Aminder Virdee is a South Asian transdisciplinary, STEM and multi-artform artist; activist; writer and creator; filmmaker; arts, justice and trauma-informed facilitator and workshop creator; trained and lived experience-based intersectional access consultant, auditor, and designer with over fourteen years’ experience; and a Trustee at UK’s leading disability-led live music accessibility organisation Attitude is Everything.

Aminder has been regularly involved with community justice organising and artivism since the age of eighteen. She is the founder and justice and arts facilitator of Disabled Intersectional Voices in the Arts (DIVA), a disabled, neurodivergent, Black and Brown-led, and focused network generating sites of creative resistance against institutional and educational intersectional ableism. Aminder initially created DIVA as UAL’s first disabled-led society; however, DIVA has now become its own entity. Aminder is also a co-founder of Cripjoy, a transnational and majority BIPOC community of practice re-worlding mental health through an intersectional, anti-ableist, and anti-sanist lens.

Aminder has also been channelling her passion for intersectional equity and her complex lifelong experience of quintuple oppressions and social injustices into a new domain; filmmaking. Aminder is the co-writer, lived experience and inclusion consultant, and director’s attachment for the short film ‘My Eyes Are Up Here’ (2022) funded by BBC and BFI, based on a day in Aminder’s life when she was 19 years old. This short film was a collaboration with director Nathan Morris, co-writer Arthur Meek, disability-focused executive producer 104 Films, and stars Jillian Mercado (American actor, model, and star on ‘The L Word’) as the lead protagonist. ‘My Eyes Are Up Here’ (2022) premiered at the BFI’s London Film Festival 2022, and will be screened as a part of the London Short Film Festival 2023.

As an artist, Aminder’s art work has been exhibited, and performed across the UK, including the National Gallery with Art in Flux, National Theatre of Scotland, Lyric Theatre, TATE Exchange at TATE Modern, European Film Festival 2021, Bonington Gallery, Hoxton Arches, Waterman’s Art Centre, Lewisham Arthouse, Bow Arts Nunnery Gallery, Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival 2021, NDACA, GlitchRealm - ReFest: Remote Access with CultureHub, Shape Arts, and more. In 2017, Aminder received the NDACA (National Disability Arts Collection and Archive) Award, and was mentored by Disabled British Sculptor Tony Heaton OBE. NDACA is a project funded by Heritage Lottery and delivered by Shape Arts, chronicling the unique history of the UK Disability Arts Movement.

Recently, Aminder exhibited, and was one of three key speakers for Art in Flux’s ‘Reclaimed’ exhibition at National Gallery. Here, Aminder was highlighted as “one of the most underrepresented radical artists of our time.” Her audio-visual work, ‘KaleidoSkeleton Ti: The Desi Cyborg (2020-21)’, was exhibited, screened, and discussed as part of the European Film Festival in 2021. Additionally, this work was also published in the BFI’s Official Sound and Sight ‘Winter Special’ Magazine for the Films of the Year 2021-22 (Vol 32, Issue 1), and the BFI website, as a part of ‘the best of 2021 in experimental cinema.’

As an arts professional and panel speaker, Aminder was recently invited to the National Portrait Gallery (in collaboration with ‘British Art Network’ and ‘European Paintings pre-1900’ for ‘Museum Collections on Prescription: Health, Wellbeing and Inclusivity’) to discuss the lack of intersectional disability representation and visitor wellbeing in galleries, museums, and collections as a part of the online series “Nothing About Us Without Us”, convened and chaired by Tony Heaton OBE.

Aminder’s consultancy experience varies from her early role as one of the previous London Ambassador’s for the Muscular Dystrophy Campaign's Trailblazer Network, where she has chaired London APPG disability groups; to public speaking discussing disability representation at schools, boards, and book fairs, such as the London Book Fair in 2013. She has also consulted for Inclusive Mind’s children’s book ‘Max the Champion’ which is available to purchase across book stores in the UK, and has been distributed to all schools and libraries in England. As Trailblazer’s London Ambassador, Aminder received the 'Merril Lynch Local Hero Neighbourhood Excellence Initiative Award' due to her leading role in disability campaigns, as their media spokesperson, and as chair of regional and APPG meetings.

Aminder was also an arts tutor, facilitator and arts award advisor for the National Saturday Arts and Design Club (based at Somerset House, London) at Cranford Community College for over three years. Through this, Aminder designed art lessons and workshops, guiding young people from the age of 13 to 16 into the arts to push back at the governmental education and art cuts. As a tutor and facilitator, Aminder created the arts curriculum each academic year in line with the NSADC model at the college; devised alternate approaches to presenting lessons to increase student understanding; taught young people sustainable careers in the creative industries and how to tap into their own resourcefulness, creativity and motivations in art, alongside much more. For more information about this, an Aminder's employment history, please contact her via the contact form on this website.

Aminder continues to consult on integrated and collective intersectional access-centred practices, inclusion, equity and diversity in the arts, and has carried out consultations and audits at various arts organisations in the UK. Working as an artist for the last fifteen years, Aminder continues to fight for herself and other multiple marginalised artists in the sector.

As an alumni of Central Saint Martins, Aminder recently won the 'CSM Graduate Award 2022.'