Sammi Grant

Adjunct Professor and Dialect Coach

Sammi Grant is an adjunct professor and dialect coach who grew up in the suburbs of Chicago. She earned a Bachelor's in Fine Arts in Acting from Illinois Wesleyan University and a Master's in Fine Arts with Distinction in Vocal Studies from the Royal Center School of Speech and Drama. Currently coaching at Illinois Wesleyan University and DePaul University, she has also coached at the University of Cincinnati and has been doing freelance work since 2012.

Sammi is legally blind with limited vision in her left eye and no vision in her right. In 2017, she produced a video with BuzzFeed on how to do accents that has around 3 million views at the time of this writing. She has worked on over 60 theatrical productions, major films, and TV shows.

Vision Towards Success Podcast Episode
Transcript

Speaker 1: Forward. Forward. Left, by the door.

Speaker 2: There are over 4 million working aged blind and visually impaired people in the United States, and over 2 million of these people are unemployed. This is a staggering statistic, but many people defy these odds and are happily and gainfully employed, and we wish to share their stories with the world.

Speaker 3: Hello and welcome to Vision Towards Success, the podcast that highlights stories of career development and lived experience. This podcast is brought to you by the Polus Center for Social and Economic Development. In our program, we feature employment success stories from visually impaired individuals for people with disabilities and their allies in hopes of showing just how smart, hardworking, and capable this diverse community is.

Josh Pearson: Welcome to Vision Towards Success. I'm Josh Pearson. Today we have a very enlightening discussion with Sammi Grant. She's an actor, a dialect coach, and a teacher, as well as being a fierce and determined advocate for the blind community and the rights of students. She discusses equity in educational programs, authentic representations of blindness and other disabled identities in the media, and empowerment through discovering your strengths and inner resolve to meet challenges. We're pleased to chat with her, and without further ado, we'll turn the mic over to Shaheem Sutherland, our student interviewer, and Sammi Grant, our guest. I'll be back with you after the break.

Shaheem Sutherl...: My name is Shaheem Sutherland, I am an intern with the Polus Center. Nice to meet you.

Sammi Grant: Nice to meet you.

Shaheem Sutherl...: For our listeners, I was thinking we can go through about a little who you are and a little about your background.

Sammi Grant: Sure. My name is Sammi Grant and I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, which is where I am in the current moment. I'm 31. I am legally blind, and I work as a dialect and vocal coach and voice and speech teacher at universities for dialect coaching. I work in theater, TV, film. I've also done some voiceover work. So just kind of any element of voice work within the entertainment industry.

Shaheem Sutherl...: Is vocal coaching or that general field of work something that you were always interested in, or is that something that came up later in life?

Sammi Grant: I wanted to be an actor at first. I started acting when I was 10, and I have a BFA in acting. During my training for the BFA, we took voice classes and dialect classes and I really, really liked them, and I was pretty good at them. So I did some more independent study in college and coached a couple shows in college.

And then after I was out of college, I was auditioning for acting roles for a couple of years, but at the same time was starting to get dialect and vocal coaching work, which was much more available. The jobs I was getting for coaching were a lot better in terms of pay, in terms of the projects I was getting to work on, the level of theater I was getting to work at, it was a lot better than the handful of acting roles I was getting.

So in 2015, I made a decision to take an entire year off of acting and focus solely on dialect and voice coaching, and decided that if after the year I missed acting, I would go back, but I didn't and I just stuck with coaching and then eventually got my MFA in voice studies. And now in addition to coaching, I also teach at the university level.

Shaheem Sutherl...: For vocal coaching, did you learn that at your initial college or did you go to a new school to practice it?

Sammi Grant: So both. In my undergrad I took classes as an actor to work on my own voice. We did voice, speech, dialect. We learned the International Phonetic Alphabet, things like that. So that was in my BFA. My MFA in voice studies was specifically focused on voice, and was more focused on the teaching and coaching of voice rather than my own voice.

We definitely still did work on our own voices, but it was through a framework of using ourselves as examples of how exercises can be applied and how to analyze voices and work with different people. So it was all through the lens of teaching and coaching. I coach and teach actors how to do different accents, how to learn an accent, how to do accents in an authentic and culturally sensitive way. So yes, that's the bulk of my work, is with accents.

Shaheem Sutherl...: Are you comfortable discussing your vision?

Sammi Grant: Yes, I am.

Shaheem Sutherl...: Okay, because I do have some questions about how your vision affected your career or any challenges you faced throughout it. So did you experience any challenges working in this field?

Sammi Grant: Yes. I'll give just a little bit of history about my blindness, for context. So I have always been visually impaired, I have glaucoma, but I didn't reach legal blindness until I was 10. And as many people probably know, glaucoma is a degenerative disease, so I lose more vision over time.

So in elementary school and middle school, I didn't need to use a cane. I didn't really use much assistive technology. In high school, I was at a crossroads where I should have been using those things but was having a lot of identity issues and didn't want to sort of engage with my blindness. And then by college I really had no choice. My vision had reached a level that I could either use my cane and assistive technology or I could just not participate in life in the way that I wanted to.

In terms of the challenges in my career, it's a large reason, not the only reason, but a large reason I stopped acting. When I was in college, which was 2008 to 2012, we were not at a point that we are now where diversity and authentic representation and inclusion are widely discussed. And so when I was in college, I assumed that if I couldn't play sighted roles, I would never have an acting career, and my teachers supported that.

So I had one teacher in particular who gave me lessons to get rid of my "blindisms" on stage, where he would set up these sort of obstacle courses, I guess I'd call them, where he would set up a scene and I had to walk to the table and pick up a cup and step over this thing all without my cane, and I had to not look blind while doing it. And if I did, then I would have to stop and start over. And at the time I was like, I thought, "Oh, this is great, he's really helping me." But in reality, it was very psychologically damaging because I was basically being told that my blindness was a problem and that we weren't even doing acting. We were just sort of pretending that I wasn't blind, which isn't what acting is.

Shaheem Sutherl...: Yeah.

Sammi Grant: And then throughout my time at college I kind of started to realize that that wasn't great and wasn't what I wanted. And then after school, when I was auditioning and working for a few years, there was this sense a lot of times when I would walk into an audition room, because I was walking in with a cane, there was an immediate sort of shutdown from the people who were running the auditions, that I could just feel the energy in the room shift knowing that, oh, you're not even really going to listen to my monologue because I'm blind and this is too much of a problem for you or too complicated, or you couldn't possibly see me in this role because I'm blind.

And then when I would get cast, it would be for roles that were blind or that incorporated my blindness, but in a way that didn't feel right to me because it was more like, "Oh, this is a metaphor and we're going to use it to send a message," rather than allowing me to play like a character.

Shaheem Sutherl...: How did you go about confronting that?

Sammi Grant: Well, I'll admit that I really didn't confront it at the time. As I sort of alluded to earlier, I've had a really hard journey of my own acceptance of my identity as a blind person. And at the time in college and the few years after, I just sort of accepted it and just assumed everyone was right. That I didn't deserve these roles or that I wasn't cast-able. And so I didn't and I shifted to a different career, which I love. I love doing my coaching and teaching career, and I really think that is actually my calling.

So I'm really doing the confronting work now, in the teaching and coaching that I do, confronting assumptions like this about people with disabilities or any one of a marginalized identity, supporting the ideas of authentic representation and inclusion and all of that in my teaching and my coaching and my advocacy work. So it's happening now more towards what I'm teaching my students rather than standing up for myself years back.

Shaheem Sutherl...: You did study abroad in London, is this correct?

Sammi Grant: Yes, that's correct.

Shaheem Sutherl...: How did that go?

Sammi Grant: I went to London for my grad school, the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. I went there the 2018, 2019 school year. It was rough, I'll be honest, not really because of my blindness. I also have arthritis. I think there's this misconception that because in England there's more universal healthcare and seemingly better healthcare than we have here in the United States, which I think is true, but it doesn't mean that the healthcare system is easy.

So because I have a lot of specialty medications and I need to see a lot of specialists, it took months and months to get to see a specialist who could then prescribe my specialty medications. So one of the medications that I need for my arthritis, which is an injection, I didn't get until six months into being there and I was only there for nine. So I had really bad flareups and it was just really hard to deal with and it had affected my mental health.

So I was able to go to class and fully participate in my studies, but I didn't get to experience England and London in the way that I thought I was going to. Going in I had these fantasies of going to the theater every weekend and going out with my friends a ton. And I did those things a few times, but because my health was so rough there, it was overall a negative experience for me.

Shaheem Sutherl...: Now, during that time, were you using any assistive technologies over there?

Sammi Grant: There and here. I use a screen reader on my computer, I use JAWS. And then on my phone as well, I use Voiceover on my iPhone. Those are my main pieces of assistive technology. I will also occasionally use a video magnifier or CCTV. I had a desktop one and a portable one in England, which I still have here. I use those very rarely. It's for very specific circumstances like reading my mail, or if I need to write something by hand. But the main thing I use it for is the International Phonetic Alphabet, which is something used to teach dialects and accents for actors.

Until just a little bit ago, I wasn't able to use JAWS fully with IPA on my computer or voiceover on my iPhone, so I would use the video magnifier to read the IPA because there's lots of symbols that are not in the alphabet that we used. They're just weird random symbols, so JAWS doesn't recognize them. So that's what I was using there. But I actually just two months ago figured out a way to get JAWS to read the IPA, which is a huge game changer for me, and I'm very excited about it. So that's what I used there, and like I said, what I also use here.

Shaheem Sutherl...: Did you experience any other assistive technologies that were new to you over there in England that should be adopted over here?

Sammi Grant: I didn't use any other assistive technology, but I will say that in my school we had a dyslexia and disability services department. I think that's what it was called. And I will say there is a lot more support for people with disabilities, and especially for people who are neuro divergent. I am not neuro divergent, but I had a lot of classmates who were, and there's just so much more support and so much more advancement in terms of how to make teaching accessible for all.

So that would be the biggest change that I saw in London, because a lot of times accommodations in the US in acting classes or voice classes or just sort more fine arts related classes, a lot of times those accommodations that are typical here are not even necessarily needed because we didn't really take written tests. But I have a lot of other access needs that wouldn't be met by a typical list here in the US and are more ephemeral, I guess. Less sort of able to be just defined in a checklist. I don't know if this makes any sense, but that was a huge change that I saw there. And coming back to the US and entering the university system as a teacher, it was just really apparent to me that the US is just many, many steps behind in terms of accessibility within school.

Shaheem Sutherl...: Yeah, it makes perfect sense. It's kind of like they have a set list of things to provide that they will provide and that's about it. You're on your own from there. And it's a little stressful at times because you may need a little more than that, or you may not need most of the things on the list, but you need something else, and they just aren't flexible enough to work around them, unfortunately.

Sammi Grant: Absolutely.

Shaheem Sutherl...: Working in this field, are there any other blind individuals that you've worked with or collabed with?

Sammi Grant: In terms of specifically voice work, there's a woman in England named Frankie Armstrong, who's in England a very well known voice teacher, and she is blind and she came and did a workshop at my school, and that was very cool. There are others who are blind in my specific voice field, but I haven't worked with them yet. I hope to one day. But the person I collaborate the most with is a woman named Mary Lee Talkington, who is a blind actor, director, activist, and she started a program called Access Acting Academy, which is a first of its kind training program for blind and low vision actors. And so I've been teaching for that for the last year. Mary Lee started it a couple years ago.

Shaheem Sutherl...: It's unfortunate, because if you would've had a program like this and activist like this back then, maybe you would've still been in the acting field, having people supporting you. You know?

Sammi Grant: Yeah, well it's very interesting because the way I met Mary Lee was actually through my undergrad. She was brought in my freshman year, at the end of my freshman year, and gave a talk to the entire department, had a meeting just with the faculty, and then had a meeting with me and the faculty to really try and shift their thinking about how to work with me and any other disabled folks who might come through the program.

So that was fantastic in terms of me getting connected with Mary Lee, and having her as a role model, mentor, cheerleader. But I think that at the time my faculty was quite resistant to what Mary Lee had to say. So even though she was there and did come in and did do great work, I think there was a lack of openness to what she had to say. I feel that things didn't really change that much from after she came. But I had her as a support from then on. So we got connected in 2009, and we are still friends and now collaborators to this day.

Shaheem Sutherl...: How has Covid 19 affected your life slash line of work?

Sammi Grant: Entertainment essentially shut down during 2020 at least. There was no theater, for a while there was no TV or film work. I'm very lucky that my life timeline played out the way it did, because I finished my masters in the summer of 2020 and I had work lined up for the coming school year, the 2021 school year. So I actually had more work teaching and made more money than I ever had during Covid 19, which was kind of mind blowing because so many of my friends and colleagues in the entertainment industry were just out of work completely. So I was very lucky.

I did teach everything online, which was quite a challenge because it was only my second year teaching, but my first year teaching my voice classes, and I had to not only figure out how to teach and what I wanted to teach and all of the sort of nervousness that comes with being a first year teacher, but then I also had to do it all online. I wasn't in faculty meetings and I wasn't seeing students around or connecting with my other faculty in the hallway as I normally would if we were in person. It was a very, very hard school year to get through. On the other side of it now I'm very grateful for it, and Covid is still here obviously and still affecting work, but it's coming back slowly. So I did a film project earlier in the summer and I do have teaching work for this fall. We'll kind of see how it continues to play out.

Shaheem Sutherl...: Having lived a experienced life now with some acting, vocal coaching, and meeting people around the world, what advice would you give your younger self about the world ahead?

Sammi Grant: I'm specifically thinking of my high school self. Really try and work on acceptance, particularly accepting not only the fact that I am blind and learning how to celebrate that identity, but also learning to accept all of my access needs, because I was very resistant to them in high school and it caused issues when I got to college, I had a very rough freshman year of college because I was independent for the first time and it was kind of a culture shock almost for me of being independent and also using all this new assistive technology and using my cane consistently.

So I really wish that my teenage self had been able to accept the reality of my life. And everyone knew that I was blind. My close friends knew I was blind, obviously my family did, but walking around, I guess it sounds so silly now, but I preferred walking into things rather than using my cane. I don't know why I thought that looked okay, to just walk into stuff. Obviously people would notice that too. So that would be my biggest thing.

And to then talk to my college and post-college self, is really getting to what you asked before, is to have the bravery to confront what was going on at the time. Because I really knew in my gut that it wasn't right and I wasn't happy and I didn't feel comfortable, but I didn't know how to say that and how to fight for myself. I think that's not just on me. I think I also wasn't taught how to do that. So that's also advice for those that were around me at the time. But I'm 31 now, and I've gone on a long journey of acceptance and while I'm certainly not ashamed or embarrassed of my access needs, I still have internalized ableism and some negative thoughts towards my blindness. And so still now at 31, I wouldn't say like, "Oh, I've accepted it, I'm done." I think it's going to be a lifelong journey to fight against the ableism and not accept it.

Shaheem Sutherl...: I agree. I think when we're younger in our teenage years, where I am as well, is we're so focused on seeming, in quotations, "normal" and fitting in that we don't want to show our disabilities whether if it's temporary or not. You know?

Sammi Grant: Yeah.

Shaheem Sutherl...: And I think as we grow older, we start to realize, this is just me and I shouldn't care what other people think and I shouldn't be worried about what other people think of me. As long as I have my needs and I'm able to succeed, everything will be okay. I think for most people, as you said, it is a lifelong journey. It's not you're going to wake up in the morning and the switch is going to turn. You know?

Sammi Grant: Yeah. Something I have really started to think about lately, talking about my disability with my therapist, is even though now, I was just saying, I have a lot more acceptance of my access needs and I try to be an advocate for myself and others, I can still feel myself when I'm walking around outside or I'm by myself in a situation, I can feel myself sort of hiding away. I'm using my cane and I'm doing what I need to do, but I'm internally just praying that no one notices me, which is really sad. Not that I have the ego to say everyone needs to look at me, but trying to accept the fact that people are going to look at me, just as people look at people just that they pass by. That's just what sighted people tend to do. But to not try and hide myself away and close in on myself. To be more open and allow the world to see me.

Shaheem Sutherl...: Yeah, honestly I think it's perfectly normal for people in general to not want to stick out and have random people on the street stare at them. It is a little weird. But yeah, I don't think it's anything bad to not want to be noticed in public. I think as long as you're able to accept yourself and just keep moving forward, things will be perfectly fine. Now, thank you so much for answering all my questions and meeting with me today. It was an honor.

Sammi Grant: Thank you so much. Thank you for all of your questions and for sharing your stories. I really appreciate it.

Josh Pearson: You're listening to Vision Towards Success.

My name is Josh Pearson. We've been chatting with Sammi Grant, an actor and dialect coach as well as an educator and advocate. In the first part of our show, Sammi spoke about her story and journey through education and into the career that she now holds on stage and in the university, helping others to achieve similar goals through her work with the Access Acting Academy, the first of its kind program to prepare blind actors, writers, directors, storytellers for work in the entertainment industry, and to do so while helping them to tell disabled stories authentically.

We had a chance to talk more with Sammi about the importance of community, the value of authentic representation of disability identity and lived experiences in the media, and advocating for your access needs and the wider needs of the disabled community through ensuring that true stories are told that reflect our experiences in the entertainment landscape.

Often blind kids grow up one of very few, if not the only blind person in their school, and they don't have much interaction with fellow blind students unless they intentionally seek that camaraderie out with other folks who are blind or low vision to be able to network and share lived experiences. Sometimes that can come in the form of a teacher for students with visual impairments, recommending that they attend one or another blindness program. Sometimes it can come through blindness agencies seeking students out. One way or another, blind students are very lucky if they find their way into a peer network. We asked Sammi to share her journey in coming to accept her blindness as an identity, and in particular we were curious how did meeting and networking with other blind students help her to become comfortable with herself.

Sammi Grant: It was pretty much non-existent for a lot of my life. Part of my resistance to my identity was also a resistance to others of the same identity when I was growing up. And I went to a public school, I had "special education support." I don't really like that term, but that's what it was called. And there were a couple other blind people in my high school, so I interacted with them, but only in school and only in the moments when we were meeting with our vision aid, I think that's what we called her.

I went to one or two events in my area that were for blind youth or for blind teenagers, but at those events I could just feel myself being really resistant to it and not wanting to engage, not wanting to make friends. And then in college, I went to a really small college and there wasn't anyone else blind in my department, in the theater department. And the theater department is a little insular, I think, at a lot of schools where we don't really interact with people outside of our department a lot. And so even though I know there was one or two other blind people at the school, I didn't interact with them. And for my day job for a couple of years, I worked at an organization that supported the blind community in Chicago called the Chicago Lighthouse. I worked there for just under two years.

So obviously there I interacted with a lot of blind people, but again there was this resistance to really get to know people and to let them in and be friends with them. So it really wasn't until the last few years that I started to actively engage with the blind community, meaning trying to form actual friendships, trying to follow more blind activists on Facebook, and just being more aware of activism work that's going on. But yeah, that's a real ongoing project for me that I want to be actively working on.

Josh Pearson: Just as blind youth struggle to find kinship and a sense of community with peers and within themselves, advocacy skills are an essential yet very difficult thing for young people to learn. Oftentimes advocacy comes into a person's life out of necessity, when they face access barriers or attitudes from members of the non-disabled public who base their views of blindness or other disabilities on stereotypes and misguided ableist perceptions.

This is why a program such as Access Acting Academy is so valuable to those who walk through its doors. Blind students oftentimes need to advocate for things like accessible classroom materials, and we'll take that a step further and say that they also need to advocate for the right to be in that class and in their bodies as a disabled person and feel like they are welcome there.

Sammi illustrated examples in the first part of her program where professors were very uncomfortable having a blind person on a stage. She is definitely not the only person to have experienced professors telling her that they did not think that she could easily take this class. Blind youth not only learn how to communicate their own personal experiences meaningfully through programs that empower them to learn self-advocacy skills, but they also advocate collectively for the community by helping to ensure stories by and about disabled characters are told honestly and authentically.

And if the portrayal of these characters happens in a way that benefits not only actors, but people all across the entertainment and media landscape who identify as disabled, this includes directors, writers, cinematographers, photographers, costume designers, sound designers, stunt people, basically the wide network of media folks.

Sammi Grant: Part of what Access Acting does beyond teaching acting and voice and just all the different parts of acting is advocacy. Is learning how to ask for access needs, really to demand them if we're honest, and how to not only ask for access needs, but how to start changing some of those thoughts with casting directors, producers, people like that. Because I think what we're at now is people are saying, "Yes, we need to have more representation in our stories," but we're still really struggling to get those stories with actors who are actually blind or disabled or whatever the need is. So we're still many steps away from where we need to be.

That is the actual strength of Access Acting. And what draws me to it the most is the advocacy and the knowledge that this program is not just here to teach people how to act, but it is here to fully shift the industry to understand that disability stories need to be told, disabled people need to be telling them, and that disabled people need to be able to tell stories that are not about their disability.

Part of the team working on Access Acting is someone who works heavily in casting, and he told a story about how he was teaching, I think it was a class on casting, and his students had to write a casting breakdown, and he showed a picture of someone who was disabled. I don't remember if this person was blind or a wheelchair user, was one of the two. And so the students wrote casting breakdowns that were saying sickly man or out of work veteran or all the stereotypes. And then at the next class, this teacher told them who this person really is and what their life is, which is a full, expansive life, including their disability. And so these students had to rewrite their breakdowns and suddenly they were writing stories that, yes, included the disability as part of this person's identity, but this person was now a lawyer or a doctor or whatever and had a love story and things like that. So in those kinds of ways, what kind of stories we can expect to be telling. And talking directly to executives.

Josh Pearson: Sammi addresses a core issue that has been central to the representation of disabled experience in film and on the stage, the idea that our disability would get in the way of us authentically portraying that disability and acting as a disabled character. Whether there is a role that is specifically written around that character's disability so that we can easily build our disability into it, or the idea that we just happen to be an actor or a writer or a sound effects person who is disabled.

So thinking about the onscreen representation of characters who are disabled, the question often comes up, how well do they understand what they're portraying if they are a disabled character? And if the character is not disabled, what's the problem with the actor him or herself or themselves having a disability? This belief not only locks people out of the industry, but it continues to perpetuate harmful stereotypes as non-disabled actors and writers try to portray our lived experience without having lived it or understood all of the internal feelings, thoughts, and complex emotions going on in our minds and hearts as we try to navigate a world which we have to adapt to as opposed to the other way around.

Sammi Grant: I'm going to be frank, I think it's absolute BS, them saying that we went through so many blind actors and we just didn't find the right person, then you didn't try hard enough. This is such a huge element, not just for blind actors or disabled actors, but actors of any marginalized identity. The excuse is always, "Oh, well we couldn't find the right person." Well, if you're only ever casting non-disabled people or white people or cisgender people, then those of the marginalized identity are not going to feel comfortable coming into your space, because they don't feel welcome and they don't feel that they will be safe or cast or whatever is hoped for. So there needs to be really active outreach. Weeks of training is never going to replace a lifetime of lived experience. Anytime that comes up, that excuse of we just couldn't find the right person, I just absolutely roll my eyes. I don't believe it.

Get disabled writers. I think so often in conversations like this or conversations of representation, it is so focused on the actors, which is really important because they're the ones that are telling the story for the audience, but it has to start earlier than that with the writers, with the producers. And I'm not saying that every single person on the team needs to be disabled, but there has to be disability representation in all departments. And if there isn't, if a writer is non-disabled or if the producers are non-disabled or the director, then there should be a disability consultant. Because what happens so often is the disabled person in the room ends up becoming the consultant, and therefore reliving their trauma. Right? To say, "Oh, this isn't how this would happen. Here's what would happen." But they're not the writer, you know? They're the actor or they're the director or whatever it is, and it's not their responsibility to be a disability consultant.

So that should be a job. I think that's true for so many marginalized identities, not just disability. That if you are not of that identity and you're telling the story, you better have someone on your team sort of checking your work. In terms of the stories we tell, I think what we were talking about earlier is it's so important to give people the opportunity to tell their story, to tell stories that aren't just about their disability, but that also don't ignore it.

I don't spend my entire life talking about my disability, but it's something that certainly affects my everyday life. So I wouldn't want to it to be hidden inside of a story, to be hopefully unnoticed. I'd want it to be present but not be the focus. And if it is the focus, because those are stories that still can be told and should be told of a disability story, that we are not objects just of inspiration, that we can often fail and be flawed and be complex people, and that we're also not needing to be cured. I think bringing in the social model of disability is so important in telling disabled stories. That it's not about somebody overcoming their disability, it's about society getting it together and making the world more accessible.

Josh Pearson: We asked Sammi to explain her approach to dialect coaching. What is the best way to portray a character given the actors personal lived experience without perpetuating long existing stereotypes or culturally appropriating?

Sammi Grant: My master's thesis, which has such a long title and is such an academic title, the cultural implications of intelligibility for actors on American stages and the need for anti-racist practices for vocal coaches. What it essentially got at in my research is that the way we view intelligibility and the intelligibility of accents that are not our own and that are not of a white, middle class, American person is that intelligibility is tied to that identity that I just mentioned, that to be intelligible is to speak in that way. So the way that I'm speaking is pretty much that, I am a white, middle class, US American, and I have this sort of "desired accent" that was taught in acting schools for a long time, and people were forced to adopt that accent, not just on stage, but in their everyday lives and strip away whatever their native accent was or natural accent, and all the cultural identity that came along with it.

So yeah, at the time it was transatlantic, now it's called General American, that rather than thinking, oh, that person with that accent different than my own is unintelligible and they should sound more like me, it's rather how can I lean in and listen more, and listen to their message rather than saying, "You need to pronounce your Ts more." And that when vocal coaches are working with actors, that it's not about having crisp T sounds or sounding a certain way, but it's about having a clear intention behind what you're saying.

So in terms of teaching accents and how to teach them the cultural sensitivity, I think actors need to be really self-aware of the accents that they're doing. So I, if I were still performing, I should never be doing an accent of a Black Jamaican speaker. That's just completely culturally inappropriate for me. But I could do many different French accents, but I am not French in my own identity. So in any accent that I am going to do, that I've decided is culturally appropriate for me, part of the research of acting, and this is what I teach and what I provide when I coach, is cultural context research. What is the culture related to this accent? What are their social norms? Are their gestures that are related to their particular way of speaking? All of those things.

So beyond sound, it is identity, and they are completely linked, that they cannot be separated. And so that when you're performing an accent, you are representing that accent's culture. So to tell someone doing a certain accent or that has a certain accent, "You need to modify it so the audience can understand you," is essentially saying you need to modify your culture so it's more acceptable to this predominantly white, middle class audience.

Josh Pearson: Sammi mentioned that professors tried to have her not acknowledge her blindness on stage. We asked her about how she prepared for auditions while knowing that she would have to face that type of discrimination based around denial of her identity.

Sammi Grant: In terms of prepping for auditions, yeah, I would do a lot of research into the character, and if the play was available, read the play, and make decisions about how I wanted to perform the monologue or the scene, whatever I was auditioning with. I'd have to really make decisions about how my blindness would or wouldn't play into this character, how I was going to deal with it in a sense of this character isn't written as blind, could they be blind? Should I try and hide it?

When I would go into an audition, oftentimes I would go and then I would put my cane aside and then do the performance and then pick up my cane to leave. So I was sort of making a statement that now I am acting and now I'm not blind. I don't think that really worked for me because it didn't feel authentic, and I was very self-conscious about making sure I knew where my cane was at all times. So I really wasn't in the moment and wasn't able to really apply a lot of the work I did in preparation.

I think not only in thinking about how I would incorporate my blindness into the role, but what would those who were doing the auditions, the casting director, director, how would they view it? Could they possibly view this character as blind? How open would they be to that idea of this character being blind? And a lot of times I felt that they wouldn't be. And when I would be cast, I would sort of develop my ways of getting around the stage if I didn't have my cane, or ask other actors to assist me off stage during blackouts and such. But I also felt in auditions, and even sometimes when I was cast, that it didn't even really matter how much work I put into it.

There was one audition I had where at the end of it they said, the director said, "Okay, well if we don't cast you, it's not because you're blind." And I thought to myself, well obviously it is, or you would not have said that. Why would you feel the need to say that, except I guess to cover your butt? It just was so awkward and weird, and I wasn't cast, and I'm pretty sure it was because I was blind. I of course don't know and they legally can't tell me that's the reason, because that would obviously be employment discrimination, but I definitely felt that in the room.

Even when I was cast, no matter how much work I put into it, I would always feel like I had to prove myself worthy of being there. And that was certainly part of my own internalized ableism, my own lack of self-worth. But it was also the way that I was treated overall. Now this again is what Access Acting is trying to fight against and we're trying to change. So I think things are getting better. But that's the experience I had and why I stopped.

Josh Pearson: Part of Sammi's story involved her traveling to study in London. Access to information as well as cultural perceptions of disability and reactions to it differ all over the world. By studying how others view and have responded to disability, this will help us to build global equity and a unified cultural understanding of what disability is and appropriate access needs.

Sammi shared a little bit about the benefits across the pond that she saw while traveling, and ways that we can incorporate some of that culture into the way that we think about disability here in the US.

Sammi Grant: When I was in England, there was braille on every single prescription for my medication, on all boxes and over the counter medication. And just imagine how nice that would be, because I take many medications for many different conditions, including my blindness, and lots of eyedrops feel very similar. And so it wasn't on the bottles themselves, but on every single box or bag or whatever sort of container the medication came in, the bottle of medication came in would have braille on it. So I could always check to see what I was taking. So that was huge, and I didn't even know I wanted that until I got it. And now back I really miss it. It was so nice.

I think attitude is a big thing. When I was in England, I was very rarely grabbed by a random stranger. It happened a couple times, but it was very rare. Now, I don't know if this is a general English versus American just way of social norms, of interacting with anyone, of physical touch with a stranger, or reaching out to a stranger, I don't know. But in America, as I'm sure many blind people can relate, I'm grabbed by random people all the time. Thinking I need help or that I'm lost or that I will not be able to cross the street that I'm standing at the corner for, which always blows my mind because it's like I'm here alone at the crosswalk, obviously I planned to do this thing on my own, and unless I'm literally walking into oncoming traffic, I don't need your help. And so I would get offers of help, but it was always a question. Whereas in the US I feel it's often a grab and then a demand, "Let me help you."

That's a big thing I've had to work on in terms of my advocacy, is getting really direct with people, and particularly ride share drivers who think they're being very helpful by getting out and helping me to my door even though I say I don't need their help. I've had to get very direct and sometimes blunt with people to let them know I don't need their help. Because people here in particular don't want to hear that I don't need their help. If I need it, I will ask for it. And if someone asks me if I need help, that's fine. I never mind that. But then listen to my answer. And that was a big difference I felt in London, that people would ask. If I said no, it would be fine, and I was very rarely randomly grabbed.

Josh Pearson: We'd like to thank Sammi Grant for her insight and candor in sharing her knowledge and experiences. For more info on her acting work, or to book her as a dialect coach, please visit sammygrant.com. That's S-A-M-M-I-G-R-A-N-T.com. To check out Access Acting Academy, and their diverse set of classes and webinars, please visit them at www.accessacting.com.

Speaker 3: Thank you for tuning into Vision Towards Success. This program has been recorded and produced by Elena Regan and David Gonzalez from the Trades Win Audio podcast team. In association with the Polus Center for Social and Economic Development. Funding for this program has been provided by the Libby Douvan Award from the Fielding Institute, the Massachusetts Commission for the Blind, and the Berry Savings Foundation. Additional episodes of this podcast can be found at www.poluscenter.org/tradeswin, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Job Field