AMBER GALLOWAY
A long-time lover of music, Amber Galloway has used her skills in American Sign Language (ASL) to bridge the gap between music and deaf audiences. She was inspired to become a music interpreter in 1999, after seeing two deaf dance troupes—the San Antonio Deaf Dance Company and the Wild Zappers—perform. “I knew that’s what music should look like,” she says of those performances. She now runs Amber G Productions, an agency that trains ASL performance interpreters, provides advocacy education for businesses, and helps artists, including Metallica and Tove Lo, make their music more accessible to deaf audiences. Her vision, she says, “was for me to create an ASL interpreting agency that focused on making significant changes when it came to ASL access in the music industry which I have seen happen.” In her 22 years as an interpreter, she’s seen how more and more music festivals and venues around the world are increasing efforts to provide ASL interpreters, often without being prompted to do so. These efforts, she believes, are crucial toward empowering the deaf community—and making the world, overall, a better place. “I strongly believe that making music accessible at the very inception of any event or concert truly uplifts humanity and creates a vibrational shift in our hearts and minds,” she says. “Music is a culture and it doesn’t discriminate—it brings people together.”
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