Vilma Jackson is an English actor and performer. She is known for portraying the role of Charlie in Coronation Street. She is Deaf and a British Sign Language user. In 2020 Jackson wrote, produced and performed in a short film, "Triple Oppression", which deals with the challenges she faces as Black, Deaf and a woman. The short won four Best Inspirational Film at the New York Film Awards, the FilmCon Awards, Festigious International Film Festival and Los Angeles Film Awards. In 2021 she launched her own chat show, available online.
Jackson grew up in Mozambique and attended boarding school in Portugal, before moving to London, where she attended Harrow College studying Performing Arts and also trained in the Meisner Acting Technique. Her career spans film, stage, television drama, music video, public service broadcasting and theatre credits. [1]
She has collaborated with deaf poet Raymond Antrobus in a performance that blends his poem "Dear hearing world" with music and sign language. [2] She was in a leading role for Dear Hearing World (Short Film) and received five winning awards for Best Short Film, and other categories.
She also appeared in the short "Almost" by director Teresa Garratty, which won her Best Performance at OutlantaCon Short Film Festival in 2020, [3] and in the short "Sign Night" with actress Sophie Stone, which was broadcast on the BBC. [4]
She is a dancer and sign-song performer and she uses her performance to discuss in Sign Language essential issues such as cultural appropriation and the Black Lives Matter movement. [5] [6]
Children of a Lesser God is a 1986 American romantic drama film directed by Randa Haines from a screenplay written by Hesper Anderson and Mark Medoff and based on Medoff's 1979 play of the same name.
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.
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.
Dear Frankie is a 2004 British drama film directed by Shona Auerbach and starring Emily Mortimer, Gerard Butler, Jack McElhone, and Sharon Small. The screenplay by Andrea Gibb focuses on a young single mother whose love for her son prompts her to perpetuate a deception designed to protect him from the truth about his father.
Nokugcina Elsie Mhlophe, known as Gcina Mhlophe, is a South African storyteller, writer, playwright, and actress. In 2016 she was listed as one of BBC's 100 Women. She tells her stories in four of South Africa's languages: English, Afrikaans, Zulu and Xhosa, and also helps to motivate children to read.
Anna Maria Manahan was an Irish stage, film and television actress.
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.
Rachel Joy Shenton is an English actress. She gained prominence through her role as Mitzeee Minniver in the Channel 4 soap opera Hollyoaks (2010–2013). She is also known for her role as Courtney in Waterloo Road and has starred in the ABC Family drama Switched at Birth (2014–2017), the BBC2 sitcom White Gold (2019), and the Channel 5 series All Creatures Great and Small (2020–).
Compensation is a 1999 independent drama film produced, co-edited and directed by Zeinabu irene Davis and written by Marc Arthur Chéry. The film is about two parallel love stories set in turn-of-the-century and present-day Chicago, with both stories concerning a relationship between a deaf woman and a hearing man. The story is inspired by the 1906 poem of the same name from early African-American writer Paul Laurence Dunbar. The film stars Michelle A. Banks and John Earl Jelks in the leading roles. The early part of the story is shot like a silent film. Thought the film was not released until 1999, filming took place in 1993.
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.
Samantha Louise Baines is an English actress, author and comedian. She is best known for her appearances in Magic Mike Live London, The Crown (Netflix), Lee Nelson's Well Funny People, Hank Zipzer (CBBC) and A Royal Night Out.
Sophie Leigh Stone is an English stage and television actress. She was the first deaf student to win a place at the drama school RADA. she is best known for her roles as Louise in Two Doors Down and Doctor Who as Cass.
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.
The Silent Child is a British sign language short film written by and starring Rachel Shenton and directed by Chris Overton, and released in 2017 by Slick Films. It tells the story of Libby, a profoundly deaf 6-year-old girl, who lives a silent life until a social worker, played by Shenton, teaches her how to communicate through sign language. The film won the Oscar for Live Action Short Film at the 90th Academy Awards. The film's television debut was on BBC One to an audience of 3.6 million, the film then received an extended period on BBC iPlayer.
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.
Sound of Metal is a 2019 American drama film directed and co-written by Darius Marder. It stars Riz Ahmed as a metal drummer who loses his hearing, and also features Olivia Cooke, Paul Raci, Lauren Ridloff, and Mathieu Amalric. Sound of Metal had its world premiere in the Platform Prize program at the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival on September 6, 2019. Amazon Studios released the film in theaters on November 20, 2020, and on Amazon Prime Video on December 4. The film was critically acclaimed, with particular praise for the performances of Ahmed and Raci, the sound design, the editing and Marder's direction and screenplay. It was listed on 52 film critics' top-ten lists for 2020. At the 93rd Academy Awards, it was nominated for Best Picture, Best Original Screenplay, Best Actor (Ahmed) and Best Supporting Actor (Raci), and won for Best Sound and Best Film Editing.
Jean St. Clair is an English actor, screenwriter, director, producer and British Sign Language consultant. She has twice won Best Actress at the French deaf film festival Clin d'Oeil. St. Clair is Deaf and a British Sign Language user.
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.
Caroline Parker is an English actor, comedian and performer. She is deaf and a British Sign Language user.
Rose Lucinda Ayling-Ellis is an English actress. Deaf since birth, she is a British Sign Language user. She is best known for playing the role of Frankie Lewis in the BBC soap opera EastEnders (2020–2022).