Richard Butchins

Dr Richard Butchins is an award-winning documentary filmmaker, journalist, writer and photographer who has spent more than twenty years making work about disability, power and the stories institutions prefer to tell about other people.

His forthcoming book, Misfits: Reframing Disability, published by Pluto Press, brings together memoir, cultural criticism and decades of documentary practice to examine who gets believed, who gets spoken for, and why disabled people are so often treated as subjects rather than authors of their own lives.

Butchins has made films for the BBC and Channel 4 on disability benefits, hate crime, institutional abuse, art and representation. His work is informed by his own experience as a disabled and neurodivergent person, but he has little interest in inspirational narratives. He is much more interested in power, evidence, credibility and what happens when the people usually kept at the edge of the frame take control of it.