Speaking & Workshops
Ray Young is a Creative Director, artist, coach, and speaker with over 16 years of experience making internationally touring performance work. They speak from the inside of a practice, as a Black, working class, AuDHD and dyslexic artist who has built a significant career in an industry that was not built for people like them.
Ray speaks not from theory but from experience: of making work, navigating institutions, managing teams, negotiating fees, fighting for access, and building something sustainable in a sector that consistently underestimates many of the people doing the most important work.
If you are looking for a speaker who will say something real, Ray is available for keynotes, panels, workshops, and facilitated discussions.
What Ray speaks about
Ray is available to speak for conferences, festivals, universities, arts organisations, and institutions who are serious about the questions they are asking, rather than simply ticking boxes.
They are interested in conversations where people are willing to be changed and make change.
Race, neurodivergence, and what it costs to be both
Ray is AuDHD and Black. These are not separate conversations. The way neurodivergence is understood, accommodated, and celebrated in this country is racialised, and the consequences of that are serious and underexplored.
Ray speaks about the intersection of race and neurodivergence with honesty and specificity: what masking costs, how autistic behaviour is read differently on Black bodies, the danger of meltdown when you are already presumed to be the problem in the room, and why the mainstream neurodivergence conversation so often leaves Black and brown people out.
This is a topic Ray is developing actively through their own practice and coaching work, and one they bring genuine fire to.
The pay gap nobody is measuring
There is significant data on the gender pay gap. There is some data on the race pay gap. There is almost no data on what happens at the intersection of race, gender, disability, and freelance status in the creative industries, and the absence of that data is not an accident.
Ray speaks about this gap from a position of personal experience and sector knowledge. This is a talk about money, about who gets paid what and why, about fee negotiation as a survival skill, and about why the creative industries cannot keep pretending the problem does not exist.
Access support — what it really means
Ray receives access support through the Access to Work scheme and has hard-won, specific knowledge of what good access support looks like, and how rarely it is done well.
Rather than focusing policy, Ray speaks about the vulnerability required to ask for help, the care work involved in building a functional support relationship, the question of agency when you are the disabled person in the room, and why so many access support arrangements fail the people they are supposed to serve.
Ray speaks about this as someone who has lived it, continues to live it, and has thought hard about what needs to change.
Building a sustainable creative practice
Sixteen years making internationally touring work. Multiple concurrent projects. A coaching practice. A speaking offer. All of it built as a sole trader, without institutional backing, while being Black, working class, neurodivergent, and queer.
Ray speaks about what it actually takes to sustain a creative practice over the long term: the financial realities, the structural barriers, the cost of doing it alone, and what the industry could do differently to support artists who are not already part of the system.
What institutions get wrong about inclusion
Ray has worked with, been commissioned by, taught at, and been failed by arts institutions. They have a clear-eyed perspective on the gap between what organisations say about diversity and inclusion and what they actually do, as well as what genuine structural change would require.
This is not a comfortable talk. But it is a useful one.
Race and the arts – panels and sector conversations
Ray has spoken on panels and in sector discussions about race, class, and access in the arts, including work with Something To Aim For and the Edinburgh Festival around racial inclusion, a panel with the Race Collective and Arts Admin, a panel on Autobiographical Practice with Raze Collective, a lecture at Warwick University on sustainability in the Arts, as well as their own panel discussion Blacklash, and public discussions following performances of their work OUT.
Current workshop offer
- Social activism and art-making – how creative practice can be a site of genuine political resistance
- Developing a visual language – finding and owning your aesthetic as an artist
- The relationship between movement and text – for performance makers working across disciplines
- Leaning into your own cultural narratives – how personal and community history becomes material
- Neurodivergence and creative practice – for neurodivergent artists and for organisations wanting to understand how to support them better
Ray has delivered workshops and masterclasses at institutions including Goldsmiths University, Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, London Contemporary Dance School, University of Warwick, and University of Roehampton.
Bespoke workshops are available. Get in touch to discuss what you need.
Dramaturgy and outside eye
Ray is available to work as a dramaturg and outside eye on devising processes. They bring 16 years of experience making complex, multi-partner, interdisciplinary work to their dramaturgical practice.
Recent outside eye work includes collaborations with Brownton Abbey, Mika Onyx Johnson, Louisa Robbins, Finlay Carroll, Subira Joy, and Princess Bestman.
Book Ray
Ray is available for keynotes, panels, workshops, masterclasses, facilitated discussions, and dramaturgy work.
To discuss availability, topics, and fees, please get in touch:
Ray is based in Nottingham and works nationally and internationally.