The performing arts and the disability sector are built on the radical proposition that every person deserves to be seen.
MJ Wilson works at that intersection — not by accident, but by design. His Master of Arts and Cultural Management at the University of Melbourne (2020) is a deliberate act of inquiry into the Australian performing arts sector may assume.
The Research
Wilson’s minor thesis examined the unwritten rules governing how able-bodied arts workers engage with artists and arts workers with disability in Australia. The unwritten rules — the social codes, assumptions, the invisible hierarchies that determine whose body is considered a working body in a professional creative context.
The research mapped the parameters of engagement between disabled and non-disabled practitioners in the Australian performing arts — asking what the sector quietly expects, what it silently excludes, and what genuine inclusion would actually require if organisations were serious about it rather than merely compliant.
Then and NOW
Wilson now work alongside some of the most compelling emerging artists in the Australian disability arts sector — practitioners whose work is not definable but is made richer by human experience.
MJ Wilson 