Traci Foster is a d/Disabled artist, cultural leader, and consultant who explores and develops her work with a focus on where awareness, intuition, and action intersect in the body. She works with creation as care, and unapologetically seeks pleasure in all aspects of life, including art-making. Her trauma-informed approach to facilitation was cultivated through her long journey to find her voice, and her right to be in her body as a disabled individual with pleasure and ease. The heart of her work lies within the space where compassion meets creativity.
Traci is the Founder and Artistic Director of Listen to Dis’ Community and Arts Organization – Saskatchewan’s first and only disability led arts organization – and is an unrelenting advocate of disability culture and justice. Traci has worked with the company for 19 years, developing a portfolio of multidisciplinary projects aimed at creating professional opportunities for disabled artists and allies while informing the broader community about disability through the lens of lived experiences, both past and present. Actors and musicians with Listen to Dis’ perform innovative, original work across the province, tackling issues of sexuality, identity, and disability, the desire to belong, ableism, and the political right to be in one’s body.
Traci is the recipient of the 2015 YWCA’s Women of Distinction Jacqui Shumiatcher Arts Award and the 2022 SK Arts Awards Organization Leadership for her work with Listen to Dis’ Community & Arts Organization. She was awarded recognition in Individual Artists in Leadership for her work in Saskatchewan in 2023.
Shaylee Rosnes is an Artist, Administrative Associate, and Arts Programmer with Listen to Dis’ Community & Arts Organization [LTD’]. She graduated from the University of Regina with a Bachelor of Social Work in 2022 and incorporates that education in her programming and project work. Shaylee is an actor in both The Dripping Honeys [LTD’s music ensemble] and The Other Ordinary [LTD’s theatre company]. Most recently, she has appeared in the Dripping Honeys’ productions Bits & Pieces of Dis’ & Dat, which toured across the province in 2023 – 2026. She is also the monologist in the annual “Not Just Christmas” concert which is performed at care and seniors’ homes in Regina and surrounding areas, in addition to the annual public concert. She has also co-presented at conferences including the 2024 Re-Imagining Nonprofits conference and Inclusion Saskatchewan’s 2025 Inclusion conference.
Breakout Session:
Creation as Care: Creative Ways of Maintaining and Cultivating Health and Wellbeing While Building Accessibility
Disability artists and cultural workers Traci Foster and Shaylee Rosnes will host a 1hour interactive workshop focusing on integrating care into accessibility for disabled people and everyone in service to cultivating or providing accessibility.
Using research from lived experience, d/Disability Culture movement, and trauma-informed exercises, the presentation will build an understanding of how disabled professionals not only survive the impossible pace of an ableist world but thrive within it.
This workshop will break down how creation as care is held and why it is important that everyone understand and integrate it when building accessibility. All participants will leave with an understanding of how care is central to accessibility, how to integrate care-centered access for people with disabilities, and how to interrupt the inherent overwhelm and sometimes burnout for everyone in service to or allyship with d/Disabled folks. ‘Creation as Care’ emerged as a theory and practice within the disability cultural movement. It grew out of concern for the health and wellbeing of disabled people and the environments around them. Creation as Care is based on biological, physical, physiological, and psychological needs.
The presenters will use facilitated dialogue, presentation, and trauma-informed exercises to help integrate the information from the experiential learning model.
