The Department of Linguistics and ASL Program proudly presents Willy Conley, professor emeritus, Gallaudet University.  Willy will present on "How It Fell on Deaf Ears Became a Play for a Bilingual Audience".

What goes into the development of an original stage production for an audience of D/deaf, hard-of-hearing, and hearing people? Willy Conley, a Deaf playwright, pulls back the curtain to reveal his process on creating the script, Falling on Hearing Eyes: A Museum of Sign/anguish for People with Communications Disorders. He will share time-worn cliches regarding deaf people, including aspects of Deaf culture to show how they were explored/exploited to create New Vaudevillian physical comedy and visual theatre. 

Willy Conley, Professor Emeritus at Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., is an award-winning playwright, photographer and writer. His plays have been produced worldwide, and his writings appear extensively in anthologies and periodicals. Conley is the author of numerous books such as Space is Deaf Like Me, Photographic Memories — Essays, Playlets, and Stories, Plays of Our Own — An Anthology of Scripts by Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Writers, Visual-Gestural Communication, Listening Through the Bone – Collected Poems, The Deaf Heart – A Novel, and Vignettes of the Deaf Character and Other Plays. 

ASL/English interpretation will be provided.