Sydney Disability Pride Festival 2025

An all-day extravaganza of activities and performances to celebrate Disability Pride Month. It’s a completely disability-led event, with something for everyone.

The festival includes music, dance, speeches, panels, workshops, markets, exhibitions and interactive contests for all abilities. Our theme for 2025 is “No Shame. No Apologies.”

What will happen:

Main stage:

• Auslan speech by Alistair McEwin (profoundly deaf human rights campaigner)

• Dances by Deb Roach (three world pole dancing titles but one arm) and Jeremy and Bedelia Lowrencev (Auslan-inspired deaf dancers)

• Music by Dean Nash (cabaret performer with cerebral palsy) and Elly-May Barnes (rock princess with cerebral palsy)

• Films by Emily Dash (artist with cerebral palsy

• Poetry by Olly Nash (bipolar and functional neurological disorder)

• Panel with Rosemary Kayess, Shaun Bickley and more

All day:

• Disabled makers market with disability-led businesses and organisations selling everything from woodturning to bath salts

• Decorate your mobility aid contest

• Arts and crafts facilitated by professionals

• Agents signing up disabled talent

• Remembrance wall for disabled abuse victims

• Protest against subminimum wage

• Art exhibition

• Cinema space

Workshops:

• Doing your Own Thing: grassroots disability activism with the founders of Disability Pride Sydney

• Reclaiming Your Voice: poetry with disabled poetry champions

• Speaking Out: drama workshop for all abilities

What is disability pride?

This is our fourth year running and for many it’s a life-altering experience that changes how we see the world, and how the world sees us. This year we make history by taking our well-deserved place in Sydney’s iconic Town Hall and by putting our banners all over the CBD. 

Disability Pride publicly refuses to apologise for our needs and demands inclusion as our right. Many of us disabled people feel shame about who we are and the need to apologise for our needs. At Disability Pride we turn that attitude on its head as we join disabled persons around the world joyfully standing or sitting together and affirming our value and rights.  

Disability Pride is a global movement that rejects the feelings of shame and inferiority that our society foists on us, and fights back by celebrating ourselves and empowering our communities.