Liz Cooper is an award-winning writer/director who works across drama, experimental, online content, and documentary. With a strong focus on performance-driven drama with distinctive female characters, her films have screened at over a hundred festivals worldwide.
Liz’s work often explores themes of marginalised women, female rage, social injustice, trauma, queerness, disability, and the effect of social issues on the body. Most recently, her short film Wolf was financed by the Screen NSW Emerging Filmmakers Fund.
Liz has a Graduate Diploma in Directing from Australian Film Television and Radio School (2013) and is a proud disabled woman, with a physical disability.
Give me these moments back
Give them back to me
Give me that little kiss
I know you have a little life in you yet
I know you have a lot of strength left
I know you have a little life in you yet
I know you have a lot of strength left
This Woman’s Work, Kate Bush
I always wanted to be some kind of artist since I was a child, abounding with enthusiasm and adventurous spirit, and I was restless unless I was doing, making, performing, creating or on a wild goose chase with other adventurers.
My physical disability appeared inexplicably at 12 years old and progressed at a steady but life-altering pace so by the time I left school I was living in a world which was extremely different to my non-disabled peers. Endless doctors, clinics, hospitals, operations, physical therapies, infections, rehabilitations, failed surgeries, pain, and extensive medical intervention gave me the feeling at times I was living in a discombobulating gory horror film and other times a psychological thriller trying to guess the ending to this twisted tale.
I had thought my calling was to be an actor but that dream died a cruel death when all the acting schools I applied to told me actors needed to be physically able-bodied and I would never have a career. At the time I did not even question this. Of course, it made sense. I didn’t have a disabled community or a disabled identity so I didn’t even question this level of ableism. To be honest, I did not even know a disabled community or identity existed. As a disabled person in the world I was pretty isolated. The way I dealt with it all was to mentally compartmentalise my life from my disability.
I love storytelling so an old acting teacher suggested I look at directing and writing which made so much sense. So I started my filmmaking journey by making films with friends; it was fun and accessible. But as I tried to move into the larger film industry I experienced roadblocks again as no one would hire me because of my disability.
So I decided to study film, but there are such strong ideas about what bodies are ‘allowed’ to make work; and being a woman I didn’t need another cross against my name. So I just told people I had an injury rather than a disability – which was really disturbing. I mean, people were happy to make things accessible for an injury, but towards disability, attitudes were very different, even though technically the accessibility requirements would have been the same.
It became clear the only way I could do this was if I made my own work and worked with people who knew me and continued to largely hide and compartmentalise myself. So, I started making work and in some ways it was an act of resistance, but after a while it was just tiring. Having to work out all my own accessibility needs and perform like a non-disabled person – it just didn’t work after a while. My resilience had really worn thin.
Then, miraculously just when I thought I couldn’t go any further, all these incredible disabled filmmakers, actors and artist started to show up in my life. I discovered a disabled arts community and everything changed. I felt so lucky to come to know these disabled artists, and I felt understood in a way that words cannot describe.
In more recent years, diversity and inclusion have become buzz words on applications for funding, and funding bodies love to bang on about lived experience. My experience is, and maybe I am cynical, that often this ends up being more part of a box ticking exercise; about metrics, and an optical illusion of diversity and inclusion, especially around emerging sectors, but no real changes are made in attitudes around disability or the way things are done at higher levels. Leadership is crucial to change but we really have to question the way we do everything.
Doing the Sync Leadership programme was life changing for me. Being a part of a group that centred disabled leadership changed how I saw myself. Just being in a place where we are heard and seen – and held in a gentle open space for us as disabled people with all our trauma and intersections – this was life changing. I always feel so restless, anxious to being exposed – but suddenly I felt like I could be still and be seen. It was unlike any experience I had ever had.
Non-disabled people undervalue the amount of emotional labour disabled people do daily in all our relationships, work, personal, family and the world at large and it can require a lot of mental gymnastics for us to navigate a largely ableist world. But during Sync I felt like the walls of the mental compartments I had created in my mind started to melt away and I became whole. I could comfortably centre my disability and be a disabled person without an explanation or being someone’s afterthought. It wasn’t an “oh I forgot”, it was a ‘front and centre’ and the experience of not having to deal even the small fragment of ableism was life-changing for me.
The Sync coaching asked me to reflect upon our journeys of leadership so far; what strengths I had built, and the people and resources I had in my corner supporting me. The coaching allowed me to look at myself and my journey as valid and see how far I really had come. Having disabled leaderships centred in such a way really helped reflect back to me how much energy I spent comparing myself to others and how much stress I felt relying on non-disabled people for access and their leadership and how this was very not conducive for art making. I felt like I had been waiting for someone’s permission.
My coach reflected back to me the longing I had for creating stories and the joy and purpose I found in doing that. I began to really see there was a place for me and the practice of the coaching also allowed me to begin to champion the way I had been doing things, the validity of that, and how I had been leading and creating work from an authentic place all along.
It wasn’t just the individual coaching in Sync that shifted me, it was being together with this incredible group of people, the way Sarah and Jo approached the group. It was conversation which centred on disabled artistic leadership – and the way it was modelled showed us, through the workshop, in the way they inhabited the space, just how easily it can be done.
Being in a space where you are seen and valued as you is life changing. Disabled artist leadership is as sexy as fuck, I am completely in love with it. It is not just a box to be ticked – it is truly a completely achievable, precious and wonderful way of life and now I realised I actually have a lot of strength left.