Current Brief Bio:
Dawn-joy Leong is a researcher and transdisciplinary artist who, for ten years and eight months – the best years of her human existence – traversed terrains of sparkling wonderment with the love of her life, Lucy Like-a-Charm, an enchanting spirit residing in the corporeal form of a black Greyhound dog. Since Lucy departed this mortal realm in March 2023, Dawn-joy’s new mission is to fulfil her promise to Lucy to complete their Magnum Opus, “Lucy Like-a-Charm“, a multimodal, multimedia memoir-fantasy, before her time comes to join Lucy once again for yet more amazing adventures in the great beyond. Dawn’s website (this one here) contains her official human-centric material. The fun stuff is in her Instagram: @scheherazadessea and you can also follow her works in progress for her epic multimodal autobiography in the dedicated website, Lucy Like-a-Charm.

Previous Brief Bio:
Autistic artist-researcher presenting autism as parallel embodiment, with sensory-cognitive idiosyncrasy as the nucleus of research, and an artistic practice of immersive mind-body experiences via music, visual art, photography, narrative, poetry and performance. With Lucy Like-a-Charm, a rescued former racing Greyhound, my beautiful creative muse, research assistant and faithful companion, we traverse blended, multidimensional terrains of wonderment: flipping pages of imagination, dancing around pandiatonic-chromatic-polyrhythmic mental fires, making splotches, humming in and out of tune, flying and falling, meandering in and out of discombobulation, gazing at pulchritude, picking up sound waves, celebrating symbiotic connectivity, and finding new ways to sense the world and Be.

Email me: dr.dawnjoyleong@gmail.com

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More Information

Dr. Dawn-Joy Leong is a researcher, multi-artist, international academic and corporate keynote speaker, and TEDx speaker. As an autism and disability advocate, co-founded K9 Assistance (Ltd), Singapore’s first and currently only charity organisation promoting the benefits of assistance dogs for the disabled, and served as a board member of the Disabled People’s Association, Singapore for 6 years. In 2021, Dawn-joy Leong was awarded the Goh Chok Tong Enable Award (Achievement).

Dawn-joy is a specialist consultant in the Arts and Disability, Disability Leadership, Autism, Neurodiversity, and Multi-Art applications. Her most recent extensive arts related publication is the report commissioned by the British Council, The Arts and Disability in Singapore: a journey of dynamic partnership between the United Kingdom and Singapore through the British Council.

Lucy Like-a-Charm, a rescued former racing Greyhound was Dawn-joy’s assistance dog, providing mitigation support for Dawn’s sensory anxiety, establishing for Dawn an oasis of calm in the midst of the overwhelming cacophony of a frenetic cityscape. Much more than her public facing role as assistance dog, Lucy was also Dawn’s creative muse and research assistant, inspiring major trajectories in Dawn’s PhD dissertation. and closest and most trusted companion, a crucial source of strength for her many ventures far and wide.  

Leong has a Masters of Philosophy in music composition (University of Hong Kong), and a PhD in Autism, Neurodiversity and Multi-Art Praxis (UNSW), for which she was conferred the 2016 Dean’s Award for Excellence in Postgraduate Research from UNSW Art & Design, Australia, an honour given to only one top candidate per year. Dawn-joy was also awarded the Arts in Society International Excellence Award in 2013, for her paper, “Art in a Hidden World – creative process and invisible anomaly”. She has published, performed and exhibited her transdisciplinary work in the USA, United Kingdom, Hong Kong, Australia, South Korea, Japan and Singapore; and has been interviewed by and featured in multiple media networks in Australia and Singapore, including SBS Australia, ABC Australia, The Conversation, Artlink, and the Straits Times, Channel News Asia, threesixzero films, Pets Magazine, Cleo, Tatler Singapore, and True Colors Festival. 

Since returning to Singapore in late 2016, Dawn-joy has engaged passionately in disability advocacy and mentoring of future disabled leaders in their chosen fields of practice. Almost all her projects – helmed and collaborative – have been ground-breaking ‘firsts’ in Singapore.

In 2020, Dawn-joy Leong became the first Autistic artist in Singapore to be commissioned by a major visual arts institution, the National Gallery Singapore, to hold a solo exhibition, Clement Space, a new, playful and whimsical iteration of Dawn-joy’s signature concept and practice of the same name, promoting mental wellbeing from within the natural Autistic paradigm. In the same month of January, Dawn-joy was one of the performers and a key sensory advisor in Something About Home, a theatre promenade conceptualised and directed by theatre maestro Peter Sau, commissioned by the National Gallery Singapore, comprising a cast of 6 artists with different disabilities.

Subsequently, Dr. Leong was engaged by the National Gallery Singapore as consultant for the design and construction of their groundbreaking Calm Room.

In November 2021, Dawn-joy presented another ‘first’ in Singapore: a multidisciplinary digital-cum-live performance of a brand new chapter in the Scheherazade’s Sea narrative entitled, Scheherazade’s Sea: continuing odyssey. Created by an artist with disabilities, and featuring three talented emerging and professional artists with disabilities, this experimental production also presented a report on alternative performance practice approaches that will provide due access and inclusion for artists with sensory idiosyncrasies and the immunocompromised. This production was an experimental work-in-progress, supported by a National Arts Council Creation Grant and produced with ART:DIS Singapore.

Dawn-joy is now working on her autobiography in the form of a multimedia Fantasia, “Lucy Like-a-Charm“, in honour and memory of her Beloved Lucy Like-a-Charm, who departed for another realm in March 2023 after 14 human years on this earth.