The channels of visibility have been narrowed because of our age. Anonymity is both imposed and protective. To admit to being an older artist in this landscape is to be excluded from it.
We are here. We are women. We are digital artists. We work with code, screens, networks, data, machines, and sound. We make installations, AI films, generative art, XR, creative code, electronic music, live visuals, art games, and things that do not yet have names.
Many of us spent years in agencies, studios, game studios, sound design, music production, and software development because the institutional infrastructure for digital art barely existed for most of our working lives. Some of us are mothers and carers, some of us are disabled, some of us are neurodivergent, some of us lost years to illness, and some of us are younger women already feeling the clock imposed on them. Many of us came back to art after the world told us the window that had never been open to us had closed. The barriers compound. The age cap sits on top.
The digital arts have always been entangled with commercial and technical practice in ways that other art forms are not. That entanglement means the path into independent art practice is longer, less linear, and more likely to begin or resume in a person's thirties, forties, or beyond.
We are told the digital arts are for everyone. We are told the sector values diversity, inclusion, access, non linear careers, intersectional thinking. We are told these things by the same organisations that will not let us through the door because we are over 28. Or over 35. Or over 40.
This is age discrimination. It is not a grey area. It is written into eligibility criteria, published on open call pages, built into the architecture of publicly funded programmes.
It also narrows the field. When a sector selects from the same narrow age bracket year after year, it creates a homogeneous and linear career focused culture of competitive artists following a trend driven understanding of what digital art is. Much of this field frames itself around critical practice, claiming to interrogate the systems of exclusion built by big tech and platform capitalism. But a sector that reproduces its own systems of exclusion while critiquing those of others is not engaged in critical practice. It is posturing. It is adhering to the brand guidelines of criticality while critiquing from a framework of blatant exclusion. The depth that comes from lived experience, from years spent inside the systems that digital art claims to critique, from the hard won knowledge of commercial production, of labour, of compromise, is excluded by design. Age based selection does not just discriminate against individuals. It impoverishes the entire field.
And it harms younger artists too. Age capped programmes tell artists in their twenties that there is a clock running. That they must achieve now, produce now, be visible now, or the door will close. This breeds anxiety, not exploration. It encourages artists to treat their work as product, to chase trends rather than develop a practice, to optimise for selection panels rather than take the risks that make work genuinely new. A 24 year old rushing to build a CV before an arbitrary deadline is not being supported. She is being pressured. DWAA exists for her as much as for the artist in her forties who was shut out. The system that excludes one diminishes the other.
DWAA is a network of women and non binary artists working in digital art who have been directly affected by age based exclusion in the UK arts sector. We bring decades of combined experience across the breadth of creative technology.
We are committed to working constructively with funders, funded organisations, and sector bodies to achieve lasting policy change. We recognise that many organisations have adopted age caps without malicious intent, often inheriting criteria from earlier iterations of their programmes. Our aim is structural reform, not institutional blame.
But good intentions do not exempt organisations from their obligations under equality law. The persistence of age capped criteria, when alternatives exist and are already in use elsewhere in the sector, is a choice. We are asking the sector to make a different one.
We welcome members at any career stage who share our commitment to structural change. You do not need to have been personally excluded by an age cap to recognise that the practice is harmful. If you believe digital art is diminished when it draws from a narrow demographic, you belong here.
This network centres women, while explicitly including non binary artists whose experiences intersect with the conditions described here. We recognise that age based exclusion does not operate in isolation, and we welcome engagement from others who see the need for change.