San Alland Bio (they/them or just ‘San’)
San is a writer, performer and interdisciplinary artist shielding in Glasgow. San explores a wide variety of media, from avant-garde poetry and multimedia essays, to audio experiments, film-stories and documentaries. It’s become rare for San to participate in public arts production because all institutions, and most galleries and publishers, do not meaningfully engage with disabled and ill people.
San’s work examines queer crip (or ‘qrip’, spelled with a q) audiences and languages, anti-eugenics, political mourning, and archive. For over 25 years, San has reveled in exciting cross-media collaboration and formal experimentation, working extensively in Tkaronto, Edinburgh, Glasgow, the UK, Turtle Island and Europe.
San specialises in integrated access, and is committed to remote and non-time-based participation. They strive towards disability justice, which includes clean air and a free Palestine.
Recent Work
San has an essay “A Manifesto of Manifestos” in the Winter 2024 issue of Wordgathering, and a poem on The Passion Project Mixtape. Earlier this year, San collaborated with Emilia Beatriz and Etzali Hernández on a poetic audio commission for Rhubaba Gallery, Grief Offerings: (End of) Life Wishes.
For San’s 2021-23 Locked World Commission, they created a multimedia essay with creatively-embedded access, “Writing From the Groin”. Excerpts of the project’s BSL/AD video were screened during San’s talk at Wysling Arts Centre’s online event, Temporalities of Access.
Glasgow International 2021 featured the outdoor filming of San’s poem, “Audience”, with British Sign Language performance from Bea Webster. That same year, Disability Arts Online awarded San and Etzali Hernández a commission to create Sore Loser, a paper and digital zine on queer disabled grief. The duo also produced a podcast on memorialisation.
In 2020, Kenny Fries commissioned San to contribute an essay on disabled queer and trans filmmakers to Disability Futures in the Arts. San was also a guest editor at Disability Arts Online. In response to the inequalities of the pandemic response, San curated the online arts event, A Wake: on mourning, marking, and moving forward together with joy.
Proper Tales Press celebrated its 40th anniverary with the 2019 publication of San’s second chapbook of stories, Anything Not Measurable Is Not Real. Canada Council for the Arts awarded San a 2020 Digital Originals grant to create an audiobook and film-stories of the chapbook.
Writing History
Since 1998, San’s poems, essays and short stories have featured in international anthologies and magazines. San has published three poetry collections and two fiction chapbooks. Their poetic collaboration with dictation software, Naturally Speaking (espresso, Toronto) co-won the 2013 bpNichol award. Blissful Times (book*hug, Toronto) was widely reviewed as a groundbreaking digital hybrid.
San co-edited the multimedia UK anthology Stairs and Whispers: D/deaf and Disabled Poets Write Back (Nine Arches, Rugby). San’s poems appear widely, including in Zarf, make/shift, Literary Review of Canada, Anything That Moves, Feral Feminisms, Why Poetry? (Verve, Birmingham), Red Light: Superheroes, Saints and Sluts (Arsenal Pulp, Vancouver), and Catechism: Poems for Pussy Riot (English PEN, London).
Story publications include Protest! and Thought X (Comma Press, Manchester), We Were Always Here (404 Ink, Edinburgh), British Council, Gutter, Extra Teeth, and The Deaf Poets Society. San’s essays have been commissioned for Disability Futures in the Arts, Wordgathering, Disability Arts Online, The Bi-ble Volume 2 (Monstrous Regiment, Edinburgh), Imaginary Safe House (Frog Hollow Press / HA&L, Victoria/Hamilton), and The State of the Arts (Coach House Books, Toronto).
Visit Books or Portfolio for more info, and San’s SoundCloud for audio recordings.
Performance History
For three decades, San performed original works at international festivals, theatres and galleries. San’s creations have been produced by Soho Theatre (London), Oxford Playhouse, Homotopia (Liverpool), The Arches (Glasgow), Waterspout Theatre (Bermuda), New York International Fringe Festival, The Scream Festival (Toronto) and MayWorks Festival of Working People & the Arts (Toronto).
As a 2016 Anatomy Arts Associate Artist, San created an onstage/onscreen performance of their short story with film, Equivalence. Edinburgh Filmhouse and Transpose (Barbican, London) also presented the story-film-play, which featured integrated audio description, captions and BSL. Equivalence follows on from San’s multimedia work on genderqueer and disabled poetics in their Toronto shows Body Geometry (The Theatre Centre, 2002) and Strange Attractors (Hysteria Festival/Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, 2004)
San is internationally known for founding poetry-music-film collectives Zorras, Stumblin’ Tongues and They They Theys. Check out San’s YouTube for performances.
Film & Photography History
San directs and edits documentaries, film-poems and strange hybrids. Their shorts have featured at such places as Tate Modern (London), Bristol Museum and Art Galleries, vii Bienal de Arte Contemporáneo (Madrid), Entr’2 Marches (Cannes), Entzaubert Queer DIY Film Festival (Berlin), Queer City Cinema (Regina), TransLations (Seattle), Malmo Queer Film Festival, San Francisco Transgender Film Festival, Los Angeles Transgender Film Festival, Toronto Bi+ Arts Festival, and Macrobert Arts Centre (Stirling).
In 2016, Brighton’s Viewfinder Project commissioned San to co-create five short documentaries about disabled and Deaf UK artists. LGBT History Month Scotland awarded San a 2013 Cultural Commission, for which San mentored five artists in The Queer and Trans Deaf and Disabled Film Project, and produced the I’m Not Your Inspiration film series.
San has shown photography and video at Glasgow Gallery of Modern Art, Midlands Arts Centre (Birmingham), Gallery 44 (Toronto), Gallery 1313 (Toronto), Contact Festival / Pteros Gallery (Toronto) and Schwules Museum (Berlin). With Ajamu X, San was an inaugural artist-in-residence at Glasgow’s Trongate 103.
Visit Films for samples of San’s work.
Curation History
San curates film, visual art and multimedia performance. They are a consultant, lecturer and workshop leader on interdisciplinary art and meaningful disabled access. Over the past 10 years, San has worked collaboratively with artists to make their work more accessible, particularly through audio description and captioning.
In 2009, San co-founded Scotland’s accessible queer and trans art project, Cachín Cachán Cachunga! San has curated LGBTQIA+ Disabled and Deaf Pride, the SEEP series of visual art exhibitions, and the film-performance sensation Who’s Your Dandy? They also organised a zine fair and multimedia event, Faceplant, for Edinburgh’s Forest Café in 2010 and 2011.
San’s Toronto multimedia curation includes The Queen West Art Crawl, The Theatre Centre, The Salvador Allende Arts Festival, The League of Canadian Poets, and Toronto Women’s Bookstore. San has presented at Stirling University, Wysling Arts Centre, This Way Up, and John Hansard Gallery. They have created accessible film programmes for BFI Flare (London), Glasgow Short Film Festival / Oska Bright (Brighton), SICK! Festival (Manchester) and Edinburgh Filmhouse / Film Hub Scotland.