CisHet Monied White People Lock Themselves Into Mediocrity”, has text, alt-text, plain language, captioned video ‘footnotes’, audio and BSL. It’s forthcoming in autumn 2022.

San’s most recent online performance was at Glasgow International 2021 of their poem, “Audience”, with BSL performance from Bea Webster. San received a Disability Arts Online Commission 2021 to co-create a multimedia zine on queer disabled grief with Etzali Hernández. The duo also produced a podcast on memorialisation.

In late 2019, Proper Tales Press published San’s second chapbook of fiction, Anything Not Measurable Is Not Real. They were awarded a 2020 Digital Originals grant from Canada Council for the Arts to create an audiobook and film-stories of the chapbook. San has received story commissions from British Council and Manchester’s Comma Press, and features in international anthologies and magazines including The Deaf Poets Society. Author of three poetry books, San co-edited the multimedia UK anthology Stairs and Whispers: D/deaf & Disabled Poets Write Back. San’s commissioned essays appear in The Bi-ble Volume 2 (Monstrous Regiment), Imaginary Safe House (Hamilton Arts & Letters / Frog Hollow Press DisAbility Series), and Kenny Fries’s Disability Futures in the Arts (Wordgathering).

San directs and edits documentaries, poetry films, and hybrid projects. Their short films have screened internationally at festivals including Entr’2 Marches (Cannes), San Francisco Transgender Film Festival, and Queer City Cinema (Regina). In 2016-17, San’s short story with film, “Equivalence“, featured live onstage / onscreen at Barbican (Transpose), Edinburgh Filmhouse, and Summerhall (Anatomy Arts). From 2015 to 2017, San was commissioned by The Viewfinder Project to co-create five short documentaries about disabled and Deaf UK artists.

San curates independent film, performance and visual arts. Collaborations include Oska Bright (Brighton) / Glasgow Short Film Festival, BFI Flare (London), Edinburgh Filmhouse / Film Hub Scotland, Forest Café (Edinburgh), The Theatre Centre (Toronto), Theatre Passe Muraille (Toronto), and Scotland’s accessible queer and trans arts project, Cachín Cachán Cachunga!