Bio
Aminder Virdee is a South Asian transdisciplinary, multi-artform and STEM artist; facilitator; writer and creator; filmmaker; community creative justice facilitator and organiser; a trained, lived experience-based, and trauma-informed Intersectional Disability Inclusion and Access Consultant with over fifteen years of experience; and a Trustee at UK’s leading disability-led live music accessibility organisation Attitude is Everything. Aminder has been exhibiting her work since 2008.
Aminder has been regularly involved with community justice organising and artivism since the age of eighteen. She is the founder, community creative justice facilitator and organiser of Disabled Intersectional Voices in the Arts (DIVA), a disabled, neurodivergent, Black and Brown-led and focused network generating sites of creative resistance against intersectional ableism. Aminder is also a co-founder of Cripjoy, a transnational and majority BIPOC community of practice re-worlding mental health through an intersectional, anti-ableist, and anti-sanist lens.
As an artist, Aminder’s work has been exhibited internationally, including at the National Gallery with Art in Flux, the National Theatre of Scotland, Lethaby Gallery for the London Design Festival 2022, the British Computer Society, TATE Exchange at TATE Modern, Lyric Theatre Hammersmith, European Film Festival 2021, Bonington Gallery, Waterman’s Art Centre, Hoxton Arches, Lewisham Arthouse, Nunnery Gallery, Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival 2021, NDACA, GlitchRealm - ReFest: Remote Access with CultureHub (New York), Shape Arts, and more. In 2017, Aminder received the NDACA (National Disability Arts Collection and Archive) Award and was mentored by Disabled British Sculptor Tony Heaton OBE. NDACA is a project funded by Heritage Lottery and delivered by Shape Arts, chronicling the unique history of the UK Disability Arts Movement. In 2021, Aminder exhibited and was one of three key speakers for Art in Flux’s ‘Reclaimed’ exhibition at the National Gallery. Here, Aminder was highlighted as “one of the most underrepresented radical artists of our time.” Furthermore, Aminder’s audio-visual work, ‘KaleidoSkeleton Ti: The Desi Cyborg (2020-21)’, was exhibited, screened, and discussed as part of the European Film Festival in 2021, as well as published in the BFI’s Official Sight and Sound ‘Winter Special’ Magazine for the Films of the Year 2021-22 (Vol 32, Issue 1), and the BFI website, as a part of ‘the best of 2021 in experimental cinema.’
Aminder has also been channelling her passion for intersectional equity and her complex lifelong experience of quintuple oppressions and social injustices into a new domain; filmmaking. Aminder is the creator, co-writer, lived experience and inclusion consultant, and director’s attachment for the short film ‘My Eyes Are Up Here’ (2022), funded by BBC and BFI, based on a day in Aminder’s life when she was 19 years old. The short film has received recognition from over 20 prestigious international film festivals, including the BFI London Film Festival 2022, the London Short Film Festival 2023, TriBeca Film Festival 2023 (NYC), and Sundance Film Festival 2023 (London). The film has also been shortlisted for awards across many film festivals, most recently being honoured with the “Woman’s Voice Award” and the “Best of the Festival Award” at the BIFA-qualifying Beeston Film Festival (link to trailer). This short film stars Jillian Mercado (model and actor in ‘The L Word’) as the lead protagonist.
Aminder’s consultancy experience varies, and as mentioned above, she started at the age of eighteen as one of the previous London Ambassadors for the Muscular Dystrophy Campaign's Trailblazer Network. During her work at MDC Trailblazers, Aminder received the 'Merril Lynch Local Hero Neighbourhood Excellence Initiative Award' in 2012 due to her leading role in disability campaigns, as their media spokesperson, and as chair of regional and APPG meetings. Aminder has experience speaking at many events, panels, and seminars, discussing intersectionality as it pertains to disability and her lifelong lived experience (i.e. disability as a Brown woman from a low-socioeconomic background), disability justice, and developing tools to build authentic intersectional disability inclusion. Aminder has also consulted on disability representation and imagery at schools, boards, seminars, and book fairs, such as the London Book Fair 2013, and recently at Royal Holloway University as a consultant for Disabled Students UK. Aminder has also consulted on children's books, notably ‘Max the Champion’ in 2013 with Inclusive Minds, which is available to purchase across bookstores in the UK, and has been distributed to all schools and libraries in England.
As an arts professional and panel speaker, Aminder has spoken about her lived experience, art, and justice work at many events, such as the National Gallery and the National Portrait Gallery (in collaboration with ‘British Art Network’ and ‘European Paintings pre-1900’ for ‘Museum Collections on Prescription: Health, Wellbeing and Inclusivity’) to discuss the lack of intersectional disability representation and visitor well-being in galleries, museums, and collections as a part of the online series “Nothing About Us Without Us”, convened and chaired by Tony Heaton OBE.
From 2016 to 2019, Aminder was an Arts Tutor, Facilitator, and Arts Award advisor at Cranford Community College as a part of the National Saturday Arts and Design Club (based at Somerset House, London and founded by Sir and Lady Sorrell). As an educator, Aminder curated the art class curriculum each academic year and designed lessons in line with the college's NSADC and Arts Award model, guiding young people from 13 to 16 into the arts and pushing back at the governmental education and art cuts. She also devised alternate approaches to presenting lessons to increase student understanding; taught young people sustainable strategies for a career in the creative industries; employed art to delve into subjects that were at the heart of the student's interests (such as equality and diversity politics, and eco and environmental justice), led trips to galleries and events such as a behind the scenes masterclass at the English National Opera, and tutored students to tap into their resourcefulness, creativity and motivations in art (2017-18 yearbook PDF pg 38/39).
Aminder continues to consult on integrated and collective intersectional access-centred practices, inclusion, equity and diversity in the arts and has carried out consultations and audits at various arts organisations in the UK. Working as an artist for the last fifteen years, Aminder continues to fight for herself and other multiple marginalised artists in the sector.
As a postgraduate alumnus of the University of the Arts London (Central Saint Martin’s campus) graduating with a first-class distinction in MA in Art and Science, Aminder recently received the ‘CSM Deans Award 2022’ and the “UAL Art Archives and Special Collections Acquisition 2022”. Aminder was nominated for the NSVA award for providing ’Opportunities for All’ by creating and sustaining the first disabled and Black and Brown-led arts society at UAL while completing her postgraduate degree during multiple adversities in the pandemic.
Visit Aminder's Instagram for works in progress:
All images © 2008 -2023 Aminder Virdee. Use of images is prohibited unless permission obtained by Artist.