How American Sign Language Masters Are Transforming the Culture for Deaf Actors

This is the second story in a three-part Spotlight on Deaf Actors Siân Heder’s living room was all wrong. While on set for her new film “CODA,” about the hearing daughter of a deaf family, her American Sign Language master, Anne Tomasetti, gave her a note about the film’s production design that Heder said she never would have considered as a hearing person. “She was like, this living room is set up wrong. No deaf family is going to put their couch facing away from the door,” Heder told TheWrap, explaining that a typical deaf household would arrange their furniture to be able to see who’s coming and going. That wasn’t the only suggestion Tomasetti or her colleague Alexandria Wailes had for Heder. And while “CODA” may be a watershed moment for representation of deaf people on screen, starring three deaf actors in leading roles, the Sundance award-winner also holds up as a new standard for the way deaf talent can be integrated into film sets thanks to its two ASL masters. An ASL Master, or what those in the business also refer to themselves as directors of artistic sign language (DASLs, pronounced “dazzles”) differ in key ways from other...

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