Diane J. Wright

Diane J. Wright is the founder of Autastic.com, the largest online home to late-identified autistic adults and the only community of its size founded by a woman of color. She guides those who – often after multiple degrees, careers, and family – are surprised to learn that neurodiversity may explain their lives. Her advocacy and media consulting centers on intersectionality and diversity in inclusion -- specifically broad representation of the BIPoC, neurodiverse, and disabled communities.She offers the perspective of a bi-racial, bi-cultural, autistic woman over 40, an all but invisible minority. Her achievements include being an award-winning author, a university professor, a strategic consultant to a Fortune 5 C-suite, a member of MENSA, and a national pageant queen. She has consulted on feature films and network series as a ghostwriter and story editor and contributed to two New York Times bestselling non-fiction titles, one of which informs Pulitzer Prize winner Thomas Friedman’s columns. She stumbled into learning she’s autistic at the age of 42.

Diane holds a Bachelor of Commerce degree with a major in Consumer Behavior (Canada) and a Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing, the terminal degree in the field. Her essays and reporting have been published in national entertainment and lifestyle magazines. She has contributed to prize-winning feature films premiering at the Sundance, Tribeca, and other notable festivals. She is the author of "Birthday Girl", a novel about an overprotected autistic teen forced to find her way home, alone, through the wilds of the Mojave Desert. She is currently working on a non-fiction manuscript that highlights the systemic inequities facing women, girls, and people of color through the lens of her autistic experience.

Sub-specialities:
Within equality, intersectionality, and neurodiversity, Diane speaks on:

-- Global issues relating to women, people of color (particularly BIPoC who are women), and autistic aging.
-- The parallels between the struggles for racial justice and those for disabled rights.
-- The pervasive, wide-spread inequities that have brought about generations of women, girls and people of color who have been denied access to identification, support, and services that would change society as a whole.
-- The causes of the vast under-representation of the autistic population in the official literature.
-- The heavily funded, stigma-based, shifting narrative about autism that directly affects countless lives directly and indirectly.
-- The larger forces behind the autistic community's high unemployment rate, rates of depression, and 8x higher than average suicide rate.
-- Representation in popular media of the neurodiverse and disabled communities and how that perpetuates the above.