American Sign Language (ASL) is a natural language that serves as the predominant sign language of Deaf communities in the United States and most of Anglophone Canada. ASL is a complete and organized visual language that is expressed by employing both manual and nonmanual features. Besides North America, dialects of ASL and ASL-based creoles are used in many countries around the world, including much of West Africa and parts of Southeast Asia. ASL is also widely learned as a second language, serving as a lingua franca. ASL is most closely related to French Sign Language (LSF). It has been proposed that ASL is a creole language of LSF, although ASL shows features atypical of creole languages, such as agglutinative morphology.
Marlee Matlin is an American actress. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including an Academy Award, a Golden Globe Award, and a Screen Actors Guild Award, in addition to nominations for a BAFTA Award, and four Primetime Emmy Awards.
Jill Farren Phelps is an American television producer. She is known for her work with American soap operas, having served as executive producer of Santa Barbara, Another World, Guiding Light, One Life to Live, General Hospital, and The Young and the Restless.
Ellen Jayne Wheeler is an American actress, director and producer. Her work, both on screen and in production, has been primarily in American daytime drama.
Rachel Ames is an American actress. She is known for playing the role of Audrey Hardy on the ABC Daytime soap opera General Hospital. Ames' role is the longest-running in the series' history, spanning over 50 years and earning her three Daytime Emmy Award nominations. She received the Daytime Emmy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2004. Ames also played the role of Audrey on Port Charles, a spin off of General Hospital, from 1997 to 1998.
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.
Manually Coded English (MCE) is an umbrella term referring to a number of invented manual codes intended to visually represent the exact grammar and morphology of spoken English. Different codes of MCE vary in the levels of adherence to spoken English grammar, morphology, and syntax. MCE is typically used in conjunction with direct spoken English.
Deanne Bray is an American actress. Bray was born deaf and is bilingual in American Sign Language and British Sign Language. She is also known as Deanne Bray-Kotsur.
Israeli Sign Language, also known as Shassi or ISL, is the most commonly used sign language by the Deaf community of Israel. Some other sign languages are also used in Israel, among them Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language.
Emilie de Azevedo Brown is an American voice actress, producer, and director. Before moving out of the Los Angeles area, she did several anime voice roles mostly under the names Emily Brown, Mary Cobb and Marie Downing. One of her earliest voice acting roles was Annie Labelle in the 1980s crossover anime hit Robotech when she was 13 years old. After graduating from Brigham Young University in 1996 with a theatre degree, she continued her career in the entertainment industry.
Signing Time! is an American television program targeted towards children aged one through eight that teaches American Sign Language. It is filmed in the United States and was created by sisters Emilie Brown and Rachel Coleman, the latter of whom hosts the series. Between 2006 and 2016, it was syndicated by American Public Television to public television stations across the US. Signing Time! is produced and distributed by Two Little Hands Productions, which is located in Salt Lake City, Utah.
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.
Rose Pizzo is an Italian American author. She wrote the autobiography Growing Up Deaf with the help of her friend Judy Jonas, which tells the story of her life as a Deaf woman. This book was self-published through Xlibris. She is a prominent member of the Deaf Community and has won many awards for her efforts including the Fred Schreiber Golden Hands award.
Ella Mae Lentz is a Deaf American author, poet, teacher, and advocate.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Melissa Malzkuhn is an American deaf advocate and founder of the Motion Light Lab at Gallaudet University. She was a 2018 Obama Fellow.
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.
