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Every Face Is Doing Something

A viral post claims the West never once produced the Buddha’s expression across twenty-five centuries of art. The claim collapses in the first wing of any decent museum, and the thing that killed it spent thirty-five years walking through Janna’s ASL classrooms. There is a post moving through social media that stakes an entire theory of civilization on one face. Every Buddha statue, it observes, from Thailand to Japan to China to Tibet to India, wears one expression: lids lowered a few degrees, the corners of the mouth lifted by a hair. The styles vary by country and by century while the face holds steady. The post rules out the easy readings, smile and peace both, and names the look “the absence of wanting.” Western religious art, the argument continues, produced this expression at no point in twenty-five hundred years. Michelangelo’s Last Judgment strains, Bernini’s Teresa swoons, every Annunciation leans toward its angel. Western faces reach; the Buddha’s face has stopped reaching; and that difference, the post concludes, compresses the whole philosophical quarrel between East and West into a single expression. It closes with a slogan engineered for the share button: “your face is where you are.”

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The Voice Goes Off: Writing My Half of Back to Willowbrook

On the first day of my classes at New York University, the voice goes off. I stand at the front of the room and I do not speak, and no one else will speak for the rest of the semester, because the language my students have come to learn does not live in the throat. It lives in the hands and the face and the shaped space between two people, and the fastest way to teach that is to stop pretending otherwise on day one.

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In Chicago, the Deaf Will Sing Don Giovanni

Since we opened ASL-Opera.com in September 2023, one question has arrived more often than any other: how rare is it, exactly, for an opera company to present a foreign-language title in American Sign Language? The question deserves a documented answer, and this fall Chicago supplies the occasion. Lyric Opera of Chicago opens its 2026-27 season with Mozart’s Don Giovanni, October 10 through November 1, 2026, in the Robert Falls production, Enrique Mazzola conducting, Christian Van Horn in the title role, the capstone of the company’s Mozart and Da Ponte trilogy. Inside that run sits something the season coverage barely mentions: a designated ASL performance on Sunday, October 18, at 2 p.m., which the company’s own production page marks on its ticketing calendar and describes plainly, all dialogue and lyrics translated into American Sign Language by “two certified interpreters located near the stage,” with select seats reserved for the sightlines a signed performance demands. Lyric has loaded the same matinee with its other access services, audio description and the haptic SoundShirt, a garment that lets the wearer feel the orchestra on the skin in real time. An Italian opera from 1787, interpreted live in ASL, on a major American mainstage, sold inside the regular season. In a healthy art form that sentence would read as routine. In the American record it reads as an event, and the distance between routine and event is the subject of this article.

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The Golden Age of Deafness: 1991, Tanya Towers, and the Long Erosion After

There was a year, exact and bounded, when the world we built held together. 1991. David and I had just celebrated our third wedding anniversary. He had finished his MFA at Columbia that spring under Peter Stone. I had just started teaching ASL at New York University, where I have now taught for thirty-five years. I had come east from Iowa, where I attended the Iowa School for the Deaf from first grade through twelfth, and from CUNY Lehman, where I would graduate the following spring as the first Deaf graduate in the school’s history. We were in our twenties and newly credentialed, and we felt as if we owned every inch of the city.

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My Language Is Not English: A Deaf Educator Answers JB Mitchell

I have taught American Sign Language at New York University since 1991. My credentials and history sit on the public record: first Deaf graduate of CUNY Lehman College in 1992, Master’s in Deafness Rehabilitation from NYU in 1997, SCPI rating of Superior Plus, Iowa School for the Deaf from first grade through twelfth, twenty-three years as a Vocational Rehabilitation Counselor for Deaf services at the New York State Department of Education, and in Spring 2023 the first Deaf dual tutorial instructor at NYU Gallatin, where one of the two tutorials I taught was Black Sign Language. I write today because a man on TikTok who calls himself an ASL Communication Coach has been telling a generation of young people that my language is English. It is not. Marlee Matlin has said so publicly, clearly, and with the moral authority she has earned across forty years of Deaf advocacy. JB Mitchell has responded by calling Marlee an actor rather than an educator. That is the move of a man who has run out of argument.

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The Metropolitan Opera is Dying Because It Wants to Die

The pinnacle of the Performing Arts in America is collapsing not from the weight of its chandelier, but from the brittleness of its imagination. The Metropolitan Opera has chosen extinction over evolution, and the evidence is no longer circumstantial.

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The EleMenTs Series Is Complete: A Young Adult Fantasy Trilogy

Twenty years ago, I began imagining a story about three disabled teenage girls who discover they possess elemental powers. The idea stayed with me, growing and changing as I grew and changed, waiting for the right moment to be told. That moment has arrived. The EleMenTs Series is complete, and all three novels are now available.

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