About

San Alland Bio (they/them or just ‘San’)

San is a writer, performer and interdisciplinary artist living in Glasgow. They are of French-/Dutch-Canadian settler and Scottish descent.

San’s work examines queer crip (or ‘qrip’, spelled with a q) audiences and languages, anti-eugenics, political mourning, and archive. San has engaged in exciting cross-media collaboration and formal experimentation for over 25 years, working extensively in Tkaronto, Edinburgh, Glasgow and the UK. They specialise in integrated access, and are committed to remote and non-time-based participation. San strives towards disability justice, which includes clean air and a free Palestine.

Recent Work

A close-up of San outside wearing a white N95 mask, black t-shirt and grey jacket. San is white with long reddish-brown hair, smiling with crinkly blue eyes at someone off-camera. Green trees with sun-dappled leaves blur behind them.
Photo of San by Riley Skelton.

San has an essay “A Manifesto of Manifestos” in the forthcoming 2024 issue of Wordgathering, and a poem on The Passion Project Mixtape.

For San’s 2021-23 Locked World Commission, they created a multimedia essay with creatively-embedded access, “Writing From the Groin”. Excerpts of the project’s BSL/AD video were screened during San’s talk at Wysling Arts Centre’s 2022 online event, Temporalities of Access.

In 2022-23, San collaborated with Emilia Beatriz and Etzali Hernández on a poetic audio commission for Rhubaba Gallery, Grief Offerings: (End of) Life Wishes.

The outdoor filming of San’s poem, “Audience”, with British Sign Language performance from Bea Webster, was an online feature at Glasgow International 2021.

Disability Arts Online awarded San and Etzali Hernández a 2021 commission to create Sore Loser, a paper and digital zine on queer disabled grief. The duo also produced a podcast on memorialisation.

In 2020, Kenny Fries commissioned San to contribute an essay on disabled queer and trans filmmakers to Disability Futures in the Arts. San was also a guest editor at Disability Arts Online. In response to the inequalties of the pandemic response, San curated the online arts event, A Wake: on mourning, marking, and moving forward together with joy.

As part of its 40th anniverary in 2019, Proper Tales Press published San’s second chapbook of stories, Anything Not Measurable Is Not Real. Canada Council for the Arts awarded San a 2020 Digital Originals grant to create an audiobook and film-stories of the chapbook.

Writing History

San has published three poetry collections and two fiction chapbooks. Naturally Speaking (espresso, Toronto) co-won the 2013 bpNichol award, and Blissful Times (book*hug, Toronto) was widely reviewed as a groundbreaking digital hybrid. Since 1998, San’s short stories, essays and poems have featured in international anthologies and magazines. Recent story publications include Protest! and Thought X (Comma Press, Manchester), We Were Always Here (404 Ink, Edinburgh), British Council, Extra Teeth, and The Deaf Poets Society. San’s essays were commissioned for The Bi-ble Volume 2 (Monstrous Regiment, Edinburgh), Imaginary Safe House (Frog Hollow Press/HA&L, Victoria/Hamilton), and The State of the Arts (Coach House Books, Toronto). Their poems appear widely, including in Zarf, SCREE, make/shift, Why Poetry? (Verve, Birmingham), Red Light: Superheroes, Saints and Sluts (Arsenal Pulp Press, Vancouver), and Catechism: Poems for Pussy Riot (English PEN, London). In 2017, San co-edited the multimedia UK anthology Stairs and Whispers: D/deaf and Disabled Poets Write Back (Nine Arches, Rugby).

Performance History

San has performed their original works at international festivals, theatres and galleries for three decades. In 2016, Edinburgh’s Anatomy Arts produced San’s onstage/onscreen performance of their short story with film, Equivalence. Edinburgh Filmhouse amd Transpose (Barbican, London) picked up the story-film-play for later tours. Equivalence follows on from San’s multimedia work on genderqueer and disabled poetics in their Toronto shows Body Geometry (The Theatre Centre, 2002) and Strange Attractors (Hysteria Festival/Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, 2004). San’s theatrical creations have also been produced by Soho Theatre (London), Oxford Playhouse, Homotopia (Liverpool), Edinburgh International Book Festival, The Arches (Glasgow), Waterspout Theatre (Bermuda), New York International Fringe Festival, The Scream Festival (Toronto) and MayWorks (Toronto). San is internationally known for founding poetry-music-film collectives Zorras, Stumblin’ Tongues and They They Theys.

Film & Photography History

San directs and edits documentaries, film-poems and weird hybrids. Their short films have featured internationally at such places as vii Bienal de Arte Contemporáneo (Madrid), Entr’2 Marches (Cannes), TransLations (Seattle), Macrobert Arts Centre (Stirling), and Tate Modern (London). In 2016, Brighton’s Viewfinder Project commissioned San to co-create five short documentaries about disabled and Deaf UK artists. LGBT History Month Scotland awarded San a 2013 Cultural Commission, for which San mentored five artists and produced the I’m Not Your Inspiration film series. San has shown work at Glasgow Gallery of Modern Art, Midlands Arts Centre (Birmingham), Gallery 44 & Gallery 1313 (Toronto), Contact Festival / Pteros Gallery (Toronto), and Schwules Museum (Berlin). They were an inaugural artist-in-residence at Glasgow’s Trongate 103 in 2009, with Ajamu X. Over the past 10 years, San has worked collaboratively with filmmakers to make their films accessible, particularly through audio description and captioning.

Curation History

A photograph of multi-disciplinary artist Sandra Alland from above their bare chest. They are white with short brown hair. San is tying a polka dot green and black tie while wearing wrist supports. San sits or stands against a backdrop of handwritten words that are somewhat cut off. Some of the words include: Strange how there's no pain when I'm inside her. I would fill in every ridiculous questionnaire, I'd type a million emails, open 300 bottles of wine, tear into a... condom wrappers, zip up the dresses of... army of models, roll enough cigarettes... life, click all pop-ups, use tripods and... fasten all the buttons of all the chidren... world, hold the Bilbe until I'd turn... pop all my pain pill sfrom their...
Self-portrait, GoMA, 2009.

San curates film, visual art and multimedia performance. They are a sought-after consultant, lecturer and workshop leader on interdisciplinary art and meaningful disabled access. In 2009, San co-founded Scotland’s accessible queer and trans art project, Cachín Cachán Cachunga! San has curated LGBTQIA+ Disabled and Deaf Pride, the SEEP series of visual art exhibitions, and the film-performance sensation Who’s Your Dandy? They also organised a zine fair and multimedia event, Faceplant, for Edinburgh’s Forest Café in 2010-11. San’s Toronto multimedia curation includes The Queen West Art Crawl, The Theatre Centre, The Salvador Allende Arts Festival, The League of Canadian Poets, and Toronto Women’s Bookstore. San has created accessible film programmes for BFI Flare (London), Glasgow Short Film Festival / Oska Bright (Brighton), and Edinburgh Filmhouse / Film Hub Scotland.