Why Do We Need Neurodivergence In The Arts?
Early 21st-century word, formed from the word neuro + divergence
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Lennie Varvarides and Dr Naomi Folb, are the founding editors of, The Museum of the Neurodivergent Aesthetic. They met in 2009 at the very first DYSPLA Festival, entitled, DYS(the)LEXI where they discovered a common passion for using the intersection between art, performance, storytelling, and culture to speak about marginalization, and differences, that matter. This encounter sparked a conversation that was to be ongoing, and the result of a beautiful friendship.
They don’t agree on everything; like all good friends, they are able to hold different opinions without the opinions defining the conversation. They do not agree on how we define ‘difference’, or how it ought to be approached and spoken about through the discourse of art, but they both view the conversation as critical and vital to their own creative development. They both aim to approach it with respect, intuition, creatively, constructively, and openly.
The following questions and answers are a series of thoughts that will hopefully highlight their ambition and why they are inviting you to participate.
What do you want to get out of the publication?
We want to build an online community of ND (neurodivergent), readers and creatives. To have an open and collective conversation about ND life, communities, culture, and creativity.
Who is this publication for?
We want it to be for ND Creatives, Educators, and Proffestionals, maybe even Neurosientist. Specifically, those who want to talk about our brians create, how we practice, how we observe our process, how our ambitions are developed, and how we deal with our failures, (we learn from them, right?). We want this to be the platform that feels right to explore change, resistance, and creativity.
Who do you most want to contribute?
People who Identify as ND. Those with established practices, that are trying out the platform for the first time as well as writers and creatives who love medium and have been on the platform a long time. We are looking for creatives who are just trying to figure out what it means to be part of a creative community that embraces difference and who want to learn how that diffrence is impacting their work.
What’s the purpose of it?
We want to encourage a friendly, upbeat, personal, and happily argumentative conversation about differences that matter. We want those conversations to be respectful of difference. To learn from each other’s point of view, not about shaming or perpetuating the marganalisation that may have been experienced as a consequence of being ND. The Publication is an ongoing conversation, but it is also a collection of works by ND Creatives. It is our museum, our legacy of the Neurodivergent Aesthetic.
What excites you most about the publication?
Building the community. Seeing people connect. Understanding what the community wants and needs, and how we can inspire each other to play, join in, provocate, share, learn from each other. We want it to be full of tangents and impulsiveness, circular conversations, and general creativeness, without defining the terms for that to happen. We want the aesthetic to emerge from the conversation rather than dictate what it should look like.
What do you want contributors to know about the publication?
That this is their space where they will not be ‘corrected’, edited, shut down, or overlooked. We want to be able to offer feedback, thoughts, and encouragement. The online publication is just one part of the work we can all do together. This is a legacy project, building a global audience around ND and Creativity and we hope that the work we all do here, will spark ongoing collaborations and work towards promoting the creative benefits of Neurodivergency.
Why do we need Neurodivergence in the arts?
We have always had Neurodivergence in art, film, literature, science, but we have just never appreciated neurodivergent in society until neurodivergent is connected to a famous personality. You probably already know lots of famous artists, filmmakers, writers who are neurodivergent, such as Pablo Picasso, Leonardo da Vinci, Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Stan Brakhage, Steve Mcqueen, Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino, Steven Spielberg, Guy Ritchie, Michael Bay, Agatha Christie, F. Scott Fitzgerald, WB Yeats, Sally Gardner…the list goes on, but you may not have associated their talents with their Neurodivergence before. Lennie Varvarides does believe they are connected, that genius is connected and even formed by one neurodivergent, by their unique processing challenges that lead to new pathways in thought and in ‘product’. Why do we need Neurodivergency? Well, you answer that questions. Imagine a world without the artists and authors history has provided us. You imagine a world without, Albert Einstein, Thomas Alva Edison, Pierre Curie, Alexander Graham Bell, and tell us what that looks like.
To write for us, go here.
To see more about other ND projects go here.
Thank you for reading this post and for all your future comments or submissions,
Naomi & Lennie
