Congratulations to the six artists selected for the 2026 Accessible Arts and Bundanon Artist-In-Residence Program: Daniel Bartholomaeus, Inez Playford, Victoria Singh-Thompson, Hope Disher, Christopher Bryant and Allison Reynolds.

Each year, Accessible Arts partners with Bundanon to present a residency program for artists with disability or who are d/Deaf from NSW and the ACT. This prestigious program comprises a week-long residency in at the renowned Bundanon Estate. This Artist-in-Residence program is the largest of its kind in Australia, making it highly sought after by artists nationally.

We’d like to thank everyone who applied for this competitive opportunity, and thanks to our donors and supporters for helping to make this unique initiative possible. As an important stepping stone in the careers of many successful Australian artists, this annual program is an incredibly valuable creative and career development opportunity for artists with disability.

These residencies will take place from 21 – 27 September 2026 and will make a big difference for these six talented artists:

Daniel Bartholomaeus

Daniel Bartholomaeus (DanBartArt) is a 23-year-old emerging artist, mental health advocate and proud neurodivergent individual with lived experience of autism, ADHD and mental ill-health.

Daniel is the 2025 ACT Young Australian of the Year, the 2023 Young Canberra Citizen of the Year (Arts and Multimedia), and a recipient of the ACT Chief Minister’s Inclusion Award. He has appeared on Seasons 2 and 3 of the ABC television series The Assembly. One of Daniel’s artworks was presented to The Queen of Denmark by Her Excellency the Governor-General of Australia, while another hangs in Government House – From Assembly student to commissioned artist (Daniel’s dream comes true: The Assembly, ABC iview).

Through his art, Daniel advocates for inclusion, self-expression and empowerment, particularly for neurodivergent people, people with disability and underrepresented communities. He is currently studying a Bachelor of Visual Arts at the Australian National University and shares his work through DanBartArt and social media.

About Daniel’s Project:
“During the Bundanon residency, I plan to create a body of work inspired by the natural environment, atmosphere, legacy and sensory experience of Bundanon. As a neurodivergent artist, I am interested in responding intuitively to place, exploring how light, texture, space, and emotion can be translated through drawing and painting. Through observation, experimentation, and reflection, I will develop visual responses to the landscape and environment and the feelings it evokes. Bundanon will provide the dedicated time and place to explore new ideas, deepen my engagement with other artists and expand the ways I communicate emotion and connection through my art.”

Inez Playford

Inez Playford is a queer and disabled writer, director and access consultant. She graduated from AFTRS with a Masters in Directing. Inez’s directorial and screenwriting debut ‘Rehabilitating’ premiered at Sydney Film Festival and screened at St Kilda Film Festival Flickerfest International Film Festival and has been acquired by SBS for broadcast and SBS on demand.

Inez was awarded the Stella Young Award and a Createability Mentorship with SBS in 2025. She is also currently a part of the Australian Writer’s Guild First Break Program. Inez always prioritises the inclusion of disabled creatives and finds innovative ways to make film-sets more accessible.

About Inez’s Project:
“Throughout my residency, I’ll be writing a first draft of The Exchange, a science-fiction feature film exploring disability, identity, and belonging. The story follows Morrie, a disabled woman who volunteers for a revolutionary program that allows participants to leave their bodies behind and inhabit a new life in another world. Believing she will finally experience life free from the barriers she faces every day, Morrie eagerly accepts the opportunity. The film challenges traditional ideas about disability and highlights the social model of disability in a new and creative way. I’m really keen to get feedback from fellow artists on the residency to ensure an intersectional perspective on disability through the writing process.”

Victoria Singh-Thompson

Victoria Singh-Thompson (she/they) is a queer, Hard-of-Hearing Australian filmmaker of Fijian-Indian descent. Their 2020 short film ‘Don’t Forget To Go Home’ was selected for Melbourne International Film Festival Accelerator Lab, Outfest Fusion, Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles and Flickerfest. Her latest short, ’14 in February’, funded by Screen NSW’s Screenability Film Fund, premiered in Official Competition at the 70th Sydney Film Festival and internationally at Palm Springs International ShortFest, was a Vimeo Staff Pick, and won Gold at the Young Director Awards.

A graduate of AFTRS, Victoria completed a Screen Australia Director’s Attachment on the SBS/Easy Tiger series Four Years Later under Fadia Abboud. She is developing her debut feature New Year, an eco-horror, with support from Screen NSW, and expanding ’14 in February’ into a feature through Torino Film Lab – Next 2026. She was selected for the 2024 Melbourne International Film Festival Accelerator Lab and 2025 Zürich Film Festival Academy, where she won the pitch competition with ‘New Year’.

About Victoria’s Project:
‘New Year’ is an eco-horror feature following four women trapped together in the Blue Mountains during a catastrophic bushfire, forced to confront each other and themselves as the landscape turns against them. It’s the unknowable landscape of ‘Picnic at Hanging Rock’ meets the survivalist friendship of ‘The Descent’. During my residency, I’ll be working on the second draft, focusing on character detailing and the psychological dimensions of the story in relation to environment and landscape.”

Hope Disher

Christopher Bryant

Christopher Bryant is an award-winning playwright, performer, and access consultant. He has worked with a range of companies including Griffin Theatre, Sydney Theatre Company, Merrigong Theatre Co., and ATYP. In 2024 he was a participant in Australian Plays Transform’s writers’ group ‘Write Together, Rise Together‘ for playwrights with disability, and in 2025 was one of three playwrights chosen for the Griffin Studio. He’s had plays produced around Australia, in London and Omaha, and completed his Ph.D. in playwriting & disability at Monash University, under the supervision of Jane Montgomery Griffiths (2020).

About Christopher’s project:
Christopher will be redrafting and dramaturgically interrogating his new play. ‘Parallel Play’ is a comedy about a young man at theatre school who one day wakes up in hospital, having survived a violent car crash. As he comes to terms with an acquired brain injury, he’s visited by ghosts of theatre history’s ableist past, and confronts an ableist present. Calling on the absurdity of Beckett’s ‘Happy Days’, ‘Parallel Play’ explores the ways two people can affect and change each other from bed, asking its audience to question the societal messaging we receive around disability. But, like, funny.

Allison Reynolds

Allison Reynolds is a multidisciplinary abstract artist and writer who explores social justice themes (in particular she is passionate about environmental and disability issues) in her works.

Working with a range of mediums from handmade paints and pigments, making land art, video pieces, and experimental mark making with tools such as date stamps Allison is more interested in the materials and process than the finished work. Allison is self-taught and has come to art in the last ten years after a career in IT and small businesses. After focusing on creating a group for disabled artists in her local town in 2017, she went on to open a not-for-profit social enterprise gallery in that town in 2020 and managed it for several years until the end of 2025 when she left to concentrate solely on her own art career.

Her work has been included in group exhibitions in the USA and Australia and she has exhibited solo in Melbourne and regional NSW. Her early work “Pilliga’s Progress’ won second prize at the Outback Archies in 2017.

About Allison’s project:
“Georgia O’Keefe said it takes time to see. Using ochre that I have gathered and made from my local geology, mineral paints, and recyclable single egg containers, I will introduce psuedo-organic shapes into the Bundanon landscape. My plan is to record the feelings these temporary visitors to the landscape inspire in me using traditional art products, drone footage, video footage, photographs, rubbings, journaling, etc. I will remove them from the landscape and leave it as if I was never there. At the end I hope to have many versions of what I took time to see to take with me back to the Pilliga to use in my art there.”

About Bundanon

Bundanon is a place for creativity and community inspired by the landscape.

Bundanon is a place for creativity and community inspired by the natural landscape. As a centre for the arts and learning, we support the development of creative practice across all disciplines. Bundanon supports new work, research and collaborations by artists and researchers from around the world.

Set across 1000 hectares of wildlife refuge on the Country of the Dharawal and Dhurga language groups, Bundanon welcomes artists and visitors alike.

Arthur and Yvonne Boyd opened the Bundanon complex in 1998 as a gift to the Australian people. Their vision was to provide an inspirational haven for artists of every discipline and in all stages of their careers. Our programs and offerings reflect the culmination of the Boyds’ vision for Bundanon as a place for people to create, connect, learn and where every facet of the arts and sciences can come together.

ENDS

Image Description: Headshots of the artists selected for the 2026 Accessible Arts and Bundanon Artist Residency Program. There are six vertical columns with a headshot in each column, featuring from left to right: Allison Reynolds, Daniel Bartholomaeus (photo by Salty Dingo Photography), Inez Playford (photo by Andrew Fraser), Victoria Singh-Thompson (photo by Seiya Taguchi), Hope Disher and Christopher Bryant (photo by Jasmin Simmons).