James Todd Spader is an American actor. He is known for often portraying eccentric and morally ambiguous characters. He started his career in critically acclaimed independent films before transitioning into television for which he received numerous awards and acclaim including three Primetime Emmy Awards as well as nominations for three Golden Globe Awards, and ten Screen Actors Guild 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 animated feature film The Lion King and Pinocchio in New Line Cinema's 1996 film The Adventures of Pinocchio.
Jonathan Harris was an American character actor whose career included more than 500 television and film appearances, as well as voiceovers. Two of his best-known roles were as the timid accountant Bradford Webster in the television version of The Third Man and the fussy villain Dr. Zachary Smith of the 1960s science-fiction series Lost in Space. Near the end of his career, he provided voices for the animated features A Bug's Life and Toy Story 2.
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).
Keith Wann is an American comedian and performance artist.
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. He began his career as a child in the film sequel The Sandlot 2 and is known for his roles in the television series The Society and Switched at Birth. He is the founder of The Sign Language Agency.
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.
Lake Windfall is a 2013 American post-apocalyptic movie written by Tony Nitko and Roger Vass Jr, and directed by Roger Vass Jr. The film was produced by Rustic Lantern Films, as subsidiary of Deaf Empowerment Awareness Foundation. The film focuses on the interaction between five friends who set off for a weekend of camping. It explores issues around Deaf, hard-of-hearing, and hearing people. The primary language is American Sign Language with closed captioned subtitles throughout, though early stages of the movie contain dialog in voice, with subtitles.
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 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.
Lauren Ridloff is a deaf American actress known for her roles in the TV series The Walking Dead and the film Eternals. She gained prominence in 2018 with a lead role in the Broadway revival of Children of a Lesser God, earning her a Tony Award nomination for Best Actress in a Play. Ridloff was born in Chicago, Illinois. She attended California State University, Northridge and later earned a master's degree in education from Hunter College. She initially worked as a teacher before pursuing acting, and she was also crowned Miss Deaf America.
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 child of deaf adults (CODA) and only hearing member of her family, who attempts to help her family's struggling fishing business while pursuing her aspirations to become a singer.
Troy Michael Kotsur is an American actor. Born deaf, Kotsur made his acting debut in the late 1980s working with the National Theatre of the Deaf. His television debut was in a 2001 episode of Strong Medicine and his film debut was in the 2007 thriller The Number 23.
Shaylee Ava Mansfield is an American actress. Mansfield, who is deaf, first gained recognition by making YouTube videos in which she told 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.
Sandra Mae Frank is an American actress. She is known for performances in theatre, films and TV series.