‘It is a joy to be hidden, a disaster not to be found.’ – Donald Winnicott
2026 MASTERCLASS REGISTRATION OPEN NOW
Disaster usually demands immediacy. It calls for urgent response, swift action, and rapid repair. After the first months of clean-up and restoration, attention fades. The world moves on. This is true not only for visible, physical disasters, but also for the quieter, internal crises that we all experience by being alive.
The Disaster School asks us to pause and look again. It invites participants to sit with the aftermath: the marks left behind, the scars that shape memory, the wounds that reopen despite our efforts to heal.
And yet it also turns toward what grows, often bountifully, from these places. Again and again, individuals and communities do more than survive disaster. They live beyond it. From loss and rupture, they make meaning. From fragments, they create beauty through art in all its forms.
The first in-person Disaster School takes place in New Orleans in the summer of 2026. To support our work, you can donate here.
The inaugural online edition of The Disaster School took place in the first week of August 2025, bringing together ten exceptional writers and speakers from England, France, Germany, Iran, Northern and Republic of Ireland, Norway, Palestine, Scotland, Uganda, and Ukraine. Over sixty participants from around the world attended the programme, which explored how personal disaster intersects with external catastrophe and how this relationship influences our creative expression.
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