Sinéad Burke

Activist, Entrepreneur, Idea generator, Policy maker, Writer/Editor

Sinéad Burke’s life and work has been framed by her drive to make the world more accessible for all disabled and otherwise marginalised people. Sinéad is a little person, standing at a height of 3 foot 5 inches, she has Acondraplasia, the most common form of Dwarfism. Training as a teacher, the school staffroom was an early reminder that although many spaces, places, and systems are rigged to be just-about accessible to users, they are rarely so for people who may want to be employed there and be successful. A blog series decrying the lack of representation and meaningful inclusion in fashion, led to opportunities to door-step people in power and challenge them to think about adaptive fashion, more accessible systems, and more ways for disabled people to show up in the world. Sinéad has spoken to leaders across the world to make the case for the inclusion of disabled people in every room where decisions are made, to drive system change by using lived experience to advance beyond compliance. This includes stage time at the World Economic Forum, the UN, the White House, TEDNY, Cannes Lion, Anthropy, and many more. In 2020, Sinéad founded the strategic consultancy ‘Tilting the Lens’ in 2020, to build an accessible and fairer world. Along with her majority-disabled team, their work ranges from creating more accessible public spaces (like companies, shops, film sets, hotels and nightclubs, galleries, and playgrounds), and advising on required changes within recruitment, workflows, and culture to set disabled employees up for success. Seeing limitations in both Universal Design and Inclusive Design, Tilting the Lens uses them only as a starting point and instead, adopts accessibility as a framework, creating multi-modal solutions, by co-designing through human-centred design principles. This builds trust and leads with empathy to understand users needs and expectations by meaningfully engaging with the disabled community, and co-designing solutions. This work is both local and global, with clients on 4 continents across business, media, public sector, the arts, academia, and non-profit sectors, such as The Crown Estate, Chanel, Ford Foundation, Gucci, ITV, Mattel, Microsoft, NASA, Pinterest, and the Victoria & Albert Museum. Aside from that, Sinéad has had honorary positions on the Irish Council of State, the Irish Future of Media Commission, chairs the ITV Cultural Advisory Council, Gucci’s Global Equity Board, and is a Contributing Editor at British Vogue. Sinéad has also worked with partners to create better pipelines for disabled creatives to get into the rooms of power, this includes fully funded scholarships for disabled designers to train at Parsons School of Design in New York, and for disabled writers in Film & TV with the National Talent Academy in Ireland. Over the last few years, Sinéad has also hosted the podcast ‘As Me with Sinéad Burke’ for Lemonada Media, and published a best-selling and award-winning book for children, ‘Break the Mould’.