Toronto’s Accessible Media Inc. (AMI) has selected six Canadian writers with disabilities to participate in the first-ever Accessible Writers’ Lab.

The lab, which launched in July, is sponsored by the Canada Media Fund and was created in partnership with the ReelAbilities Film Festival Toronto and the Miles Nadal Jewish Community Centre. It is set to run until November.

The six participants, who were chosen from over 180 applicants, include Connor Yuzwenko-Martin, a communications specialist, actor, producer and playwright known for his independent performance, The Invisible Practice, which premiered at the 2020 Nextfest; Ottawa-based poet, comedian and writer Wake Lloire, owner of Almonte, Ont., creative community space Curious & Kind; and Carrie Cutforth, an independent creative producer, writer, consultant, adviser and evaluator for interactive projects, including VR, AR, transmedia, web series, alternate reality games and interactive fiction.

Other writers that were selected are: Toronto-based Chilean writer-producer-director M.C Cruz, whose credits include the short films Vampyric PSA, La Llorona and Root Causes; Ontario-based multidisciplinary artist Kitoko Mai, the recipient of the 2021 Promising Pen Prize from the Cahoots Theatre, and a 2020 Gilded Hammer Emerging Artist Award from the Hamilton Fringe Festival; and Ojibway-Mohawk filmmaker Katarina Ziervogel, who was recently selected for the Whistler Film Festival’s Indigenous Filmmaker Fellowship talent program, and is the co-writer of Madison Thomas’s upcoming feature Finality of Dusk.

The Accessible Writers’ Lab is led and designed by writer and consultant Ophira Calof. The lab connects writers with disabilities and established showrunners or senior writers to create the concept for an accessible writers’ room. It is designed to break down barriers and “create pathways for creatives in the disability community to thrive in the Canadian television industry,” according to a news release.

Calof said in a statement that the lab participants “each bring a unique set of skills and experience to the program, with the common goal of building a truly accessible Canadian television industry.”

Image courtesy of AMI. Top (L-R): Connor Yuzwenko-Martin, M.C Cruz, Wake Lloire; Bottom (L-R): Katarina Ziervogel, Kitoko Mai, Carrie Cutforth