Sandra Alland (she/her or they/them) experiments with form and integrated access in writing, film, performance and interdisciplinary art. San lives in Glasgow, and retains ties to Edinburgh, Toronto/Tkaronto (Dish With One Spoon treaty territory) and Cobourg (Williams Treaties First Nations).
San is interested in language, mourning and archive. Her work explores feminist, queer, gendered, classed and disabled politics / poetics. She is committed to slowness, and to her communities thriving beyond ‘diversity crumbs’ from arts institutions.
Birds of Paradise Theatre Company awarded San a Locked World Commission 2021-22, to write a multimedia essay with creatively-embedded access. The essay, “Writing from the Groin: How Non-disabled CisHet Monied White People Lock Themselves Into Mediocrity”, has text, alt-text, plain language, captioned video ‘footnotes’, audio and BSL. It’s forthcoming in May 2022.
San’s most recent performance is of their poem, “Audience”, for Glasgow International 2021. San received a Disability Arts Online Commission 2021 to co-create a multimedia zine on queer disabled grief with Etzali Hernández. The duo also produced a podcast on memorialisation.
In late 2019, Proper Tales Press published San’s second chapbook of fiction, Anything Not Measurable Is Not Real. They were awarded a 2020 Digital Originals grant from Canada Council for the Arts to create an audiobook and film-stories of the chapbook.
San has received story commissions from British Council and Manchester’s Comma Press, and features in international anthologies. Author of three poetry books, they co-edited the multimedia UK anthology Stairs and Whispers: D/deaf & Disabled Poets Write Back. San’s essays appear in The Bi-ble Volume 2 (Monstrous Regiment), Imaginary Safe House (Hamilton Arts & Letters / Frog Hollow Press), and Kenny Fries’s Disability Futures in the Arts (Wordgathering).
San directs and edits documentaries, poetry films, and hybrid projects. Their short films have screened internationally at festivals including Entr’2 Marches (Cannes), San Francisco Transgender Film Festival, and Queer City Cinema (Regina). In 2016-17, San’s short story with film, “Equivalence“, featured live onstage / onscreen at Barbican (Transpose), Edinburgh Filmhouse, and Summerhall (Anatomy Arts). From 2015 to 2017, San was commissioned by The Viewfinder Project to co-create five short documentaries about disabled and Deaf UK artists.
San curates independent film, performance and visual arts. Her collaborations include Oska Bright / Glasgow Short Film Festival, BFI Flare, Filmhouse / Film Hub Scotland, The Theatre Centre (Toronto), and Scotland’s accessible queer and trans arts project, Cachín Cachán Cachunga!