Learn to Include Us

Hello everyone, my name is Robert Girolami. I’m a young actor and filmmaker on the autism spectrum. I wanted to wish you all a happy Autism Acceptance Day. I’m excited to be sharing with you all a brand-new project I created for Spectrum Productions. If you have comments to share, feel free to post. 

The project is called Learn to Include Us; it is a message to the producers of the creative industry about the lack of representations of disabilities in their media content as well as the lack of employees with disabilities that work for them.

While I’ve been a member of Creative Media Lab (CML) for over a year now, I’ve been performing and editing videos with Spectrum for over a decade. During the pandemic, I’ve worked on my projects and challenges from home, including this one. I used my laptop camera to film myself, and I edited on DaVinci, adding bits from previous films I worked on with Spectrum, as well as a play I performed at Dawson College in the Professional Theater program. 

Learn to Include Us is my most important project to date. The reason for that is due to the relation it has to my career as not only an actor, but a writer and editor. With this campaign, I want to not only bring to the forefront the barriers of inclusion and representation people on the autism spectrum face, but also all people with various types of disabilities.

I want to give a special thanks to the EXEKO team, Tiphaine, Thierry, Marie-Paule, and Emma, who joined us at the Creative Media Lab for two weeks and guided us through the process of building strong messages like this one.

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