Why I started EvoAutism
Founder’s letter
Iuliia Bazhan, Founder of EvoAutism Foundation
But becoming a parent brought me back to a question I had lived with for a long: how much of an autistic person’s future is impact by autism itself, and how much is impact by what other people believe is possible for them?
A great deal happened between those two moments. I grew up differently from the future once imagined for me. I became an entrepreneur, built businesses, worked across different countries, and eventually built a career that also brought me into fashion, photography and visual media.
Years later, I found myself sitting on the other side of that conversation when my son Matthew was diagnosed with autism.
I was diagnosed with autism when I was four. My family was given a difficult picture of what my future might look like.
EvoAutism grew from that question.
How much of a person do we stop looking for once we think their diagnosis has already explained them?
What happens when a diagnosis becomes the story before a person has had the chance to tell their own?
Autism can involve serious and lifelong support needs. People develop very differently. A diagnosis can be useful. What I could not accept was how quickly it could become a forecast of someone’s abilities, independence and future.
The more people I met, the less comfortable I became with predictions.
After my son’s diagnosis, I spent years reading, attending conferences, spending time in hospitals and rehabilitation centers, and speaking with physicians, therapists, educators, researchers, autistic adults and other families.
Matthew, son of EvoAutism founder Iuliia Bazhan
That is the question behind EvoAutism: what changes when people get to meet an autistic person as an individual, before they reduce that person to an idea about autism?
It means leaving enough room for the individual person to appear before deciding what a diagnosis tells us about their future.
That doesn’t mean ignoring disability, or presenting every autistic person as someone hiding an exceptional talent. Both replace one stereotype with another.
Expectations have consequences. They shape which abilities adults notice, which interests they encourage, which opportunities someone receives, and how long people keep looking for progress. There’s real research on stigma and on how quickly first impressions form, and it points the same way.
The harder problem is how quickly a diagnosis turns into a conclusion about the person.
I don’t think the biggest problem with how autism is understood is a lack of awareness.
The question behind EvoAutism
I wanted EvoAutism to work in that space: where representation becomes expectation, and expectation starts to create opportunity.
Before someone is offered a job, encouraged in a classroom, included in a community or given an opportunity, someone else has usually already formed an idea of what they think that person can do.
Many strong organizations already work on diagnosis, services, education, therapy and family support. I didn’t want to duplicate work that others already do well.
I also knew what I didn’t want EvoAutism to become.
My connection to autism gave me the reason to start EvoAutism. My years in business gave me some of the tools to build an organization around that reason.
Iuliia Bazhan — selected professional background
Why I built an organization around it
We keep coming back to a harder question than what autistic people can achieve: what makes a life meaningful, and who gets to decide?
I know what it’s like to have your future described by someone else before you’ve had any say in it. That’s part of why the people in this project keep a say in how their own story gets told, from the first conversation to the final wall text.
No single story represents autism, and not everyone in the exhibition has to have an extraordinary career or public success. Together, the stories are meant to make the diversity of autistic lives harder to reduce to one assumption, or to replace one stereotype with another.
Autism Through Talent exhibition concept, EvoAutism Foundation
We want to show people in their complexity: who they are, their strengths and interests, what has been difficult, what became possible over time, and what may still be difficult today. And we want to show what helped it happen, because talent rarely develops alone. Sometimes it’s a teacher who noticed an unusual interest, an employer who gave someone a chance, an environment that was adapted, or a strategy the person worked out for themselves. What surrounds a person matters as much as what they achieve on their own.
The title uses the word “talent,” but talent here isn’t proof of achievement or worth. It’s a way in: one way of looking at how a person creates, communicates, connects, works or experiences the world. We are deliberately not building a collection of inspirational stories about people who “overcame” autism.
The exhibition combines portrait photography with first-person stories developed together with autistic participants. Each person decides what they want to share, helps shape how it’s presented, and sees the material before anyone else does. If something doesn’t feel right to them, it changes or it’s left out. Nothing becomes part of the exhibition without their approval.
That gap led to EvoAutism’s first project, Autism Through Talent.
Autism is usually encountered in public through diagnosis, intervention, statistics and awareness campaigns. Those perspectives matter, but they can’t show what an autistic life looks like from the inside.
I have always been drawn to museums as spaces for reflection places that quietly challenge the way I see people, culture, and the world around me and gradually those two experiences started to connect. A museum is one of the few places where people give an unfamiliar life real attention. They slow down, look closely, and let a story sit with them longer than a headline or a feed ever would. What a museum chooses to show, over time, becomes part of what a society considers worth looking at.
Part of my career has taken place in fashion, photography and visual media, in New York, Paris, London and Milan. That world taught that an image can influence what we think about someone before that person has said a word.
Iuliia Bazhan and her career in fashion and visual media
Why photography and museums
We will publish what we learn, including the parts that complicate the story we’d prefer to tell. Reflection, visitor feedback and evaluation are part of how we intend to build it, one iteration at a time.
What did visitors notice? What surprised them? Did a story make them reconsider an assumption? What did autistic participants think about how they were represented? Where did the exhibition work, and where did it fall short of what we intended?
Iuliia Bazhan at Paris Fashion Week
The project is built to create conditions where people can notice and question their own assumptions, not to tell them what the right attitude is. Then we study what they actually take away from it.
We try to keep what we believe separate from what the evidence actually supports, and from what still needs testing.
Lived experience is one part of this work. So are the perspectives of other autistic people, families, researchers, educators and cultural institutions.
My own experience gives me access to the right questions. It doesn’t give me every answer. That distinction matters to me.
Why research has to lead
Founder & Executive Director, EvoAutism Foundation
Iuliia Bazhan
Iuliia Bazhan at the World Economic Forum in Davos
That is the work I want EvoAutism to do.
What we can influence is whether the world around that child keeps enough possibilities open for that future to develop.
My own diagnosis made this question personal. My son’s diagnosis brought me back to it from a completely different position. What I’ve learned since, from autistic people, families, specialists and research, has made me more careful about predicting what another person’s life will become.
Getting there means: giving autistic participants real, ongoing agency over how they’re represented; showing strength without erasing difficulty; listening when something doesn’t work; measuring impact instead of assuming it; and making only the claims our evidence can support. It also means being honest in public about what’s still working and what isn’t.
The goal is an evidence-informed model that museums, universities and other institutions can use or adapt when they work on autism, representation and public engagement.
I want Autism Through Talent become a model that gets stronger through use.
