Brenda Schertz

Brenda’s main interests include American Sign Language (ASL) and Deaf studies, concentrating on Deaf culture art, film and theatre. She coordinated the annual Maine Deaf Film Festival for twelve years and most recently co-chaired the Deaf Rochester Film Festival in 2017. An independent study on Deaf View Image Art (De’VIA) led to a first ever documented and curated exhibit organized in 1993 which led to successive exhibits in Boston and Oakland. These exhibits presented the Deaf experience through art and film. With the support of Harlan Lane and Northeastern University, Brenda organized a year-long, seven-city National Touring Exhibit of Deaf Culture Art in 1999.  In 2018, she curated the exhibition Beyond Form: Non-Objective Art by Deaf Artists for the Dyer Arts Center at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf.

Brenda’s other interests include Translation and Deaf Interpreting. She has taught courses related to translation, focusing on ASL to English and English to ASL, showing how translation theories can be applied to the process. She offers seminars related to Deaf interpreting, a process in which a specialist deaf interpreter takes a spoken message that has been interpreted into ASL, and interprets it into a form that is fully comprehensible to a consumer.