Integrating Accessibility and Inclusion into Filmmaking
About this Master Class
Master Classes are in-depth, interactive learning experiences focused on craft and career building and led by renowned industry experts. Topics include fiction and documentary filmmaking, TV writing and production, and navigating and succeeding in the entertainment industry.
This Master Class provides a guide to integrating accessibility and inclusion into your filmmaking process—from concept to final cut.
In this three-hour deep dive, you’ll gain hands-on insights into casting and hiring practices, set design for accessibility, and innovative techniques for capturing audio and visuals that ensure a smooth, inclusive post-production workflow.
Led by three groundbreaking filmmakers, this session features real-world case studies and a live Q&A, giving you direct access to their expertise:
Alison O’Daniel – The Tuba Thieves (2023)
Day Al-Mohamed – unseen (2023) & FWD-Doc
Reid Davenport – Life After (2025)
What You'll Learn:
- How to build an inclusive cast and crew
- Making your set accessible from day one
- Incorporating accessibility into shot lists and storyboards
- Best practices for working with ASL interpreters and accessibility consultants
- Capturing audio and visual content with accessibility in mind
- Creating seamless captions and audio descriptions as part of the creative process
- Ensuring your film is accessible across exhibition platforms (online & in-person)
- Designing marketing and promotional materials for all audiences
Whether you're an emerging or experienced filmmaker, this Master Class will give you the tools to make accessibility an integral part of your creative vision.
Master ClassTeam
Reid Davenport
Reid Davenport makes documentaries about disability from an overtly political perspective.
Reid’s first two feature films, Life After (2025) and I Didn’t See You There (2022), both premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and respectively won a Special Jury Award and the Directing Award. Variety called Life After “engrossing, moving, and most importantly, confrontational,” while Indiewire said it was “passionate and persuasive… upends expectations.” Nick Allen of Roger Ebert described I Didn’t See You There as “first-person poetry in captivating motion, expressed with a singular, assured artistic voice,” while Vox called it a “must-see.”
I Didn’t See You There won the True Than Fiction Award at the 2023 Independent Spirit Awards and was broadcast nationally on PBS’s syndicated series POV. Life After is slated to air on PBS’s syndicated series Independent Lens later this year and currently has a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
Day Al-Mohamed
Day Al-Mohamed is an author, filmmaker, and disability policy advisor. Day has written two novels, “Baba Ali and the Clockwork Djinn” and more recently, “The Labyrinth’s Archivist” as well as multiple short stories and articles. She is a regular host on Idobi Radio’s Geek Girl Riot with a weekly audience of 100k+ listeners and a Founding Member of FWD-Doc (Documentary Filmmakers with Disabilities).
Her documentary, THE INVALID CORPS, about disabled Civil War soldiers, was licensed to Alaska Airlines and had its broadcast premiere on public television in 2020. She is currently working on Season 2 of the docu-series, RENEGADES, of role-breaking disabled leaders in history for American Masters/PBS digital (Season 1, October 2024) and is a proud producer of feature documentary UNSEEN (POV, 2024). Day was named a DOC NYC 2021 Documentary New Leader, was part of the NBC 2022 Original Voices Fellowship class, and awarded a Disability Futures Fellow grant in 2024.
Outside of her creative work, Day is a policy expert with over 15 years of experience. The former White House Director of Disability Policy, she is a proven leader in inclusion and accessibility, policy development, organizational transformation, and innovative program design. Day lives in Washington DC with her wife, N.R. Brown, daughter Octavia, and guide dog.
Alison O'Daniel
Alison O’Daniel, a filmmaker and visual artist, is the director of The Tuba Thieves, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival 2023 and was broadcast on Independent Lens on PBS and Arte in France. The Tuba Thieves screened at festivals across the globe, including CPH Dox, MOMA Doc Fortnight, SFFILM, Biografilm, Doc Leipzeig, IDFA and many others. O’Daniel is d/Deaf and builds a visual, aural, and haptic vocabulary in her work that reveals (or proposes) a politics of sound that exceeds the ear. She is a United States Artist Disability Futures Fellow and a Guggenheim Fellow. O’Daniel has received grants from Ford Foundation; Sundance; Creative Capital; Field of Vision; ITVS; Chicken & Egg; SFFILM. She has developed projects in various labs, including Points North; Sundance Talent Forum; True/False/Catapult Editing Lab, and has attended residencies at the Wexner Center Film/Video Studio Program; Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown; and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. She was included in Filmmaker Magazine’s 2019 25 New Faces of Independent Film issue. She is represented by Commonwealth and Council Gallery in Los Angeles and is an Associate Professor in the Film Program at California College of the Arts in San Francisco.