Ella Mae Lentz | |
---|---|
Born | |
Nationality | American |
Education | California School for the Deaf |
Alma mater | Gallaudet University |
Occupation(s) | Writer, educator |
Notable work | The Signing Naturally Curriculum Series, National consortium of Programs for the Training of Sign Language Instructors (NCPTSLI) |
Ella Mae Lentz (born May 5, 1954) is a Deaf American author, poet, teacher, and advocate. [1]
Lentz was born in Berkeley, California, to two deaf parents. Her brother was also deaf.
Lentz graduated from the California School for the Deaf (currently the California School for the Deaf, Fremont) in Berkeley in 1971. After graduating, she attended Gallaudet University where she received dual bachelor's degrees in Drama and English, graduating in 1975. [2]
Lentz has done research on American Sign Language (ASL) at several research institutions, including Northeastern University in Boston, the Salk Institute in San Diego, and the University of California, San Francisco. [3]
ASL Presents was founded by Lentz in 2007, located in Hayward, California. The company focuses on the how to coach, consult, present, perform, and teach ASL and Deaf Culture curriculum. [4]
Lentz has developed training material as well as educational material such as:
Lentz is widely known in the deaf community for her poetry. [11] Many people have analyzed and studied her poems.[ citation needed ]
Lentz' partner is Judy D. Gough. They have five children, the youngest being Deaf, and ten grandchildren, of whom three are Deaf.
Deaf culture is the set of social beliefs, behaviors, art, literary traditions, history, values, and shared institutions of communities that are influenced by deafness and which use sign languages as the main means of communication. When used as a cultural label, especially within the culture, the word deaf is often written with a capital D and referred to as "big D Deaf" in speech and sign. When used as a label for the audiological condition, it is written with a lower case d. Carl G. Croneberg was among the first to discuss analogies between Deaf and hearing cultures in his appendices C and D of the 1965 Dictionary of American Sign Language.
Dorothy "Dot" Miles was a Welsh poet and activist in the Deaf community. Throughout her life, she composed her poems in English, British Sign Language, and American Sign Language. Her work laid the foundations for modern sign language poetry in the United States and the United Kingdom. She is regarded as the pioneer of BSL poetry and her work influenced many contemporary deaf poets.
Clayton Valli was an American prominent deaf linguist and American Sign Language (ASL) poet whose work helped further to legitimize ASL and introduce people to the richness of American Sign Language literature.
The Learning Center for the Deaf (TLC) is a Framingham, Massachusetts-based non-profit organization and school serving deaf and hard-of-hearing children and adults. The mission of The Learning Center for the Deaf is to ensure that all deaf and hard of hearing children and adults thrive by having the knowledge, opportunity and power to design the future of their choice.
Jane Fernandes is an American educator and social justice advocate. As of August 2021, Fernandes is the President of Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. She previously served as president of Guilford College from 2014 to 2021.
Deafhood is a term coined by Paddy Ladd in his book Understanding Deaf Culture: In Search of Deafhood. While the precise meaning of the word remains deliberately vague—Ladd himself calls Deafhood a "process" rather than something finite and clear—it attempts to convey an affirmative and positive acceptance of being deaf.
American Sign Language literature is one of the most important shared cultural experiences in the American deaf community. Literary genres initially developed in residential Deaf institutes, such as American School for the Deaf in Hartford, Connecticut, which is where American Sign Language developed as a language in the early 19th century. There are many genres of ASL literature, such as narratives of personal experience, poetry, cinematographic stories, folktales, translated works, original fiction and stories with handshape constraints. Authors of ASL literature use their body as the text of their work, which is visually read and comprehended by their audience viewers. In the early development of ASL literary genres, the works were generally not analyzed as written texts are, but the increased dissemination of ASL literature on video has led to greater analysis of these genres.
Paddy Ladd is an English deaf scholar, author, activist and researcher of deaf culture. Ladd was a lecturer and MSc Coordinator at the Centre for Deaf Studies at the University of Bristol. Despite considerable international pressure, the centre was wound down as the MSc was closed in 2009, the undergrad programme taught out from 2010 to 2013, and the centre finally closed in the July of that year.
Deaf studies are academic disciplines concerned with the study of the deaf social life of human groups and individuals. These constitute an interdisciplinary field that integrates contents, critiques, and methodologies from anthropology, cultural studies, economics, geography, history, political science, psychology, social studies, and sociology, among others. The field focuses on the language, culture, and lives of the deaf from the social instead of the medical perspective.
Benjamin James Bahan is a professor of ASL and Deaf Studies at Gallaudet University and a member of the deaf community. He is an influential figure in American Sign Language literature as a storyteller and writer of deaf culture. He is known for the stories "The Ball Story" and "Birds of a Different Feather". He is known for writing the book A Journey into the Deaf-World (1996) with Robert J. Hoffmeister and Harlan Lane. Bahan also co-wrote and co-directed the film Audism Unveiled (2008) with his colleague Dirksen Bauman.
Claire L Ramsey is an American linguist. Ramsey is an Associate Professor Emerita at the University of California, San Diego. She is an alumna of Gallaudet University and is former instructor at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, Nebraska. Ramsey's research has focused on the sociolinguistics of deaf and signing communities in the US and Mexico.
Deaf Jam is a 2011 documentary film directed and produced by American filmmaker Judy Lieff. The film centers on the experience of Aneta Brodski, a deaf teenager living in Queens, New York, who becomes immersed in the dynamic and three-dimensional form of American Sign Language poetry. When Aneta, an Israel-born ASL poet, eventually meets Tahani, a Palestinian, spoken word poet, the two begin to collaborate, creating a new form of poetry that gains recognition in deaf and hearing communities alike.
Lou Fant was a pioneering teacher, author and expert on American Sign Language (ASL). He was also an actor in film, television, and the stage. Natively bilingual in ASL and English, he often played roles relating to sign language and the deaf.
Marie Jean Philip was a leader in both the American and international Deaf community. She advocated for the right to a natural sign language for Deaf people. Marie was one of the original researchers studying ASL and Deaf Culture. She was active in establishing American Sign Language (ASL) as a recognized language in the colleges of Massachusetts in the early 1980s. Later, Marie was the Bilingual-Bicultural Coordinator at The Learning Center for the Deaf in Framingham, Massachusetts.
Terrylene Sacchetti is a deaf actress from Chicago, Illinois. She graduated from the Model Secondary School for the Deaf in 1985.
Ted Supalla is a deaf linguist whose research centers on sign language in its developmental and global context, including studies of the grammatical structure and evolution of American Sign Language and other sign languages.
Black American Sign Language (BASL) or Black Sign Variation (BSV) is a dialect of American Sign Language (ASL) used most commonly by deaf African Americans in the United States. The divergence from ASL was influenced largely by the segregation of schools in the American South. Like other schools at the time, schools for the deaf were segregated based upon race, creating two language communities among deaf signers: black deaf signers at black schools and white deaf signers at white schools. As of the mid 2010s, BASL is still used by signers in the South despite public schools having been legally desegregated since 1954.
Deaf View Image Art, abbreviated as De'VIA, is a genre of visual art that intentionally represents the Deaf experience and Deaf culture. Although De'VIA works have been created throughout history, the term was first defined and recognized as an art genre in 1989. In 1989, a group of nine Deaf artists gathered at Gallaudet University shortly before the Deaf Way arts festival was being held there. Led by Betty G. Miller, known as the Mother of De'VIA, and Paul Johnston, these artists created a manifesto detailing what De'VIA is and what it includes. Since its official designation as a genre, De'VIA has helped to introduce the Deaf experience to the artistic world and give a new platform to the Deaf community.
Ceil (Kovac) Lucas is an American linguist and a professor emerita of Gallaudet University, best known for her research on American Sign Language.
Nancy Rourke is an internationally known Deaf artist and ARTivist, with a focus in oil painting. Her pieces carry the themes of resistance, affirmation, and liberation, with stylings falling under 'Rourkeism' and 'Surdism'.