Access Intelligence with the Crip Tech Incubator
April 22, 2026 | 10:00 AM–12:00 PM PT | Virtual on Zoom

Calling Up Justice is excited to support Access Intelligence, a virtual symposium bringing together artists, researchers, and technologists working at the intersection of disability and AI. This event asks what disabled people already know as theorists and builders of intelligence, and imagines what becomes possible when that knowledge leads the way. Featuring M Eilo, Joshua Miele, Louise Hickman, Lindsey Felt, and Claudia Alick.

This event will include ASL interpretation and CART captioning. Maiamama will be digital producer on OBS. The symposium will also be recorded for archival purposes. For access questions or accommodation requests, contact criptech@leonardo.info.

Register here:
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/KphWIloFSFKkGYe_Eb3fsg

Speakers:

M Eilo

M Eilo uses castoffs, computers and community to explore disability as a hotbed of innovation. As an autistic person who later acquired a brain injury due to corporate greed and negligence they have built and rebuilt their practice around deepening disabled ways of knowing. They build personal prosthetics and community-engaged sculpture, create experimental archives and animated short films, make designed-for-one wearables and write disabled speculative fiction.

Louise Hickman

Louise Hickman is a Wellcome Early Career Fellow, leading the project “Algorithmic Kitchen: Recipes for Disability‑Led Health Technology Design” at the University of Cambridge. She is also a research associate with the Minderoo Centre of Technology and Democracy. Her research draws on critical disability studies, feminist labour studies, and science and technology studies to examine the historical and sociotechnical conditions of access work—particularly how access is produced and mediated through human labour, assistive systems, and economic structures.

Previously, she was a Senior Research Officer at the London School of Economics and contributed to the Ada Lovelace Institute’s JUST‑AI Network on Data and AI Ethics. She holds a PhD in Communication from the University of California, San Diego.

Josh Miele

Joshua A. Miele is a blind scientist, designer, author, and disability scholar. He writes, advises, and collaborates widely on accessible design, disability-inclusive research methods, and the disability experience, with understandable emphasis on blindness and low vision. He is a 2021 MacArthur Fellow, Distinguished Fellow of Disability, Accessibility, and Design at UC Berkeley’s Othering and Belonging Institute, and an Amazon Design Scholar focusing on accessible experiences for Amazon Devices.  He has a bachelor’s degree in physics and a Ph.D. in psychoacoustics from the University of California at Berkeley. 

Claudia Alick

Claudia Alick (she/they) is a national leader, performer, producer, designer, writer, designer and inclusion expert. She is founding producer of the transmedia social justice company CALLING UP whose projects include Accessible Virtual Pride, Producing in Pandemic, The Every 28 Hours Plays, We Charge Genocide TV, Justice Producers Collabertive,  F the Gala, Gaming4Justice on Twitch.  They work collaboratively on programs like CripCreate, Co-artistic direction of The BUILD Convening with FoolsFURY, Digital Design of The Festival of Masks with LA Commons, partnering with Trek Table as producer and on camera talent, building and facilitating the Mosiac Network (an alternative to facebook for BIPOC theaters and funders), producing Ghostlight Project, and Mouthwater Festival . Her practice is doing digital placemaking creating gathertown spaces for theater-making, protests, and organizing. Claudia has directed plays like Electra with Access Classics, All My Pretty Fictions in Chicago, and Istwa a Two Long Read with CUJ. She is a curator and access doula with Leonardo CripTech Incubator whose projects include CripTech Metaverse Lab, Touch Aesthetics Fellowship, and CripTech AI Lab. With CUJ she has produced many artificial intelligence experiments with visual art, animations, audio and text specifically for use with disabled community. She is in an experimental AI Dance project Zero Remake Return in May 2025.  She is a user experience design lead on apps like Followers Forever and Early Words. Claudia acts as a consultant to funders and companies around the country. She served as co-president of the board of NET for 7 years and is still active board member, She’s an advisor to SF Disability Culture Center, the NEFA National Theater project for 7 years and co-produced Unsettling Dramaturgy (crip and indigenous international digital colloquium), and is an advisor to Howlround Digital Theater Commons. She has performed with NY Neofuturists, and on many podcasts and livestreams. Public speaking highlights include On Pleasure Activism with Disability Visibility Project + Integrated Community Services, AI for the People Black in 2042, and The Smithsonian Afrofuturism Series: Claiming Space, A Symposium on Black Futures. Her online racial justice practice is reaching thousands weekly.  She is producing performances of justice on stage, online, and in real life.

Lindsey Felt

A scholar, writer, and educator, Lindsey D. Felt curates and builds frameworks for access/accessibility across digital, arts and educational platforms.She is the Disability, Access, and Impact Lead at Leonardo/ISAST, where she helps direct the Leonardo CripTech Incubator. She is also a lecturer at Stanford University in the Program in Writing and Rhetoric, where she teaches courses on disability, technology, and accessible arts curation. She holds a Ph.D. in English from Stanford University. Her research and writing has been published in Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, Ground Works, After Universal Design: The Disability Design Revolution, among other venues. She co-curated Experiments in Art, Access & Technology (E.A.A.T) currently up at Beall Center for Art + Technology, UC Irvine and Recoding CripTech during a 2019-2020 curatorial residency at SOMArts Cultural Center in San Francisco. Her curatorial work has been profiled in Art in America, KQED Arts, SFMOMA’s Raw Material podcast, the Disability Visibility Project, and others.

Vanessa Chang

As a curator, writer and educator, Vanessa Chang builds communities and conversations about art, technology and human bodies. She is Director of Programs at Leonardo/ISAST. She holds a Ph.D. in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University, where she was a Geballe Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center and also ran the Graphic Narrative Workshop. She was lead investigator for The Grid: Art + Tech Report (2020) and taught in Visual & Critical Studies at California College of the Arts. Most recently, she curated Recoding CripTech at SOMArts Cultural Center, Intersections at the Leonardo Convening at Fort Mason Center for the Arts, and Artobots, a CODAME festival of art, automation and artificial intelligence. She has appeared on NPR’s On the Media and State of the Art,  and her curatorial work has been profiled in such venues as Art in America and KQED Arts. Her writing has been published in Wired, Slate, Noema, Los Angeles Review of Books, Journal of Visual Culture, and Animation: an interdisciplinary journal, among other venues.

About CripTech Incubator

Leonardo CripTech Incubator is an art and technology program for disability innovation. Encompassing residencies, workshops, presentations, publication and education, this innovation incubator creates a platform for disabled artists to engage and remake creative technologies through the lens of accessibility. Employing a broad understanding of technologies, including prosthetic tools, neural networks, software and the built environment, CripTech Incubator reimagines enshrined notions of how a body-mind can move, look, communicate.