Sandra Alland is a writer, filmmaker, interdisciplinary artist and curator. She/her or they/them.
Sandra experiments with form and integrated access in writing, film, performance and interdisciplinary art. She is committed to slowness, and to her communities thriving beyond ‘diversity’ crumbs from arts institutions. Her work explores feminist, queer, classed and disabled politics / poetics. San lives in Glasgow, and retains ties to Edinburgh, Toronto/Tkaronto (Dish With One Spoon treaty territory) and Cobourg (Williams Treaties First Nations).
San’s most recent work is a performance of her poem, “Audience”, for Glasgow International.
In late 2019, Proper Tales Press published San’s second chapbook of fiction, Anything Not Measurable Is Not Real. She was awarded a 2020 Digital Originals grant from Canada Council for the Arts to create an audiobook and film-stories of the chapbook.
San has received story commissions from British Council and Manchester’s Comma Press, and features in international anthologies. Author of three poetry books, she co-edited the multimedia UK anthology Stairs and Whispers: D/deaf & Disabled Poets Write Back. San’s essays appear in The Bi-ble Volume 2 (Monstrous Regiment), Imaginary Safe House (Hamilton Arts & Letters / Frog Hollow Press), and Kenny Fries’s Disability Futures in the Arts (Wordgathering).
As part of an appointment by Birds of Paradise Theatre Company to Freelance Task Force, San responded to the pandemic by exploring collective loss with the collaboration “A Wake: on mourning, marking and moving forward together with joy”. They were Guest Editor for Disability Arts Online in April 2020, producing a 17-piece showcase of text and audio by disabled LGBTQIA+ artists, and recently created a Disability Arts International profile for northern Turtle Island (colonial name “Canada”).
San writes, directs and edits documentaries, experimental poetry films, and hybrid projects. In 2016-17, their short story with film, “Equivalence“, featured live onstage / onscreen at Barbican (Transpose), Edinburgh Filmhouse and Summerhall (Anatomy Arts). From 2015 to 2017, San was commissioned by DAO’s Viewfinder Project to co-create five short documentaries and co-curate a film programme. Their short films have screened internationally at festivals including Entr’2 Marches (Cannes), San Francisco Transgender Film Festival, and Queer City Cinema (Regina).
San curates independent film, performance and visual arts. Their collaborations include Oska Bright / Glasgow Short Film Festival, BFI Flare, Film Hub Scotland, The Theatre Centre (Toronto), and Scotland’s accessible queer and trans arts project, Cachín Cachán Cachunga!