Taking inspiration from over 20 talented neurodivergent artists, conference planning committee member Benji Hanon of Kingsborough Community College built three incredible spaces that encompass a vast array of neurodivergent creative expression. From the real to the unreal, organic to digital, and everything between, the neurodivergent experience is anything but mundane. Check out the galleries throughout the day and be sure tune in to Benji's session at 4:00 PM when we close out the day with a full virtual tour!

Tip: Click the arrows in the bottom right corner of each gallery for fullscreen mode, and use the numbered annotations to navigate from piece to piece.

Neurodivergent Experience Gallery

Poetry & Prose

click image to view

Artists

 

Adam Wolfond Poetry and sculpture

Keynote Adam Wolfond is an author, artist, graduate student, and co-founder/co-director of dis assembly: neurodivergent arts collective. He is a non-speaking autistic poet who uses his iPad text-to-speech application to communicate, and is interested in neurodiverse ways of studying and collaborating. His poetry has been published by Milkweed Editions and been featured by The New York Times Magazine, Poetry Foundation, and NPR. Adam is grateful to be autistic. 

Adam's Site

 

Avi Krishan Music

Avi is currently a college student at the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins, studying film and video game scoring in the Music for New Media Major. They are on the Autism Spectrum, have ADHD and also Tourettes Syndrome. 

Avi's Site

Cara DiFiore Fine art

Cara Difiore is a 23 year old inspiring artist, author and advocate for people with disabilities from Long Island, NY who has been creating since she was a young girl. She is also autistic. She uses mixed media, canvas, cards, and she also makes jewelry. She creates not just because she enjoys doing it but to cope and it's one of her ways of expressing herself.

 

Cas Weinbren Music

Cas Weinbren, is an award winning, multi-million streamed, modern musician, keyboardist, composer, music producer and project manager. Cas also has Asperger's Syndrome, however, has used this God's gift to continue to pursue the music art form and is fighting for transparency in the streaming music space. Cas's credits include Disney+ Zombies 3, songs with hip hop legends Statik Selektah, Action Bronson, Joey Bada$$, Black Thought, 2 Chainz, country legend Stephen Wrench, ASCAP Award winner Kari Kimmel, spiritual organization Jesus Took Our Scars, broadway composer Randy Klein, film producer Willard Morgan and also manages an independent label See See Beats. 

Cas's Site

Chaya Nachum Poetry

Graduate of Kingsborough College (AA, Liberal Arts, English Concentration) and Brooklyn College (BFA, Creative Writing). Freelance writer/lyricist. Currently working on both a poetry collection and several children's books. 

 

David Choi Fine art

"I love to doodle and make arrangements." David turns his full attention to pattern arrangement. His exceptional talent turns into a playful and whimsical art.

 

David Karasow Fine art

David is a lifelong artist who is on the Autism Spectrum. David loves to joke that he has “Artisim”.  David’s art is influenced by factors such as Nature, Comic Books, Science Fiction, and Comedy.   David attended Temple University: Tyler School of Art (BFA). He loves to take nature walks and look for turtles.  He has lived all over the Bucks County and Philadelphia areas (Elkins Park, Center City, Levittown, and Bristol).

David's Site

 

Emma Waldspurger Collage

Emma Waldspurger is a twice exceptional (2e) mixed-media artist with a vibrant aesthetic based in Belmont, CA. Her work centers around themes of neurodiversity, feminism, mental health, and education. Her work acts as a form of creative expression, as well as a personal therapeutic technique.

Born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, Emma has been a self-taught artist from childhood. She graduated from Scripps College with a B.A. in psychology, and recently earned her CA Child Development Site Supervisor Permit. When she is not professionally advocating for progressive educational reform or teaching in early childhood classrooms, she is pursuing her passion for the arts through collage, photography, and painting. She is also a strong supporter of the importance of art in a fulfilling and flourishing education.

Emma's Site

 

Jimmy Ryou Fine art

Jin Delos Santos Digital art

Jin is an alum of CUNY Hunter College and a member of the Project REACH participatory research group at CUNY College of Staten Island. He is passionate about writing, literature, autistic self-advocacy, and manga, all of which inform multiple aspects of his work.

Joshua Hong Fine art

Working with joyful delight, he especially enjoyed the texture of the paint and loved mixing colors. The different textures and distinct shades of his painting and artwork uplift and refresh us. 

Kristi Robinson Fine art

 

Krzysztof Mathews Sculpture & digital art

Krzysztof Mathews spent his early years fascinated by all things science fiction and fantasy related, whether they be the armor of mediaeval times, the robots of a near future, or the fearsome Kaiju monsters of Japanese movies. He developed a keen interest in the making of scale models, props and effects for the film industry. These subjects and themes would lead him to the Rhode Island School of Design where he majored in traditional illustration, and then to graduate school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he would be introduced to computer graphics.

His work takes two forms, the tangible and the virtual. The physical work is an assemblage of found materials including discarded tools, toys, technology and appliances, reshaped and rejoined to create new compositions and arrangements. These elements are joined with a combination of welding, mechanical joinery, and various adhesives. They may take the form of characters, machine-based life forms, or even mythical beings. Many of these smaller characters often take on a new dimension when he uses CAD software to reinterpret them as three-dimensional models in the computer, at which point they become actors for a series of stories and dramatic scenes. Once rendered, he redraws these scenes in Adobe Illustrator so that they become vector graphics, which can then be reprinted to any scale with full image quality. 

These two parallel methods are ultimately complementary parts of a larger creative process that continues to engage, challenge and inspire him. He lives and works in Rhode Island, where he teaches design in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Rhode Island.

Krzysztof's Site

Liam Mandelbaum Poetry

A piece named "Justice is Impossible" as you can see. I wrote it during a time when I was bombarded with news of injustice in the world; when it was so obvious that the innocent were suffering, yet it was the systems mankind had made that were doing the oppression, this is what I wrote when it all broke down in my mind. But do not be too pessimistic, as I learned afterwards, as long as your voice does not match, there still might be hope left.

 

Mahlia Amatina Fine art

Visionary artist Mahlia Amatina invites you into a multi-sensory experience of colour, line, shape and form through tactile art that explores the creative side of neurodiversity. Drawing inspiration from the varied landscapes and rich flavours of her international roots and global travels, Mahlia’s visual vocabulary creates a narrative through abstraction. Using acrylic paint, oil sticks, Indian ink, and all manner of mixed media on paper and canvas, Mahlia explodes through traditional boundaries of style and purpose.

After being diagnosed with autism in 2015, Mahlia was inspired to share the unique sensory experiences of life on the autism spectrum through her art. Working around the theme of neurodiversity, Mahlia has transformed her signature style of abstract colourism into a unique, interactive, multi-sensory experience that invites viewers to engage on a level that works for them.

Mahlia has been awarded Arts Council England (ACE) funding several times, including the ‘Developing your Creative Practice’ fund, and has been featured as one of the Top 50 Influential Neurodiverse Women by Women Beyond the Box. Available for talks and collaborative art projects, Mahlia also has a special interest in autism and the workplace and building neurodiverse-friendly workspaces.

Mahlia's Site

Max Devi Sculpture

"I love feeling things through my hands."

Max is an artist who creates art pieces with his hands. His work shows how he feels the world through textures and colors using different hand movements. It is reflected in his art and provides lively and exciting features. 

 

Nicole Corrado Fine art

Nicole is a self taught autistic visual artist based in Southern Ontario, Canada.  

Nicole's Site

Ryan Medlock & Dr Gemma Williams / Figment Arts Digital art & animation

Interview with Ryan about his piece, ‘Bear’:

 

Ryan Smoluk Fine art

Ryan Smoluk is a powerful self-advocate and a seasoned spokesman for Autism Awareness. His art has been showcased internationally. Ryan has accomplished his Fine Arts Degree at the University of Manitoba and was honoured to receive several arts grants including from the Canada Council for the Arts.

Ryan has recently collaborated with composer Justin Morell to create a series of artworks based on Morell’s music album, All Without Words, which was inspired by his non-verbal son with autism. Ryan listened to the music and painted what inspired him. Ryan has continued to work with music and is currently working on a project called Mainly Mozart, collaborating with Mainly Mozart’s Nancy Laturno and the Art of Autism.

Ryan continues to exhibit his artwork in galleries. His artworks feature multi-layered detail which explores the way that Ryan sees the world. Ryan feels that Autism is both a blessing and a curse.

Ryan's Site

 

sarah louise pieplow poetry

Bojack Horseman is a love story to a mad person—as ugly and as real as real love stories get, as joyful and hilarious, as angry as a real love story. It’s a love story between depressed friends and codependent managers, about how people live with madness. Messily, and reinscribing trauma, and with tragic and genius hilarity, is the basic story. And it does its work in a saneist world, describing my experience in ways I myself cannot. It does this through simultaneity—from anthropomorphic animals living alongside humans in a simulacrum of our world, to the pacing of its dialogue, verbal jokes, visual puns, and narrative progress (and regress-). These devices have delighted many watchers while matching the pace of hypomanic and bipolar thinking—perhaps enacting that state in non-mad viewers. My text explores simultaneity as a state of being—a state of reality; a state of madness; a state of love and loss (described both as normative, e.g. grief, denied as madness, and as madness itself); and my own television/saneism/trauma experiences.

“wtf...” interweaves all these—Bojack’s wild embrace of the expanse of human emotions/experiences, my own understanding of madness, circular reinscription of my own trauma in relationship to loss and familial/social/medical messaging. It explores several registers of voice and genre, from poetic and autoethnographic and unhinged to more traditional and academic investigations. The last explore the nature of madness and analyze how the show’s approach to animality allows access to madness. It attempts to look at and enact the simultaneity of humour and pain in the show and the personal experiences at hand by thinking about what madness is/how it relates to me and Bojack as a character; in both cases, moving incrementally through layers of Axis II trauma is process of reinscription and retraumatization. “wtf...” explores my relationship to television, to my lost intimate relationship, and to Bojack as debridement, with and without anesthesia, and as analgesic.

 

Sean Yeager Poetry

I have taught physics and mathematics courses to a number of different populations, including engineers, pre-meds, artists, high-school teachers, and high-schoolers. I have taught courses on writing, cosmology, disability, quantum mechanics, basic arithmetic, biology, finance, Newtonian mechanics, optics, pre-calculus, electromagnetism, and metamathematics. I have even TA'ed a course on queer theory, for good measure. My autism is what connects these disparate classrooms, laboratories, and topics.

This poem is delivered in David Antin’s extemporaneous mode of “talk poetry,” and draws from Julia Miele Rodas’s articulation of autistic apostrophe and La Marr Jurelle Bruce’s understanding of syncopation. I discuss the ways I make the classroom accessible for myself and my students.

 

Stephen Lee Hodgkins Digital art & animation

Through personal experiences I reflect upon the power within rigid and regulated language norm within utterances.  How people often will finish sentences for neuro diverse speakers, correcting utterances and mocking speech that dares to break grammatic rules.  

The imposition of literacy norms in society, especially within education often work to make visible diverse language use as dysfunctional. The consequences of which position diverse language users as grammatically broken and defunct. 

Stephen's Site

 

Suzanna Chen Photography

Suzanna Chen is an autistic person with ADHD. They are currently enrolled in the Arts and Sciences programme at University College London in the UK, where their studies focus on journalism and interdisciplinary disability studies. As an amateur photographer and artist, Suzanna tries to show the unique way their neurodivergent brain processes the world with her artworks. The "Saturated" collection of photographs wants to portray instances where they see specific attributes in the environment as extraordinarily strong and vibrant while others as trivial. All three of the pictures are shot in nature since it is where the sensory stimuli are majestic instead of not overwhelming.

Suzanna's Site

 

Timotheus "T.J." Gordon, Jr. Short film

Timotheus “T.J.” Gordon Jr., MFA, MS, is a research associate at the Institute on Disability and Human Development at University of Illinois at Chicago. Gordon uses his passion for self-advocacy, racial equity, disability culture, and autism acceptance to create webinars, training sessions, and publications on autism and race, inclusion in communities of color, exploration of sexuality in the disability community, coping with COVID-19 pandemic, mental health emergency services, and more.

He is also a co-founder of Chicagoland Disabled People of Color Coalition (Chicagoland DPOCC), which is supported by the Institute on Disability and Human Development. Chicagoland DPOCC is a group of disabled people of color in the Chicagoland area that promote disability pride, self-advocacy, and inclusion in communities of color throughout the Chicagoland area.

In addition to his self-advocacy work, Gordon has also written essays and reviews related to disability and race. His writings and cultural insights appear in the Disability Studies Review, the “All the Weight of Our Dreams: On Living Racialized Autism” anthology, "Code of the Freaks" documentary, and ADA 30 in Color.