Keynote Speaker
Bodies of Knowledge 5 featured a very dynamic and nationally renowned speaker, Terry Galloway.
Terry Galloway’s memoir, Mean Little deaf Queer is about coming to terms with a body and a life that did not feel like her own. “When your body betrays you like mine did me,” she writes, “then who’s to say the world won’t crack open at your feet, the sea rise up to sweep you away, or the sky won’t rain down its cosmic debris?”
Galloway is a deaf, queer writer and performer, who tours her one woman shows as a cheap way of seeing the world. She has performed her solo shows "Out All Night and Lost My Shoes" and "Lardo Weeping," in venues ranging from the American Place Theater in New York to the Zap Club in Brighton, England. In Austin, Texas she gained a reputation for playing comic male roles as a student and Research Associate for the University of Texas' alternative Summer Theater Festival, Shakespeare at Winedale. She's also known as one of the founding members of Austin's wildly popular 6th street cabaret Esther's Follies and as the founder of Actual Lives, a writing and performance workshop for adults with and without disabilities.
In Tallahassee, Florida she is the Head Cheese of the Mickee Faust Academy for the REALLY Dramatic Arts and the co-founder of the Mickee Faust Club, a performance group responsible for the award-winning video parodies, "Annie Dearest, The Real Miracle Worker, " featuring lots and lots of wah-wah, and "The Scary Lewis Yell-a-thon," featuring a Jerry Lewis look-alike and a bevy of inspirational cripples.
She writes as well as performs and you can find her articles, monologues, poems and performances texts in, among other publications, Sleepaway: Writings on Summer Camp, Cast Out: Queer Lives in Theater, Out of Character—Rants, Raves and Monologues from Today's Top Performance Artists, Plays from the Women's Project, Texas Monthly Magazine, Austin Chronicle, American Voice, The Dolphin Reader, and numerous anthologies about queerness, deafness, disability, theater, and Elvis. She has been a Visiting Artist at the California Institute of the Arts, Florida State University, and the University of Texas at Austin.
She's won a variety of awards including an NEA, a J.Frank Dobie Fellowship from the Texas Institute of Letters, grants from the Texas Commission of the Arts and the Florida Divisions of Cultural Affairs, 5 Corporation for Public Broadcasting Awards, 3 Prindi National Public Radio Commentary Awards, and a Best Swimmer Award from the Lions Camp for Crippled Children.
She splits her time between Austin Texas, and Tallahassee, Florida where she lives with her long-time love Donna Marie Nudd, a professor at Florida State University and their cat Tweety.
ABOUT Out All Night and Lost My Shoes
What:
A solo performance piece by performance artist Terry Galloway. Directed by Donna Marie Nudd.
Description:
What’s the proper etiquette of suicide? Is S & M ventriloquism an effective therapy for schizophrenics? Should drag be considered an act of self-defense? Will true love find a happy ending at the Lion’s Camp for Crippled Children? And what’s so natural about the Museum of Natural History?
Not quite blind as a bat, but definitely deaf as a doornail, Terry Galloway is the modern medical accident who’s asking these and other tough question in Out All Night and Lost My Shoes, one of the foundational texts in the history of disability performance. It’s also one hour of pure, energetic theater that mixes poetry, storytelling, stand- up, New Vaudeville and plain old corny vaudeville in a charged, moving celebration of life – hers and that of all oddballs.
Praise for Out All Night and Lost My Shoes
“She’s deaf. She’s queer. She’s a woman. And from the minute she begins the audience’s safe, dark anonymity is threatened.” Chicago Outlines.
“A hoot and a provocateur from the get-go – Galloway blends physical humor, wry intelligence and a heartfelt mortification at human suffering. “ L.A. Weekly
“Side splittingly funny and shocking, she never failed to connect.” LA Times
“She drew us into a bond that proved unbreakable” ArtForum
“. . .making wild sport of her own disabilities in defense of the defenseless, her main theme, eloquently pursued, is the use of art in hanging tough against life’s adversities.” London Times.
“Tough humor in the face of frightening subjects. . . bizarrely funny.” San Francisco Examiner.
“Fiercely intelligent and brimful of ideas for shaking an audience out of its gosh-aren’t-we-enlightened complacency and onto that uncomfortable narrow ledge where we’re not sure whether we should be laughing or crying. A remarkable performance by a remarkable woman that’s just a little scary, like eating snails or doing oral sex for the first time.” London’s Time Out
“As the lady says when we laughed: ‘sometimes it’s too damn late to do anything else.’ Great stuff!” London Times
Find out more about previous Keynotes and speakers at the Bodies of Knowledge Symposium.