[Banner is the word Justice with roots growing out of it and intermingling.]

Justice Producer's Collaborative

Don't do it alone. Get the support you need to sustain your practice.

Welcome to the Justice Producer's Collaborative, where marginalized artists, cultural workers, and IDEA practitioners build sustainable strategies together.

This crucial collaborative space is for members who:

• Have 3-5 years professional experience in their fields).
• Come from marginalized communities.
• Are setting goals for themselves and their movement.
• Are actively creating justice outcomes for marginalized communities.
• Need culturally-competent peer support.

The Justice Producer's Collaborative is co-organized by Calling Up Justice and The Curiosity Paradox.

[Event graphic shows spoons grow out of the earth alongside purple flowers. Created by The Curiosity Paradox.]

About this event

How might artistic research, with its multi-sensory and open-ended ways of learning and experiencing, promote more access than traditional academic formats? How could access negotiations themselves constitute artistic research? How could thinking through the lens of access expand and deepen artistic research? What kinds of possibilities open up when questions around disability and the arts are reimagined in terms of pleasure, and an expanded spectrum of experience? What is possible when frictions between institutions, artists, audiences, and funders are generative sources of artistic research? With its many multi-sensory media, and material-spatial possibilities, how can art help to facilitate, shape, and hold embodied knowledge?

Drawing on each of their practices, Lucy Cotter and The Curiosity Paradox (Johnathan Paradox Lee and Grant Miller) will open up some of these lines of discussion, taking as their departure point organic overlaps in their thinking, emerging questions, and a shared wish to co-imagine with a wider community.

The Curiosity Paradox, Grant Miller and Jonathan Paradox Lee, are Access Artists who are queer, non-binary, Disabled people with white settler ancestry. They are organizers of the current iteration of Disability Representation (DisRep) and the co-creators of Threshold Practice, an assistive technology for theater, meetings, and any time two or more human or non-human people spend time with each other.

Lucy Cotter is a writer, artist, and curator whose practice engages with art as a form of knowledge and a site for radical cultural transformation. She holds a PhD in Cultural Analysis focused on decolonizing curatorial practice. Irish-born, she is based in Portland, where she is a project resident at Stelo Arts and Culture Foundation, 2023-24.

This is a newly-launched program. Thank you for bearing with any technical difficulties you may encounter. Please contact [email protected] if you need support.

Core Principles of the Justice Producer's Collaborative

The Justice Producers Collaborative is guided by principles of Disability Justice, Transformative Justice, Clear Communication, Mutual Support, and Ecosystem Thinking.

Disability Justice

We honor the 10 Principles of Disability Justice, centering interdependence, access, and collective care, recognizing that accessibility is a practice of consent. 

• The 10 Principles of Disability Justice inform our choices
• Accessibility is a practice of consent—respect people's needs for access, pacing, and participation.
• We center interdependence, access, and collective care.

Transformative Justice

We handle conflict with bravery, prioritizing repair, accountability, and integrity. 

• Handle conflict with bravery—address harm, seek repair, and practice better ways of handling challenges.
• We center consent, accountability, and integrity

Clear Communication

Communication is direct, honest, and inclusive of multiple ways of knowing and expressing.

• Be direct, honest,  and constructive in communication.
• We honor multiple ways of knowing, expressing, and processing information.

Mutual Support

We trust and value all lived experiences, rejecting identity policing while fostering contribution and connection. 

• Trust people’s identities and lived experiences—no policing of who is “enough” of anything
• We  contribute to the collaborative
• We honor all lived identities and competencies they bring, Like nature, our collaborative thrives through diversity, flexibility, and interconnection.

Ecosystem Thinking and Adaptive Agreements

Inspired by biomimicry, we embrace resilience, reciprocity, and adaptation, refining our practices collectively as we grow.

• Inspired by biomimicry, we grow like ecosystems—learning from natural patterns of resilience, reciprocity, and adaptation.
• If a new agreement is needed, propose it.
• We breathe, we adapt, we refine our practices together.