Internationally known Artist Conducts Residency at Eleanor Roosevelt High School

Mike Lamitola
Mike Lamitola, the Artistic Director for the National Theatre of the Deaf and a Quest Affiliate Artist, will conduct a one-month residency at Eleanor Roosevelt High School in Greenbelt, Maryland. Mr. Lamitola will teach acting and creative sign language classes twice a week during the month of February to approximately 180 teenagers. Roosevelt sign language, theatre, and deaf and hard of hearing students will participate in the residency.

Mr. Lamitola is the Artistic Director of the National Theatre of the Deaf. He has performed and conducted theatre workshops over the past 25 years and worked with many foreign Deaf theater companies such as Sena Y Verbo in Mexico, Tsyt Teater in Sweden, The Action Players in India, as well as other countries such as Iceland, China, and South Africa. He has appeared on a number of television programs and served as a faculty member for Gallaudet University’s Young Scholars Program.

Quest: arts for everyone is a Lanham, Maryland based arts and arts education company committed to using the arts to promote understanding among all peoples, to promote excellence in schools and in the work place, and to enable people who have been marginalized to achieve their full potential. Quest also provides professional training and consultation to educators, administrators, and parents who are interested in using the arts to promote excellence in their schools.

Meeting with 6 different classes twice a week during the month of February, Mr. Lamitola will use acting, movement, and gestural games and exercises to encourage the students to develop their visual communication skills. Quest is committed to creating, producing, and presenting theatre that emanates from a visual base and that also fully integrates deaf, hard of hearing, and hearing people into the casts and production staffs.

During his stay in the Washington Metropolitan area, Mr. Lamitola, who is deaf, will direct Quest’s production of The water falls. Written by deaf playwright and Quest Affiliate Artist, Willy Conley, the play explores a young deaf man’s confusion over the lost of his hearing grandfather. Mr. Conley lives in Ellicott City, Maryland and is a faculty member of Gallaudet University’s Theatre Arts Department. Students participating in Mr. Lamitola’s classes will attend a performance of The water falls. at the conclusion of the residency.

Mr. Lamitola’s residency is sponsored by grants from the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation’s Visiting Artists’ Program and the United States Department of Education. For more information about Quest, contact Tim McCarty at info@quest4arts.org or (301) 552-1703.