Luane Davis Haggerty

contact: LuaneHaggerty.dh@gmail.com    585-820-7902

Luane Davis Haggerty, Ph.D. (Actor, Director, Educator, ASL interpreter), is a scholar and creative practitioner whose work bridges leadership, the arts, and access-centered practice. She holds a Ph.D. in Leadership and Change through the Arts and is a Pulitzer Prize–nominated playwright for Windows of the Soul (Drama, 2007). A former Principal Lecturer at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf at Rochester Institute of Technology, she taught and directed well over fifty performances always using her signature Del-Sign technique. A co-founder of IRT Theater in New York City, her work reflects a lifelong commitment to artistic rigor, inclusive practice, and the transformative power of creative leadership.

Awards for her direction which blend Deaf and hearing actors for over 20 years include:  “Emperor Jones “ which won the NYC Off Off Broadway Review Award, ”A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and  “Little Shop Of Horrors” which won Rochester CITY newspaper’s “Most Popular Local Theatrical Production” award. Her production for the National Technical Institute for the Deaf (NTID) “Fences” won the Kennedy Center College Theater Festival award for Excellence in Ensemble and three of the actors won nominations for the Irene Ryan acting award. She is the GEVA Theater Access Coordinator and She was recently featured as an actor in GEVA’s FONT productions of new works as well as in the Avant Guard production at IRT in New York’s Greenwich Village titled YOVOs. She is honored to have been the director of the first post Covid production of Rochester’s Shakespeare in the Park with “The Tempest”, acknowledged by the Broadway World Central New York category for innovative production. RIT awarded her with the Distinguished Public Service Award in 2021. She continues to work as a theater artist performing, directing and interpreting in Rochester and New York City.