Midsumma Festival 2025 is just around the corner, but before summer comes alive on Sunday 19 January 2025, let’s meet someone who will be your best company throughout the festival period. Humorous, indomitable, and a fierce blind advocate, we are so excited to have Karan Nagrani join us for his second year as Community Ambassador for Midsumma.
A little background about Karan
After huge success last year, Karan is back at Midsumma Festival with his excellent communication style: raw, unfeigned and full of humour. At the age of 11, Karan was diagnosed with Usher Syndrome, a rare degenerative and genetic condition that affects approximately 4 to 17 per 100,000 people. This incurable condition leads to complete blindness and hearing loss. In his 30s, Karan currently has less than 3% vision remaining and partial hearing loss.
After retiring from his marketing career due to the condition, he decided to utilise his professional skills to create content showing people what life is like for a blind person in a light-hearted way. Now, he is an influential disability advocate who is featured on ABC, SBS and more.
What brought Karan to Midsumma Festival
“Disability can be quite a heavy subject for many.” – Karan Nagrani
Being a proud gay person with a disability, Karan is here to be the face of disability at Midsumma Festival and help make changes for the queer people that live with disabilities in the community. Having experienced the journey of vision and hearing loss, Karan understands clearly that discussing and expressing disability publicly is never easy.
It is not something that people want to hear “normally”.
It is not something that people want to talk about “normally”.
It is not something that people want to do something about it “normally”.
Even in the queer community, where inclusivity and diversity are heavily valued and admired, says Karan.
This is why Karan is here. He is here to change the narrative of disability, to bring a lightness to an often-heavy subject and to help support inclusion and access to queer arts and culture. Most importantly, he is here to normalise having a disability.
“And now I get to be in a way, I guess the face of disability at Midsumma and show people like me that it's OK to come out. It's OK to attend events.” – Karan Nagrani
Disability can be like another closet that a queer person has to come out from, says Karan. Many queer people living with disabilities avoid attending public events as it feels like these occasions are ‘outing’ them.
Karan supports Midsumma to be a festival that welcomes all individuals to join in, telling everyone that having a disability does not mean you need to hide away and miss out on the fun!
Ultimately, proudly being the Community Ambassador for Midsumma Festival 2025, Karan wants to tell everyone attending Midsumma Festival 2025 that:
“Not being normal is the new normal.”
Fresh from hosting the red carpet for Midsumma 2025 Program Launch, which you can watch in full here, Karan will be attending and advocating for attending Midsumma events this festival season. With video walk throughs and tips and tricks you can keep an eye out on our social media platforms for more from Karan.
