Cherylee Houston
Actor and Co-Artistic Director TripleC / DANC
Cherylee has been on Coronation Street for 11 years, she has just had her fifth season of Tinsel Girl on Radio 4. She was fundamental in setting up audition courses at both Coronation Street and Emmerdale for disabled actors and also set up a Disability Confident event housed between the BBC and ITV.
She set up the organisation TripleC four years ago to challenge disabled people’s access to and participation in the arts. The TripleC team has expanded and they have become a CIC, they now regularly promote opportunities for disabled creatives whilst pushing the conversation further around employment of disabled artists. They are a solution focused company.
Bee Vocal, Manchester’s Mental Health Choir, is one of TripleC’s projects which has gone on to be its own entity; in just two years they sang at Wembley to launch the Heads Together campaign and at the Royal Variety performance with Emeli Sandé, to promote singing for Mental Health.
DANC (Disabled Artists Networking Community) is another TripleC initiative, in little more than two years the community has grown to more than 900 members and has begun to make a resounding change to the employment of disabled artists. DANC runs regular events at popular arts venues in Manchester and London and is strategic partners on disability with the BFI. Since Covid-19 they have run more than 40 webinars with actors, writers, producers sharing their working methods and furthering the conversation between disabled creatives and potential employers.
Useful links
“I strongly believe that the media has an incredible power to change how disabled people are treated in society by increasing our presence and stories on screen we can change how we are treated in society.”