For a free 30 minute consultation, please contact me at al@neurodivergentmedia.net with some dates and times that work for you. I’ll appreciate hearing about your goals in working together, as well as anything specific you’d like to share about your needs.
I look forward to talking with you.
ALLISON LEIGH HOLT
“Neurodivergent Media is for misfits. Anarchic humour, irreverent sci-fi plots, optical experiments, and supernatural cartographies: all are brainstormed, translated into storyboards, and broken down into roles. Costumes, prosthetic makeup, sets, and props; special effects and sound design; acting, directing, lighting, shooting, and editing—we do it all ourselves and as a unit. Our guiding principles are kindness, respect, curiosity, participation, and communication to the best of each person’s ability. My job is to model these things, exercising extreme patience and assuming the best of everyone, consistently, until a genuine community of trust develops. For this to work, I have to embody the sense of interrelationship I want to see in the world, which, moment-by-moment, requires flexibility and solid boundaries, radical kindness and vulnerability; I cannot insist on my way. For my students, hard parameters defined by the equipment, limitations of the medium, and production goals are acceptable, because these things do not judge. In fact, they serve as a container for the more chaotic aspects of their experience. This process asks them to trust that experience, to see it as not just normal but honourable. Creating something that could not have been done alone is a means of making shared meaning, relinquishing control, and connecting deeply with others and the medium itself. Considering that the neurotypical power structures running through these students’ lives offer little chance at belonging, this experience is often extraordinary.”
from The Conversation: Feedback Structures, Ways of Knowing, and Neurodivergence, by Allison Leigh Holt, PUBLIC Journal: Interspecies Communication, 2019