Terry Galloway Bio
Terry Galloway Biography
Terry Galloway is a German born/Texas raised, deaf, lesbian, artist and activist. During her 38-year career as an alternative artist working on the theatrical fringes, she has won grants, fellowships and awards in theater, literature, radio and video from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Texas Institute of Letters, PEW Charitable Trust, Columbia University, Austin’s Circle of Theatre’s, NYC’s Villager, the Kennedy Center, the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs, Theatre Communications Group, Mid-Atlantic Arts, the Puffin Foundation, Public Radio News Directors Incorporated, Federal Arts in Education, the National Communication Association, the Dana and Christopher Reeve Foundation, the Broadcast Education Association, the Pixie Awards, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. She is a member of SAG, the Dramatists Guild, The Women’s Project, PEN and has served on the boards of the National Performance Network and Women in Theatre Program. In 2013 she was one of the five artists in the nation nominated for the California Institute of the Arts’ Alpert Award for Adventurous Theater.
Her four solo shows Heart of a Dog, Out All Night & Lost My Shoes, Lardo Weeping and You Are My Sunshine have been produced at more than a hundred venues nationally and internationally. Heart of a Dog, Out All Night and Lardo made their national debuts in NY; Out All Night made its international debut in London, Lardo Weeping in Mexico City. In NY she was among the original performers at Limbo Lounge, W.O.W and P.S.122 and toured nationally and internationally with the P.S. 122 Field Trips. Two of her plays have been published in their entirety; all have been published in excerpted form. Additionally, she has to her credit over 17 articles about alternative theatre practices and queer disability activism, most recently in It Gets Better, Gay Shame and Cast Out Queer Lives in Theater. Her memoir Mean Little deaf Queer, published by Beacon Press in 2009, was a Lambda finalist and winner of the Golden Crown Award
Galloway has also co-founded three community based theatres. Two are in Austin Texas — the 35 year-old Esther’s Follies and the 12 year-old Actual Lives Austin. Her professional association as a writer, director and performer with Esther’s (once known for its political commentary, now as a popular and enduring professional musical cabaret) ended after five years when she left Austin to become the Heckscher Fellow at Columbia University. Actual Lives Austin, a workshop/theatre company for adults with disabilities, was based on classes she devised as a Visiting Artist at both the California Institute for the Arts and at the University of Texas, Austin. She steered that company to their national debut at the Kennedy Center’s VSA Festival of the Arts in 2004. The third theatre is the 27 year-old Mickee Faust Club in Tallahassee Florida. The oldest queer-disability centered non-profit community theater in the deep south and one of only five worldwide, Faust teaches novices the art of writing, performing and producing original cabarets, radio shows and short comic videos. Under her guidance, Faust has generated over 600 original theater scripts, produced 49 hour long cabarets of original material, been awarded 24 national and regional grants produced 21 video shorts that have been featured in over 106 national and international film festivals and garnered over 31 awards of filmmaking excellence– recently the Gold Pixie Animators Award and Best Narrative from the Broadcast Education Association. In 2012-2013 Faust was the keynote performance for three major national or international conferences including the Association for Theatre in Higher Education.
In 2014, three years after receiving a cochlear implant that allowed her to hear for the first time since she was nine, she wrote a six-character musical – The Ugly Girl: A Musical Tragedy in Burlesque that made its international debut at Liverpool’s famed DaDaFest International. Her interest in queer theatre began when, as a student she performed male roles at the University of Texas in Austin’s Shakespeare at Winedale Festival. Her interest in theatre activism began when she and nine other women collaborated with Berliner Ensemble Playwright Heiner Muller on the American adaptation of his play Mauser. Her interest in disability activism began when she first starred in and then became co-writer of a PBS series created to encourage and empower children with disabilities. Her work since that time has been grounded in principals from all three experiences.
Last updated: 3/30/2022