Award-winning artist, Alex Bulmer, has spent more than three decades working across theatre, radio, and education, but her creative path has never followed a conventional script.
Alex’s early ambitions were rooted in acting. While training at Toronto Metropolitan University (then Ryerson), she encountered a harsh reality: disclosing her vision loss often meant rejection.
She later moved to the United Kingdom to train in voice, a move that would ultimately reshape her artistic direction. There, she worked with a disability-led theatre company, collaborating with artists who were deaf, blind, and wheelchair users.
“This changed every assumption I had,” said Alex. “What theatre looked like, sounded like, who gets to create it, and where its power lies.”
That shift became the foundation of a career defined by disability-led creation, collaboration, and innovation. Today, Alex is a playwright, director, actor, educator, and the co-founder and Artistic Director of Unsightly Arts, a company dedicated to developing bold, accessible, and imaginative work.
Her practice challenges the dominance of the medical model of disability, instead exploring the idea of disability culture, particularly blind culture, as something communal, creative, and deeply expressive.
“I’m interested in public spaces where blind and disabled people gather in spaces that are designed for us, where the focus is on culture and community, not isolation.”
This philosophy is at the heart of her work and is what brings her to CNIB Lake Joe this summer.
Alex will be onsite during the Young Adult Arts Intensive week as a writer-in-residence, alongside fellow artist Lorna Craig. Throughout the week, she’ll participate in fireside chats with emerging artists, share her creative journey, and may even offer a master class within the performance arts stream. She’ll return later in the season for Summer Camp, where she’ll lead programming in the dramatic arts stream.
But beyond leading and teaching, Alex is coming to listen. She is currently developing a new dramatic work inspired by Lake Joe, and as part of that process, plans to connect directly with guests, inviting them to share their thoughts and experiences of camp life.
“There’s no way for me to create something meaningful without being there, without talking to people, understanding their experiences, and being immersed in the environment,” said Alex.
Rather than arriving with a fixed narrative, Alex is intentionally holding the work loosely, allowing it to be shaped by the voices and experiences of the community itself. The project, expected to evolve through 2027, will draw directly from those interactions, grounding imagination in lived experience.
In many ways, it reflects the core of Alex’s artistic ethos: create work that is interdependent, rooted in real voices, and expansive in how it invites audiences to experience the world.
Or, as she puts it, “Imagine with your ears and your body.”