Building Accessibility in the Arts

Date: May 21st, 8:00am–4:-00pm
Location: Kiewit Luminarium

What does it take to truly build an accessible show from the start? Hear from industry leaders on how they build inclusion and accessibility within their programming and organizations. From opera and dance to solo sensory experiences, speakers and panelists will discuss disability at the forefront of the performing arts and beyond. 

Join artists who have created engaging and interactive performing arts pieces from across the world, including the Keynote Address from Frozen Light’s (UK) Amber Onat Gregory and Lucy Garland, Risky Disco’s Carrie Nath and Katy Kepler, Ava Rigelhaupt from Carl the Collector and How to Dance in Ohio, Susan Marshall, Mimi Lien and Lisa Sonneborn from Rhythm Bath and Sensorium Ex’s creative team.

Meet Our Speakers

Frozen Light

  • Lucy Garland is the co-artistic director and one half of the founders of Frozen Light (alongside Amber), a Norwich based theatre company that makes touring sensory theatre for audiences with profound and multiple learning disabilities (PMLD).  Lucy passionately advocates for audiences with PMLD whilst always dreaming big about the company’s next epic sensory adventure.

    Lucy's background is in devised theatre as an actor, street performer and performance maker.  Her interest is in the connection between performer and audience and the magic that theatre can bring to the human existence.

    Lucy holds a Masters in Applied Performance from the University of Kent and has trained in clowning with many beautiful clowns from around the world.

    www.frozenlighttheatre.com

  • Amber Onat Gregory founded Frozen Light in 2013 alongside Lucy. She is the co-artistic director of the company which tours sensory theatre for audiences with profound and multiple learning disabilities (PMLD) to theatres and arts centres across the UK and beyond.  Amber is passionate about ensuring that people with PMLD have access to theatre which meets their needs, whilst actively encouraging play in her workplace.

    Ambers background is in working with marginalised groups using theatre as a tool for social change.  She has worked in prisons, detention centres, hospitals, special needs schools always with a passion for creating joyous experiences.

    Amber holds a Masters in Applied Performance from the University of Kent.  She is excited about sensory theatre having a global impact and has lived and worked across the globe, including in Turkey, Australia and Dubai where she toured and developed sensory theatre, as well as presenting in conferences in Ireland, Saudi Arabia and USA.

    www.frozenlighttheatre.com

Risky Disco

  • Katy Kepler (she/her) is thrilled to be a part of the RISKY DISCO team. She is the Mobile Theatre Director at the Omaha Community Playhouse, overseeing the VROOM! Mobile Sensory Theatre. VROOM! provides a traveling, immersive, and sensory-enriched theatrical experience for neurodivergent individuals and others with sensory sensitivities or disabilities. As an artist with ADHD, she loves the variety that her work provides, encompassing elements of directing, performance, teaching, and more. Celebrating her 10th year in Omaha, Katy is delighted to share community with others who share a passion for providing accessible arts spaces!

  • Carrie A Nath is a multi-hyphenate theater artist and educator and an Omaha native. She is currently the Director of Equitable Access at BLUEBARN and has served as Managing Director of The Art of Imagination at Ollie Webb Center, Inc.; Director of Education, Kentucky Arts Council; Associate Director of Education, Seattle Opera; and Education Consultant, Ford's Theater, D.C. Artistic credits include Actor’s Theatre of Louisville; Manhattan School of Music; multiple Shakespeare companies; and Washington National Opera. Carrie is an access consultant for Omaha Performing Arts and serves on their Voices Amplified Committee; is an Opera Omaha Community Panel member; is a WhyArts, Inc. guest artist; and is working with the Risky Disco team of the Common Senses Festival 2025 creating sensory spaces for adults experiencing impairment – disability. Ms. Nath is a Nebraska Arts Council (NAC) roster artist and serves on their inclusion committee, and is a panelist for NAC and the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA).

Ava Rigelhaupt

  • Ava Xiao-Lin Rigelhaupt is a writer, DEIA + Autism consultant, and public speaker. As a Chinese, Jewish, autistic, transracial adoptee, Ava shares her lived experiences in a way that’s easily understandable and entertaining for a wide audience. She's a writer for the PBS Kids animated series, CARL THE COLLECTOR, their first series centering an autistic character. She's written and consulted on scripts for 9Story Media (BLUE’S CLUES, DANIEL TIGER’S NEIGHBORHOOD), Apple TV (CHA CHA REAL SMOOTH), and Disney (THE GHOST AND MOLLY MCCGEE). Ava received a Drama Desk Special Award for Authentic Autistic Representation, recognizing her accessibility work as the Autistic Creative Consultant for the Broadway coming of age musical, HOW TO DANCE IN OHIO (follows seven autistic young adults at a social skills center as they prepare for a dance. Broadway 2023, UK 2025). As an often called upon public speaker and panelist, she shares best practices working with the neurodiverse community, creating authentic characters, tools for producing accessible events, and how her own identity breaks stereotypes! Highlights: SXSW, Disney, The Kennedy Center, Stanford, ACLU, Television Critics Association, Autism in Entertainment, The Hollywood Reporter, Actors’ Equity.

Sensorium Ex

  • Co-Creative Producer of Sensorium Ex

    Ras Dia is a Brooklyn-born producer and arts administrator whose work has been described as “stirring” (Washington Post), “bracing, compelling, and heartbreaking” (Musical America), and “grippingly produced” (The Boston Globe). He serves as Deputy Director, Creative Projects at National Sawdust, and as Producing Director of VisionIntoArt (VIA), where he leads commissions and productions supported by National Sawdust such as Primero sueño with The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Sensorium, a groundbreaking opera and social impact project at the intersection of disability and artificial intelligence, and We Were Fridays, a cultural heritage and music project inspired by diaspora, collective imagination, and co-creation, in addition to producing creative initiatives such as the National Sawdust/VIA Impact Lab Fellowship program.

    Ras previously served as the Creative Producer at Little Island, a public park and arts organization developed by the Diller-von Furstenberg Family Foundation, where he helped to lead and curate its first three seasons, as the Assistant Producer of the Metropolitan Opera’s Peabody- and Emmy award-winning Live in HD series, and as the Managing Director of the New York City Master Chorale, in addition to marketing, development, production, and administrative roles with the National Children’s Chorus, Sadler’s Wells Theatre, Carnegie Hall, and The New School, where he supported programs for immigrant, refugee, and survivor communities across New York City.

    Past projects include Heartbeat Opera’s BREATHING FREE: a visual album, the Frederick R. Koch Foundation’s Townhouse Series, San Francisco Symphony’s MTT25: An American Icon, and San Francisco Opera’s In Song.

    Ras is a graduate of the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, Purchase College (SUNY), and the Boy’s Choir of Harlem.

  • Co-Director & Choreographer of Sensorium Ex


    Jerron Herman is an artist who is compelled to create images of freedom. His own freedom stems from the joyful interplay with forms that support a “soloist who isn’t siloed”. He has premiered works at Danspace Project, Performance Space New York, and The Whitney Museum. Jerron's VITRUVIAN premiered in NYC and has toured to the Baltimore Museum of Art, curated by Johns Hopkins University, ODC SF and a digital release for Lincoln Center. Jerron has activated museums like The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Cooper Hewitt Design Museum and Guggenheim with responsive interdisciplinary installations. Alongside dance, Jerron has exhibited works for 1969 Gallery (Chella Man), LOMAA in Ontario, and ICA Philadelphia (Carolyn Lazard). Jerron is proudly a part of INTERIM, a boutique management consortium centering joy for disabled artists. Other gracious accolades include a 2024 United States Artist Fellowship, 2023 Visiting Artist for FokusTanz #10 Kampnagel, 2023-24 Fellowship at NYU/Center for Ballet and the Arts, 2022 Residency at the European Ceramics Work Centre, 2021 Grants to Artists Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts and a 2021-2022 Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship in Dance from the Jerome Foundation as well as a  2020 Disability Futures Fellowship from the Ford Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

  • mezzo-soprano & Mem in Sensorium Ex

    Recognized as a “gorgeous-voiced” mezzo-soprano (Broadway World), Hailey McAvoy’s operatic  roles include, among others, Page of Herodias (Salome, Fisher Center for Performing Arts), Taller  Daughter (Mazzoli, Proving Up; Aspen Music Festival), Third Lady (Magic Flute, MassOpera), Third  Woodsprite (Rusalka) Opera Ithaca, Zosha (Heggie, Out of Darkness; Eastman Opera Theater),  Cherubino (Le Nozze di Figaro; Aquilon Music Festival), and most recently the leading role of Mem,  researcher and mother of Kitsune, in Paola Prestini’s Sensorium Ex. Sensorium had its orchestral  workshop in December 2024 at the Kennedy Center and will premiere with Vision Into Art and Beth  Morrison Projects in 2025. 

    McAvoy’s concert highlights include Ravel’s Shéhérazade, which she performed with the Baton Rouge  Symphony under the baton of Adam Johnson in 2023, and Molly Joyce’s YouSaidHeSaidSheSaid, which  she will present with pianist Mary Holtzhaur the Opera Ithaca Festival this Fall. In Spring 2024, she  will appear in recital with flautist Maron Khuroy of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and pianist  Bethany Pietroniro at Downtown Music at Grace in White Plains, NY, and will make her recital debut  in the Gerda Lissner Foundation’s Green Space with pianist Alison d’Amato. 

    As a performer with Cerebral Palsy, McAvoy works to amplify the discussion around disability in the  arts. She has interviewed with AGMA Magazine, written for Our Singing Bodies, and been a panelist  for Opera Ithaca and Opera NexGen’s Accessibility in Opera. To learn more, visit  www.haileymcavoy.com/about.

  • VisionIntoArt Impact Lab Fellow for Sensorium Ex 

    In 2012, Greg earned his Bachelor of Arts in Musicology from Fordham University, followed by a Masters of Science in Journalism from The Columbia School of Journalism in 2014. A passionate life-long opera lover, he has spent ten years covering trends in the field for outlets such as Classical Singer and The Indie Opera Podcast. He has also penned articles for New Mobility, New Jersey Monthly and PC Gamer. In 2018 Greg delivered a lecture on Wagner and Antisemitism at University of Pittsburgh’s “Revolution of Tenderness” conference. As a disabled person with Cerebral Palsy, the intersection of opera and disability is a cornerstone of Greg’s work. This perspective informs his role as co-founder and artistic director of OperaPraktikos. New York City’s first disability affirmative Opera Company. He served as Assistant to the Librettists for Touch, an opera by Carla Lucero and Marianna Mott Newirth on the radical life of Helen Keller, commissioned by Opera Birmingham which premiered in 2024. Additionally, Greg is the Resident Musicologist for Divaria Productions, a New York City-based company dedicated to educating audiences about the historical circumstances surrounding classic works and watershed moments in operatic history.

  • Composer

    Composer Paola Prestini has cultivated a uniquely expansive and humanistic musical voice, through pieces that transcend genre and discipline, and projects whose global impact reverberates beyond the walls of the concert hall. Far more than just notes on a page, Prestini's works give voice to those whom society has silenced, and offer a platform for the causes that are most vital to us all. Prestini has been named one of the Top 35 Female Composers in Classical Music by the Washington Post, one of the top 100 Composers in the World by National Public Radio, and one of the Top 30 Professionals of the Year by Musical America. As Co-Founder of National Sawdust, she has collaborated with luminaries like poet Robin Coste Lewis, visual artists Julie Mehretu and Nick Cave, and musical legends David Byrne, Philip Glass and Renée Fleming, and her works have been performed throughout the world with leading institutions like the New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Opera, Dallas Opera, London's 

    Barbican Center, Mexico's Bellas Artes, and many more. 

  • Co-Director of Sensorium Ex

    Jay Scheib is an interdisciplinary director, developer, and designer of plays, operas, musicals and other hybrid live performance immersions. A Professor, scheib heads the Music and Theater Arts programs at MIT. Scheib’s stagings and interventions have been lauded throughout Europe and the United States. Current projects include Richard Wagner's "Parsifal," with the Bayreuther Festspiele, a UK tour of Jim Steinman's "Bat Out of Hell," and a season of rapid prototype plays at MIT under the banner #socialclimatechange. Scheib holds an MFA from Columbia University

  • librettist

    Brenda Shaughnessy is a poet and Sensorium Ex’s librettist. Born in Okinawa, Japan and raised in Southern California, she was educated at University of California, Santa Cruz, and Columbia University. She’s the author of several books of poetry, including Tanya (2023, Knopf,) The Octopus Museum (2019, Knopf,) Our Andromeda (2012, Copper Canyon,) and Interior with Sudden Joy (1999, FSG.) Her work’s been supported by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Institute for Advanced Study at Radcliffe, the N.E.A./Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission, and other arts and humanities institutions. An English Professor at Rutgers University-Newark, she is always inspired by poetry’s stellar next generation: her students in the M.F.A. program, who know their voices are their power, their truth. She lives in New Jersey with her family.

Rhythm Bath

  • Mimi Lien designs sets/environments for theater, dance and opera. With a background in architecture, her work often focuses on the interaction between audience/environment and object/performer. Lien was the first stage designer to be named a MacArthur Fellow. She also creates large public artworks and sculptural/performance installations. Selected work: Sweeney Todd (Broadway); Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812 (Broadway, Tony Award); Fairview, An Octoroon (Soho Rep.); Taylor Mac’s A 24 Decade History of Popular Music (St. Ann’s Warehouse; int’l. tour). Lien is a co-founder of JACK (Brooklyn) and artist-in-residence at the Park Ave Armory and Lincoln Ctr. She’s received a Tony Award, Drama Desk, Lucille Lortel, Outer Critics Circle, Am. Theatre Wing Hewes Design Award, LA Drama Critics Circle Award, Bessie Award and an OBIE for sustained excellence. www.mimilien.com

  • Choreographer Susan Marshall has collaborated with visual artists, scientists and composers on theater productions and gallery installations. Employing modest means to resonant effect, her movement vocabularies often include everyday gestures distilled to near abstraction. Interdependency, freedom within constraints and humor are constants in her work. The parent of an autistic son and member of a community of families of neurodiverse individuals, Marshall is pleased to be part of the movement to increase access for neurodiverse individuals in the arts. She has received MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellowships and three “Bessie” Awards. Her company has performed worldwide and at Brooklyn Academy of Music, The Kitchen, NY Live Arts, Baryshnikov Arts Ctr., Andrea Rosen Gallery, Kennedy Ctr., UCLA, Krannert Ctr., Walker Art Ctr. and Montclair State Univ. Her work is in the repertories of Nederlands Dans Theatre, Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, Pacific NW Ballet and others. Marshall is a professor and the Director of Dance at Princeton Univ. https://studiosusanmarshall.org

  • Lisa Sonneborn (she/her), Director, Media Arts and Culture, Institute on Disabilities, Temple

    University CEHD

    Lisa Sonneborn (she/her) is a documentary filmmaker and Director of Media Arts & Culture (MAC)

    for the Institute on Disabilities, Temple University, CEHD. Her work has engaged communities

    locally, nationally, and internationally in conversations around the lived experience of disability,

    the preservation of disability history, and cultural access. As MAC director, Lisa leads teams of

    artists, people with disabilities and families through the development and implementation of

    multi-layered cultural programming. MAC projects have served as models for inclusion,

    authenticity of voice, and arts accessibility. Under Lisa's direction, the Institute commissioned and

    produced the play A Fierce Kind of Love, which enjoyed four sold out runs and was the recipient

    of the ArtReach Kimmel Award for Accessible Experience. In collaboration with People's Light, Lisa

    brought Smart Caption Glasses to the US for the first time. This innovative voice following

    technology makes live performance accessible to people who are d/Deaf or live with hearing loss.

    Recent projects include File/Life: We Remember Stories of Pennhurst, a multi-modal community

    led exploration of the archives of the Pennhurst State School and Hospital; and Rhythm Bath, a

    dance installation designed for neurodiverse audiences, by Susan Marshall and Mimi Lien.

    @mac_iod

Panel Discussion

  • Daniel Van Sant is a disability rights attorney who has practiced most extensively in the areas of inclusive education, gender-based violence, and inclusive international development. He draws on his personal and professional experience with disability in leading the disability policy work at The Harkin Institute for Public Policy & Citizen Engagement at Drake University.

    All of the disability work at The Harkin Institute is tied, somehow, to increasing access to competitive, integrated employment for all people with disabilities. From conducting focus groups in Iowa related to Medicaid services, to presenting at universities, providing consultation to corporations, and organizing the international Harkin Summit on Disability Employment, Daniel works on disability inclusion in many spheres and across many locations. 

    Daniel received bachelor’s degrees in International Relations, Rhetoric, and Politics from Drake University. He earned his Juris Doctorate and a Master of Science in Cultural Foundations of Education with a Certificate of Advanced Studies in Disability Studies from Syracuse University. 

Speaker Schedule:

8:00–9:00 am
Keynote Address - Amber Onat Gregory & Lucy Garland (Frozen Light - UK)

9:15–10:15 am
Risky Disco - Carrie Nath (BLUEBARN Theatre) & Katy Kepler (Omaha Community Playhouse)

10:30–11:30 am
Ava Rigelhaupt (Carl the Collector on PBS Kids, How to Dance in Ohio Musical)

11:30 am–12:30 pm
Lunch Break - lunch is not provided

12:30–1:30 pm
Paola Prestini & Ras Dia (Sensorium Ex)

1:45–2:45 pm
Susan Marshall, Mimi Lien, & Lisa Sonneborn (Rhythm Bath)

3:00–4:00 pm
Panel discussion led by Daniel Van Sant (The Harkin Institute)