Excerpt from Project WebPage: Lucy Like-a-Charm. Please visit this link for full information.
Presenting my latest project…
Lucy Like-a-Charm
– a multimedia, multi-access memoir-fantasy about an Autistic woman and a Greyhound dog on a magical journey towards Becoming – empowered by Love, transformed by Grace.
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This award is for my Autistic & Neurodivergent community.
I am honoured to have been awarded the Skills Future Fellowship 2026, alongside 13 other professionals from different sectors.
Thank you, Skills Future, for this award and recognition of proudly Autistic professionalism and lifelong learning. I hope our country will see more and more openly Autistic professionals standing up in all platforms and fields of practice.
Grateful thanks to the judging / selection panel who, despite my unusual profile for a mainstream professional award such as this one, decided in my favour.
Thank You, Alicia Teng, National Gallery Singapore, for supporting my application.
A big Thank You to Peter Sau, my friend and closest professional collaborator, for always being there to support me and helping me navigate the sensory-social environment.
As Mr. President, Tharman Shanmugaratnam, congratulated me onstage, he remarked that I am “coming in from left of field”. This remark made me smile. Indeed, I am fully aware that I am a highly unlikely awardee. I am therefore yet more glad to have been given this chance. I even brought Lucy Plushie onstage in honour of her central position in my professional work. I told Mr. President that Lucy is the nexus of my work. (I am sure it was quite a strange sight to witness at an event such as this – was this the reason all the official photographers seemed to avoid me? *cheeky wink*)
Here are my own photos:
And our Instagram Reel with a bit of my original music accompanying, if you are on Instagram.
Lucy Like-a-Charm is indeed the inspiration and driving force behind my work and life. She was Singapore’s first Ambassador Assistance Dog, blazing the way for assistance dogs for persons with disabilities other than Guide Dogs for the Blind, long before I co-founded K9 Assistance.
I remember our past President, Madam Halimah Yacob, kindly asking after Lucy during the Goh Chok Tong Enable Awards in 2021 at the Istana — and I explained to her that I did not bring Lucy to greet her because I had retired Lucy from public duty. (A decision I have regretted ever since.) Lucy deserves to share in every one of my achievements, worldly and otherwise.
I am thankful for the opportunity to make a humble but firm stand across industries for proudly, openly Autistic persons to be recognised as an important part of Singapore’s professional network of lifelong learning, and not just existing in silos, separated from the rest of our vibrant, dynamic society.
Autistic persons worldwide have the most difficulty in mainstream employment, even during “inclusive hiring”. We are at the bottom of the disability hierarchy. The are many reasons, and one of them is our difference in social communication, which make us “unlikeable”, “too quirky”, “too difficult to accommodate”, “strange” etc (there are now published studies on this).
I myself am Self Employed. I am deeply grateful that I have been well supported throughout my journey, not every Autistic is, and this is why I make it a point to prioritise hiring Autistic and Neurodivergent professionals for my various projects.
My current Lucy Like-a-Charm memoir-fantasy project’s Video, the foundational component of this soon to be expanding work, boasts a Neurodivergent Production Team.
Autistic persons can be great at our professions, if we are well supported in the right ways. I encourage employers to find out how to create a mutually beneficial, vibrant relationship with Autistic employees in every field and level of practice.
And since I have not been invited to speak on my perspective for this award, I will share it here myself, pro-actively:
I am Autistic, and my lifelong learning journey has been challenging, but I am blessed with people who believe in me, and Lucy Like-a-Charm, my adopted Greyhound, the force behind my research and practice. I endeavour to pay it forward. My raison d’être is this: It is not my purpose to fix what is broken, but to empower Beauty in the vulnerable and unnoticed.
POST SCRIPT:
Every day is an adventure for me. I even managed to leave little Lucy Felty behind, because I became overwhelmed by the bright lights and developed a throbbing headache, and so left in hurry right after the President took his leave. Thank you so much, Michelle Cheah, of SWDA, for sending her back to me this morning!
Dear Friends,
This account (above screenshot) is a fake one, impersonating me. Lucy’s photo has been used.
Please help to report it to Instagram.
If you receive any communication from this account please let me know, and report it too.
https://www.instagram.com/dawnjoyleong/
I see they have changed their name 4 times too.
The page is up! The immersive installation was taken down 2 April 2026. Thank you for the amazing experience co-creating Lucy’s Clement Space with so many brilliant artists! Check it out here in this page.
My latest not-so-random random musing on LinkedIn about autistic truth and justice.
Recently, I reposted and called out (together with many other autistic / neurodivergent people) someone brazenly stealing a prominent and respected autistic advocate and speaker’s words verbatim and claiming it as theirs. The quote in question was this one by Chris Bonnello:
The quote reads:
“I’m autistic, which means everyone around me has a disorder that makes them say things they don’t mean, not care about structure, fail to hyperfocus on singular important topics, have unreliable memories, drop weird hints and creepily stare into my eyeballs.”
“So why do people say YOU’RE the weird one?”
“Because there’s more of them than me.”
(Autisticnot weird.com, fb.com/autisticnotweird -Chris Bonnello)
And the original post by Chris Bonnello calling out this plagiariser is here in this link.
This sort of thing deeply disturbs our autistic sense of justice. But it may not matter as much to non-autistic minds. In fact, publicly calling out injustices, inaccuracies, untruths or half-truths renders many autistic persons vulnerable to attack and even shaming by the non-autistic majority. I left a charity I was passionately invested in because of that. When I raised the issue privately, I was ghosted for a year. They only took notice when I went public. And that resulted in a 40-minute scolding session as if I were a recalcitrant primary school student, the perpetrator digging in their heels justifying a ridiculously inaccurate use of language, nobody standing up for the truth (except for one very gentle oblique but meaningful statement by someone I still respect), a former friend offended afterwards because I did not comfort them with platitudes when they declared themselves ‘guilty’ of not having defended me (I did not even raise the subject, they raised it themselves). I am in a privileged position where I have nothing to lose, and also nothing to gain. But truth-speaking can cost many autistic persons dearly. Loss of employment is a huge example. Yet, repression of truth and justice is an abomination for the autistic mind, leading often to severe burn out and breakdown. When I told them that accurate, clear and open communication is an autistic support need, they said it was “so hard”!!!! Disability support is indeed hard, in that it is inconvenient to those having to support, but isn’t that what a decent society, especially fellow disabled advocates, should be making effort to do?
There is an old Chinese saying: “若要人不知，除非己莫为.” Roughly translated as: “If you don’t want others to know about your misdeeds, keep your slate clean.” It must have been coined by an autistic person, don’t you think?
A throwback to my Greyhound advocacy days with Lucy in Sydney, Australia. It was an exciting year, campaigning for the ban on Greyhound racing, winning then losing, rising and falling.
Now, Greyhound racing is finally being banned and dissolved in many places around the world. In Australia, with Tasmania leading the way forward. I hope very much that New South Wales, where we originally began our journey together, will soon come around,
Thank you, Lucy, for opening my heart to this world, teaching me how to speak up for the greater good of not only humanity but also the non-human entities that help humanity to live better, stronger, gentler and kinder one to another.
“An each-way bet as life baiting hits” – the last I checked this article was behind a paywall. I am posting a copy here for easier perusal.
In this article, I not only speak about the cruelty of Greyhound racing, but also about how Lucy and other assistance dogs help and support persons with disabilities live fuller and richer lives.
My writer’s residency in Kyoto has concluded. Grateful thanks to Giorgio Biancorosso for this most generous provision of support to “Lucy Like-a-Charm” memoir project. I exited Kyoto on 11 February evening and arrived in Singapore very early in the morning on 12 February. Mission accomplished according to schedule, and the first complete draft of the narrative will be ready by the end of February, bringing Stage 1 of production to a close. Moving onwards to Stage 2, our music arranger, Joao, is at this moment working on the first new arrangement, which will be embedded into the story.
An uplifting spirit of gratitude and a tangible awareness of grace permeated my entire four week sojourn, and I am very much in awe of all that has transpired thus far.
Find out more here:
A new iteration of Clement Space has emerged. This one an impromptu, spontaneous work, emerging from my time at writer’s residency in McCraith House, RMIT University, in December 2025.
Find out more here:
I will be giving a public talk in Melbourne, Australia, on 1 December 2025. Tickets are free. An event organised by Care and Repair: Rethinking Contemporary Curation for Conditions of Crisis – a joint research project between Monash University and RMIT University funded by the Australian Government through the Australian Research Council.
Lucy Like-a-Charm: A multimedia memoir fantasy about an Autistic woman and a Greyhound dog on a magical journey towards Becoming.
Monday 1 December, 4.30pm-5.30pm, at Kaleide Theatre
Come find out all about my current mutli-acces, multimedia memoir-fantasy, named in honour of my beloved Lucy Like-a-Charm. If you are in Melbourne, do please drop by and say hello!
Lucy Like-a-Charm memoir-fantasy project is supported by The John and Lorna Wing Foundation, Ms. Lorinne Kon, and creative collaborator ART:DIS Singapore, with Giorgio Biancorosso, RMIT University, University of Melbourne.
Here is my latest article, for Salzburg Global, about my most recent experience as a Fellow in their programme, Creating Futures: Art of Narratives, in April this year. It was not an autism or disability focused event, but I felt a gentle, un-intrusive and organic sense of inclusion that I had not before in other events, not even in the many events I’d attended centred around autism or disabilities. For a week in the beautiful Schloss Leopoldskron, we were simply a communion of humans from eclectic backgrounds, sharing intense passion and purpose. Thank you, Salzburg Global, so honoured to be a Fellow of this wonderful institution!
Please access it on the Salzburg Global site via this link:
An Autistic Storyteller in Salzburg
