Richard Butchins

Is an award-winning filmmaker, artist and writer. He has created ground-breaking work across television and art platforms providing rare insight into the disabled experience. Motivated by the continual exclusion and misrepresentation of marginalised people in society, his work aims to shift dominant perspectives, seeking to amplify liminal voices above all the chatter and discourse. Through documentary and personal art practice, he attempts to convey the humanity, value, and self-determination of the disabled community on its own terms, rather than as burdens, objects of pity or inspiration porn.

He is an autodidact leaving school at 16 with no qualifications and has had no training in photography, art or filmmaking. He considers himself an outsider artist and puts his adeptness in art practice down to his autistic nature. How he managed to gain a 'Practice as research' PhD from the University of Kent for a study into the aesthetics of disability with no higher education at all, is a mystery he's unwilling to solve. He lives by the sea and does not have a cat.

very little and then (rather late on in life) a bit more

here and there