How can we foster harmony and diversity? Does fair mean equal? How can we recognize our unconscious biases?

Consulting with an Intersectional Focus

My name is Sasha Amaya. I work as an accessibility consultant for individuals, artist groups, producers, festivals, programmers, and institutions to help identify areas of weakness and oversight.

My focus is on applying an intersectional perspective to creative work, including dance, classical music, theatre, and visual art, as well as art colleges and universities, and how we can improve our projects through intersectional perspectives on pay, inclusion, and diversity.

We all have unconscious biases due to the fact that no one of us can experience all the perspectives in life. While we can strive to be more mindful, nevertheless due to life experience, workload, or fatigue we can still generate biases which create difficult challenges for one another.

We offer an outside perspective, a view on how dynamics and figures within a project are working, helping to catch and clear up some of these unconscious biases in order to let things flow more smoothly and equitably, and ultimately more productively and happily.

The conditions of labour are the conditions of care.

What We Offer

Application Consulting

We help artists and curators review their funding applications and budgets through an accessibility lens. In including accessibility factors from the beginning of a process, projects are better set up for less stress, fewer surprises, and more inclusivity.

Team Building

Are you looking to diversify your project team? We can help to put you in touch with a roster of artists, tech, and crew who can bring new strengths to your project.

Consulting for Festivals and Productions

We love to come in at an early stage in planning a festival or production. Here we focus on who is involved, how they can be supported, and what kinds of social and physical infrastructures can be put in place in order to expand who is involved, both at the artistic and audience levels.

Budget and Production Consultating

Money matters. In production consultations, we focus on how the budget and schedule function in relation to both guidelines from funders, recommendations from professional bodies, and the needs and desires of individual artists. Artistic budgets are often limited, so here we look at strategies to create equitable working conditions for those involved.

Problem Solving

Sometimes things get a little off track. When that happens we provide one-on-one discussions with members of the team to understand the different perspectives, and organize the problems and potential solutions for the group. We can’t promise to solve the problem, but we can suggest different pathways for going forward.

Post-Production Reflection

We sit down with curators and production leaders to reflect on what went successfully during a process and what challenges arose. Together we brainstorm how to strengthen the next project. A very good exercise to undertake shortly after the completion of a production which can yield many positive effects in the future.

Principles

  • Honesty

    We strive to be as honest as possible during the production process, flagging potential problems in budgets, pay structures, and team equality.

  • Inclusivity

    Artists face a variety of barriers, whether they be disciplinary, educational, linguistic, racial, gendered, embodied, generational, cultural, or other. We listen to understand the barriers you or your employees face and how we can best support your practice.

  • Fair Pay

    We encourage payment at or above indsutry rates and/or fund recommended guidelines. We believe that fair pay for all is the way to establishing sustainable practices for our community.

More about how I work
 

Pricing

Please inquire to learn more about fees and pricing. Each service has a unique price point. With the belief that not only established artists and companies, but also more junior artists and organizations should be factoring accessibility into their projects, we offer special pricing for those who have been working in their field for less than five years, or who can show proof of recent graduation.

Pay for Your Help

It is too common to ask employees or colleagues whom you may (correctly or incorrectly) identify as BIPOC, differently-abled, LGBTQ+, or otherwise considered to be a minority within your group to do the work for your organization. While it is important to listen to those around us who may have different experiences and perspectives, it is also very important not to ask or expect already marginalized groups to do that extra work for us. Please listen to those around you, but make sure not to ask marginalized employees and colleagues to do free work. Instead, reach out to an accessibility consultant or work therapist who can gather these experiences into a meaningful channel, without putting pressure and unpaid labour onto those you seek to support.