Taking place at online over August 9 and 23, our Arts Activated 2021 conference proved to be a successful event in terms of informing, connecting and activating hundreds of people involved with Australia’s arts and disability sector.

Making arts, culture and events more accessible for the 20% of Australians who live with disability or who are d/Deaf was the focus of the conference which attracted artists, arts workers, disability advocates, researchers, policymakers and other experts from across the arts, cultural and disability sectors.

The conference was supported by the NSW Government – via Create NSW – as well as a range of local government, corporate, community and media partners. We thank all our sponsors and supporters as well as all our delegates, speakers, presenters and session chairs for helping us set the agenda for the post-COVID recovery of Australia’s arts and cultural sector.

We’re now looking forward to all our delegates taking their learnings with them and working in their own ways to help to ensure Australia’s post-COVID arts and cultural sector gets built back for everyone.

Key Stats

• 2 Days
• 320 delegates and participants
• 70 speakers (70% identifying as people with disability)
• 16 sessions, workshops and events
• 1 accessible virtual conference portal streaming live and pre-recorded content
• 3 different content formats (live closed captioning, Auslan interpretation, audio description)
• 97% of delegates rated the content as excellent, very good or good.
• 94% of delegates rated the speakers as excellent, very good or good.

Program & Session Recordings

Recordings of all Arts Activated 2021 sessions are available on the conference portal for up to 3 months after the conference.

You can view the program, register and view the recordings by visiting: www.artsactivated2021.com

Thank You Everyone!

An event of this size and complexity would not be possible without the expertise, hard work and collaboration of many people and organisations so we’d like to express our thanks for the various contributions that have been made by our speakers, presenters, panellists, programming panel, partners, sponsors and suppliers. Many thanks to all of them for sharing their time, knowledge, expertise and support. And naturally there wouldn’t be a conference without you, our wonderful delegates, so many thanks for coming along and being part of Arts Activated 2021. We hope you all enjoyed your time getting activated! See you again in 2023!.

Production Team
Producer – Accessible Arts
Event Programmer – Hanna Cormick
Production Consultant – Clive McFarland | Small Talk Events
Virtual Conference Producer – Brooke McClune | Touchpoint

Advisory Panel
Caroline Bowditch
Eugenie Lee
Gayle Kennedy
Sofya Gollan
Bruno Booth
Joshua Pether

Principal Partners
NSW Government | Create NSW
Vivid Sydney
Western Sydney University.

Major Partners
City of Sydney
Australian Government Department of Social Services
Sydney Opera House
Australia Council For The Arts
Art Gallery of NSW
Cerebral Palsy Alliance
NSW Trustee & Guardian

Event Partners
Life Without Barriers
Inner West Council
Deaf Society/Deaf Services

Supporting Partners
University of NSW Disability Innovation Institute
Museum & Galleries NSW
Sydney Festival
SBS
Media Super
AI Media

ENDS

Image Description: A compilation of 30 black and white headshots of people participating in online Zoom panels.

Image Description: A compilation of 45 black and white headshots of people participating in online Zoom panels. The Arts Activated 2021 logo is in the centre on the image.