Samuel Yates

Samuel Yates, Ph.D., is a deaf artist and researcher who is a resident dramaturg and Assistant Professor of Theatre at Pennsylvania State University. Selected dramaturgy work: La Casa de la Laguna at Gala Hispanic Theatre (world premiere), Care: The Musical (3Arts/Art Institute of Chicago), Teenage Dick (Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Pasadena Playhouse, The Huntington Theatre), Fairview and Violet (Millikin U), Historias (Rainbow Theatre). Recent disability/artistic consulting includes She Kills Monsters (UMBC), Into the Woods (U Mass-Amherst), and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime (Penn State), and for such disparate companies/schools as the NEA, Ohio State U, and Gensler. They’ve previously worked in the literary offices of The Abbey Theatre (Ireland) and the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center, and now freelance. Samuel’s current book project, Cripping Broadway: Producing Disability in the American Musical, concerns disability aesthetics and accessibility practices in Broadway musicals, asking how our notions of disability and the able body inform and transforms theatrical performance.