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Tabitha Jacques hopes the three-day festival helps bring the community together and deepens appreciation for deaf culture.

The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) has approved a Grants for Arts Projects for $25,000 to Tabitha Jacques, ’06, Director of Placemaking. The award will go toward supporting the Deaf Way Film Festival, slated to take place this October. Jacques, the lead representative from Gallaudet, will organize logistics and contributions from the university. 

Prior to joining Gallaudet, Jacques directed the Joseph F. and Helen C. Dyer Arts Center at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf, Rochester Institute of Technology; and coordinated special projects for the National Postal Museum at the Smithsonian Institution. 

Jacques was selected as a 2018 Forty Under 40 honoree by the Rochester Business Journal and received the Outstanding Young Alumnus Award from Gallaudet’s Alumni Association in 2019.

NEA funding will go toward the Deaf Way Film Festival, a three-day event that will showcase films, host panels and workshops, and provide space for roundtable discussions of deaf people in the film industry. 

Two women's headshots with one stacked on top of the other.
Film industry veterans MJ Kiego (top) and Andrea Passafiume (bottom) are co-chairing the festival with Jacques.

Deaf people from around the world have limited opportunities to gather in one place for a period of time and to invest in meaningful and frank discussions about their experiences in the film industry, how they can break barriers within the industry, how they can provide support to each other, and to exchange ideas and possible partnerships. The Deaf Way Film Festival aims to create a space where deaf filmmakers and deaf professionals in the industry can participate in structured and unstructured discussions to do just this. 

Jacques explains the grant “will help Gallaudet University bring Deaf Way to the campus on a more regular basis, bringing the community together to deepen their appreciation for deaf culture.”

Jacques chairs the film festival in partnership with two deaf/hard-of-hearing individuals who are veterans of the film industry: MJ Kiego, a deaf filmmaker who founded and hosted the Deaf Film Festival in Austin, Texas, and Andrea Passafiume, an experienced hard-of-hearing film programmer who has worked with the Tribeca and Sundance film festivals. 

The film festival will feature captioned films by deaf filmmakers, or films with at least two deaf people involved in the film production, whether they are members of the cast or of the film crew. Filmmakers will submit their works through the FilmFreeWay platform and will be screened by Kiego, Passafiume, and other deaf committee members from the film industry.

This Grants for Arts Projects grant is administered by the National Endowment for the Arts with a project period of January – December 2025. The Deaf Way Film Festival will take place from October 16-19, 2025.

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