For Immediate Release
§1NDA - a neurodivergent aesthetic
A six week residency exhibition at the
Stephen Lawrence Gallery
Private View: 9 April, 5:00-8:00 PM
Exhibition Opens: 9 April - 6 May
ND Private View: 25 April, 2:00-5:00 PM
Stephen Lawrence Gallery
Private View: 9 April, 5:00-8:00 PM
Exhibition Opens: 9 April - 6 May
ND Private View: 25 April, 2:00-5:00 PM
DYSPLA, winner of the Saatchi Gallery Digital Artist of the Future Prize 2025, announces a major residency exhibition exploring the concept of the neurodivergent aesthetic. The exhibition will open at the Stephen Lawrence Gallery in London, from April–May 2026.
DYSPLA, a London-based, award-winning, neurodivergent-led arts organisation known for their pioneering digital art narratives and for expanding the conversation around disability aesthetics. The term, the neurodivergent aesthetic, describes art made by neurodivergent people, inspired by nonconformist cognition, and proposes the possibility of a new aesthetic - the ‘neurodivergent aesthetic’.
As part of this residency, DYSPLA will digitally reproduce historical and newly created artefacts alongside works developed during DYSPLA_Inclination workshops with students from Kings Park Newhaven School, Greenwich, funded by the Royal Borough of Greenwich. These artworks will be printed on billboard paper and assembled into a large-scale installation designed to unpack, challenge and visualise what is meant by the neurodivergent aesthetic.
‘Our brains shape our personality, our identity, our ability, the opportunities available to us, and inevitably determine our aesthetics’. Lennie Varvarides, Founder of DYSPLA & LAHP Funded PhD Candidate at The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, London.
The exhibition positions neurodivergence as culturally significant, intellectually rigorous and central to contemporary art practice. It asks whether difference itself—divergent cognition—can be seen, identified and understood through aesthetics. While recognising that identity is shaped by multiple factors including environment, education and privilege, DYSPLA argues that cognition plays a fundamental role in artistic identity, methodology and creative output.
“DYSPLA are part of the vital conversations in digital art that have emerged in recent years from radical queer, feminist, and antiracist epistemologies. Their work—and this exhibition—demonstrates how a neurodivergent aesthetic can activate the glitch, techno-embodiment, and other modes that challenge and rethink how contemporary technologies are shaped through use. We’re thrilled to host their work at the Stephen Lawrence Gallery.” Dr. Jane Frances Dunlop, University Galleries Curator and Senior Lecturer in Digital Media at the University of Greenwich
Alongside the installation, the programme will include panel discussions, roundtable debates, free workshops and public conversations with leading neurodivergent artists, academics, curators and critical peers. This is what our critical friend, Shape Arts had to say about the exhibition:
In gaining wider recognition, neurodivergence has become a topic about difference with varying degrees of acceptance, understanding and clarity. We support DYSPLA’s undertaking to assess the aesthetic lens through which those with lived experience of neurodivergence can cut through the noise and reflect their talents and viewpoints whilst strengthening the signal for better advocacy. Jeff Rowlings, Head of Programme, Shape Arts
Open to audiences both within and beyond London’s neurodivergent art community, the exhibition invites public participation in an evolving conversation about creativity, difference and the legitimacy of the Neurodivergent Aesthetic.
Press Contact: Lennie Varvarides, hello@dyspla.com RSVP hello@dyspla.com
End Notes
LISTING INFORMATION:
Where: Stephen Lawrence
Gallery, 10 Stockwell Street
London
SE10 9BD
📅 When: 6th April — 8th May 2026
Opening Times: Tuesday — Friday
11am — 5pmSaturday:11: am — 4:00 pm
Sunday — Monday: Closed.
The Gallery is Wheelchair Accessible
💰 Cost: Free & Open to all
About: DYSPLA is a London-based studio and production Community Interest Company (CIC) dedicated to developing work by Neurodivergent Creatives (NDC) and Storymakers across film, poetry, digital art, performance, and installation. DYSPLA creates platforms for artists historically excluded from mainstream narratives. They are committed to democratising creative production and celebrating dyslexic and neurodivergent cognition as engines of innovation. DYSPLA are known for making and curating ethnographic work and recently won the Saatchi Gallery Digital Artist of the Future Award. They populate both digital and physical space with performative poetics, addressing provocative subjects that aim to evoke critical conversations around the emergence of a new art term: Neurodivergent Aesthetics and ask how this term can be used in an expansive way to bring more people to the gallery space as both a spectators and an art makers with the objective of exploring artistic expression and alternative conversations around access to, in and about art spaces and disability art culture.
DYSPLA_Inclination: A series of six Digital Art workshops with 10 neurodivergent students from Newhaven School, Kings Park. The workshops focus on a technologically advanced induction into the process of 3D digital capture and printing process, together with the creation and development of short form narratives around the concept of choice and inclination. The students also have the opportunity to record performative audio exploring themes of the decision making process, agency, and the concepts of free will. Students' work was presented onsite on the 27th Feb 2026 to the whole school with the extra bonus of their work being included in the ‘Neurodivergent Aesthetics’ exhibition alongside professional artists. Lennie Varvarides is a PhD candidate at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama — Funded by London Arts & Humanities Partnership (LAHP)
The University of Greenwich founded the Stephen Lawrence Gallery in 2000 following the publication of the Macpherson report into the police handling of the Stephen Lawrence murder enquiry. The gallery was the initiative of Paul Stigant, then Dean of the Woolwich faculty at the University of Greenwich, working in close partnership with Stephen’s mother, Doreen Lawrence, who had been a student at the University in 1993 when Stephen was murdered in a racist attack. The Woolwich Campus was the first home of the gallery, where its establishment was assisted by a group of enthusiastic local supporters. One of this group, Kelly O’Reilly, became the first curator, taking the gallery forward to its new site at Maritime Greenwich.
Councillor Sandra Bauer, Cabinet Member for Equality, Culture and Communities, for Greenwich said: “From social sing-a-longs and roller discos to sensory-friendly exhibitions and writing workshops exploring Black history, this year’s Create programme will bring our communities together to be creative, and explore their unique stories through arts, culture and heritage. We’re committed to cementing Royal Greenwich as a place where creative people, innovation and cultural connections inspire, encourage and flourish. Our Create grants are key to this goal, empowering local groups and organisations to deliver events and activities, that widen participation and engagement in the arts for local people. Thank you to our community advisory panels, whose knowledge, experience and insights helped us select projects to fund that truly represent the diversity of our communities.”
Shape Arts is a disability-led organisation breaking barriers to creative excellence, delivering a range of projects supporting marginalised artists, as well as training cultural venues to be more inclusive and accessible for disabled people as employees, artists and audiences. All of Shape’s work is informed by the Social Model of Disability. Running alongside their organisation work is the NLHF funded National Disability Movement Archive and Collection (NDMAC), a radical collecting and retelling of the Disability Rights Movement’s heritage story that builds on our delivery of the National Disability Arts Collection and Archive (NDACA), a £1-million digital archive chronicling the history of disability arts in the UK, available to the public at www.the-ndaca.org
DYSPLA would like to thank The Stephen Lawrence Gallery for their invitation to exhibit, ‘The Neurodivergent Aesthetic.’ It is an extensive collection of work made by British Neurodivergent artists with a facilitated public discussion around the intersectionality of contemporary art and disability aesthetics purely from a neurodivergent lens. DYSPLA would also like to thank their critical friend Shape Arts, who have mentored DYSPLA for years and who have kindly offered to come on board in an advisory capacity and as our media partner.