Jonathan Scott Frakes is an American actor and director. He is best known for his portrayal of Commander William Riker in the television series Star Trek: The Next Generation and subsequent films and series. He has also hosted the anthology series Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction, voiced David Xanatos in the Disney television series Gargoyles, and narrated the History Channel documentary, Lee and Grant. He is the credited author of the novel The Abductors: Conspiracy, which was ghostwritten by Dean Wesley Smith.
Marlee Beth Matlin is an American actress, author, and activist. She is the recipient of numerous accolades, including an Academy Award, a Golden Globe Award, a Screen Actors Guild Award, in addition to nominations for a BAFTA Award, and four Primetime Emmy Awards.
Jonathan Taylor Thomas is an American actor and director. He is known for portraying Randy Taylor on Home Improvement and voicing young Simba in Disney's 1994 film The Lion King and Pinocchio in New Line Cinema's 1996 film The Adventures of Pinocchio.
Héctor Elizondo is an American character actor. He is known for playing Phillip Watters in the television series Chicago Hope (1994–2000) and Ed Alzate in the television series Last Man Standing (2011–2021). His film roles include The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974), American Gigolo (1980), Leviathan (1989), Pretty Woman (1990), Beverly Hills Cop III (1994), Runaway Bride (1999), The Princess Diaries (2001), and Valentine's Day (2010).
Deaf West Theatre is a non-profit arts organization based in Los Angeles, California, US. It is most well known for its Tony Award-nominated productions of Big River and Spring Awakening.
Keith Wann is an American comedian and performance artist.
Rachel Coleman is an American producer and actress. With her sister Emilie de Azevedo Brown, she created the Signing Time! video series to teach children basic American Sign Language (ASL), which was broadcast on public television. She produces, directs, and stars in the series, and handles much of its operations as co-founder of Two Little Hands Productions.
Russell Wayne Harvard is an American actor. He made his feature film debut in Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood (2007), playing opposite Daniel Day-Lewis as his adopted son, H.W. Plainview. In the 2010 biopic The Hammer, he portrayed deaf NCAA championship wrestler and UFC mixed martial arts fighter Matt Hamill. Harvard also won acclaim Off Broadway in 2012 as Billy, the deaf son in an intellectual, though dysfunctional, hearing British family, in Tribes by Nina Raine. For his interpretation, he won a 2012 Theatre World Award for Outstanding Debut Performance and nominations for Drama League, Outer Critics Circle and Lucille Lortel Awards for Outstanding Lead Actor. He played Mr. Wrench in the first and third seasons of the television series Fargo.
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.
Sean Lance Berdy is an American actor, filmmaker, entrepreneur, and real estate broker. He began his career as a child in the film sequel The Sandlot 2. Known for his roles in the TV series Switched at Birth and The Society. He is the founder of The Sign Language Agency, interpreting service company.
The Family Tree is a 1983 American television series that aired on NBC, and starred Anne Archer and Frank Converse. The show was produced by Nigel McKeand and Carol Evan McKeand, showrunners of the groundbreaking 1976-80 ABC series Family. Its pilot episode was the 1982 television film The Six of Us. The show was canceled after six episodes due to low ratings.
The Six of Us is a 1982 television film directed by Edward Parone and starring Gail Strickland and Marco St. John. It eventually served as a pilot film for the short-lived television series The Family Tree. The 1983 series was recast, and some characters' names were changed.
Ryan Thomas Lane is an American actor. Beginning his professional career at the age of nineteen, Lane is best known for his portrayal of Cincinnati Reds center-fielder William Ellsworth Hoy in the Documentary Channel biography Dummy Hoy: A Deaf Hero, and for his recurring role as Travis Barnes on the ABC Family drama series Switched at Birth, which earned him the RJ Mitte Diversity Award at the 2013 Media Access Awards.
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.
Austin P. McKenzie is an American actor and singer, known for his role as Melchior Gabor in Deaf West Theatre's 2015 Broadway revival of Spring Awakening. His performance as Melchior has garnered significant critical acclaim, and multiple theatrical award nominations, for both Los Angeles runs and its run on Broadway.
Millicent Simmonds is a deaf American actress who starred in the 2018 horror film A Quiet Place and its 2020 sequel A Quiet Place Part II. Her breakout role was in the 2017 drama film Wonderstruck. For Wonderstruck and A Quiet Place, she was nominated for several awards for best youth performance. In television, she appeared in Andi Mack in 2018 and in This Close in 2019.
Lauren Ridloff is a deaf American actress known for her roles in the TV series The Walking Dead and the film Eternals. Her breakthrough role was in 2018 with her lead performance in the Broadway play Children of a Lesser God, for which she was nominated for several awards, including a Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play. She was subsequently cast in The Walking Dead as Connie in its ninth season that aired in late 2018. In Eternals, released in 2021, she played the deaf superhero Makkari.
CODA is a 2021 coming-of-age comedy-drama film written and directed by Sian Heder. An English-language remake of the 2014 French-Belgian film La Famille Bélier, it stars Emilia Jones as Ruby Rossi, the titular child of deaf adults (CODA) and only hearing member of her family, a teenager who attempts to help her family's struggling fishing business while pursuing her own aspirations of being a singer.
Troy Michael Kotsur is an American actor in theater, film, and television. His supporting role in the film CODA (2021) earned him a number of accolades, including an Academy Award, a British Academy Film Award, a Screen Actors Guild Award, and a Critics' Choice Movie Award. He is the first deaf actor to win the latter three awards, and first deaf man and second deaf performer overall to win the first.
Shaylee Mansfield is an American actress and former YouTuber who is deaf. Mansfield was born in Burbank, California, and first gained recognition by making viral videos in which she tells Christmas stories in American Sign Language. Mansfield appeared in an "Unforgettable Stories" video advertisement by Disney Parks, in which she met Minnie Mouse, who was learning sign language at Walt Disney World. The video quickly went viral and became one of Disney's most-watched advertisements.