Jenny Sealey
Artistic Director / CEO
Art, Fashion and Design
Deaf since the age of seven, Jenny Sealey has been Artistic Director of Graeae since 1997. Since then, she has pioneered a new theatrical language and aesthetics of artistic access experimenting with bilingual British Sign Language (BSL) and English, pre-recorded BSL, creative captioning, and in ear/live audio description methods. Two, The Fall of the House of Usher, Blasted, Diary of an Action Man, Blood Wedding (Japan), and Romeo and Juliet (Japan and Bangladesh) are examples, but this ‘aesthetic’ now influences all Graeae’s independent and co-produced work.
Recent theatre credits for Graeae include: The House of Bernarda Alba, Blood Wedding, The Threepenny Opera, Reasons To Be Cheerful (2010 & 2017). In June 2021, Jenny directed (entirely over Zoom) The Tempest: Swimming for Beginners for OwlSpot Theatre in Tokyo, with Deaf and disabled artists from Japan, Bangladesh and the UK. Radio work includes co-directing with Polly Thomas Bartholomew Abominations, Amy Dorrit, Midwich Cuckoos, and Three Sisters Rewired for BBC Radio 4. Spectacular outdoor productions include Against the Tide, The Iron Man, The Garden, The Limbless Knight – A Tale of Rights Reignited, and recently a contemporary opera for 14–18 Now WW1 centenary, This Is Not For You, with disabled veterans. She is a founding member of the disability arts network #WeShallNotBeRemoved, and Where’s My Vagina? – a women’s collective.
In 2009, she was awarded an MBE in the Queen’s Honours list. Sealey co-directed
the London 2012 Paralympic Opening Ceremony alongside Bradley Hemmings
(GDIF). She also won the Liberty Human Rights Arts Award.
www.graeae.org
“I’ve just got the best job in the world. Graeae is a company that is absolutely fuelled with passion for justice, equality and belief that Deaf and disabled people have a right to be on that centre stage and we have a passion to create the best theatre we possibly can do. When you’re surrounded by friends and colleagues who share that passion, we’re in it together and that’s what I love about my job, it’s always exciting, it’s always different and its always a challenge because some of those attitudes about what people think Deaf and disabled people can do is they think we can’t do very much. So what Graeae does is make theatre that matters, really does challenge people’s perceptions and they fall into the play so they stop judging, and it stops being about disability.”
