…Plus other inquiries and invitations to reimagine neurodivergence and futures

That's a lie. Widely-acknowledged as a 'genius' with his expansive inner world expressed through powerful outputs ranging from the arts to the sciences, Leonardo Da Vinci was dyslexic and ADHD. With his 'backward-writing', and inability to sit still and complete his work, the neurodivergent polymath would have failed entrance requirements of 21st century educational systems, let alone enter Higher Education in Singapore or elsewhere in the first place.

Through creative research in the form of a tapestry art from an award-winning arts-psychiatry commission that people can touch and sit on and have further conversations, and an engaging performance-lecture drawing on her book exploring mind-wandering, and flipping neurodivergence as leadership instead of deficit, artist-academic-advisor-author-agitator Tan Kai Syng invites us to co-create inclusive futures.

About the tapestry art commission: The success of #MagicCarpet (2017-2018) led to Tan being acknowledged as a leading authority on neurodivergence, creativity and the arts in and beyond UK. The programme generated novel insights to how our different minds/brains work from creative research perspectives, via high-impact outputs (including an EU-funded film viewed 93K times) and keynote-lectures and exhibitions (from Southbank Centre, to medical settings including 14th International ADHD Conference in Berlin for 870 participants). Following a National Coordinating Centre for Public Engagement Culture Change Award, Tan is the first/only creative-researcher on a Royal College of Psychiatrists Editorial Board, co-creating initiatives to transform clinical training and transdisciplinary exchanges. Links: Guggenheim Museum interview; BBC World Service interview; Attenborough Arts Centre exhibition; details of the tapestry.

About the book:Neuro-Futurism and Re-Imagining Leadership: An A-Z towards Collective Liberation (Palgrave Macmillan 2024) applies the dottiness and dot-connecting knack of (their) neurodivergence, and drawing on the efforts of artists, activists and other atypical and minoritised doers/dreamers/daredevils, to re-imagine 'leadership' as a trans-disciplinary, (co-)creative, diversified, decolonised, neuro-queered practice of change and future-making. The book has toured 23 platforms, including Baltic Circle, Royal College of Art, Finnish National Gallery Kiasma; British Art Network; University of Arts Helsinki, for c1000 live audience. The book is housed in c15 institutions including Cambridge University, Wesleyan University in the US, Manchester Poetry Library, Indian Institute of Technology, UCL, NTU, Gothenburg, Translibrary Helsinki, and is shaping curricula, such as MA Arts Education, MBA Cultural Leadership, MSc Global Health Humanities, MSc Affective Disorder, BA Art History, as well as guiding policy and practice.