Jenny Sealey

Jenny Sealey has been Graeae’s Artistic Director since 1997. Sealey was encouraged to carry on dancing after becoming deaf at the age of 7. Although she could no longer hear the music, her teacher advised her to follow the person in front of her, and this ignited a passion which set the course of her career. Sealey studied Dance and Choreography at Middlesex Polytechnic, and then went on to become one of the founding members of both the Common Ground Sign Dance Company and the London Disability Arts Forum. Sealey has pioneered a new theatrical language and aesthetics of artistic access, experimenting with bilingual British Sign Language (BSL) and English, prerecorded BSL, creative captioning, and in ear/live audio description methods. Two, The Fall of the House of Usher, peeling, Bent, Blasted, Diary of an Action Man, Blood Wedding (Japan), and Romeo and Juliet (Japan and Bangladesh) are particular examples, but this ‘aesthetic’ now influences all Graeae’s independent and co-produced work.