About
Janna Sweenie has taught American Sign Language at New York University for more than thirty-five years. Since 1990 she has taught ASL Levels 1 through 4, in the Deafness Rehabilitation Program and in the Steinhardt School's Department of Applied Psychology, where she remains on the faculty today. In 2014 she created the ASL Level 5 curriculum and taught its first class in 2015, making NYU the first major American university with an ASL program to offer Level 5 instruction, and she has taught every section of it since. She was Program Coordinator of the ASL program from 2017 to 2020, Interim Director in 2017, and a two-time recipient of the Applied Psychology Department's award for excellence in administration. In 2023 she became the first Deaf instructor to create and teach tutorials at NYU Gallatin, offering Black Sign Language and Deafness in Performance in a single semester.
Her books have carried ASL instruction far beyond the university, from Hand Jive (Barnes & Noble, 2006) and Picture Yourself Learning American Sign Language (Cengage, 2008) to the seven-volume Hardcore ASL curriculum and the three-volume ASL Linguistics for Practitioners series published in 2026: Arm Angles in American Sign Language, Depicting Space, and Beyond the Hands, written for working signers, interpreters, and advanced students. With David Boles she is co-author of Back to Willowbrook: The Slow Winning and Fast Losing of Disability Rights in America (2026), the history of American disability rights won and reversed, with her own testimony running through it, beginning at a kindergarten roll call at the Iowa School for the Deaf in Council Bluffs, Iowa.
Beyond the campus, she co-founded the ASL Opera Project (ASL-Opera.com) in 2003, bringing sign language interpreted performance to opera stages worldwide. She has interpreted on Broadway, including 42nd Street and Flower Drum Song, advised interpreter casts through the Theatre Development Fund's Interpreting for the Theatre program at Juilliard, and signed Cyndi Lauper's set at the 1998 Heritage of Pride Rally in Bryant Park. Since 2002 she has been a vocational rehabilitation counselor for New York State's Deaf Services Unit in Queens, following more than a decade of founding and leading programs for Deaf, Deaf-Blind, and Hard of Hearing New Yorkers at the New York Society for the Deaf, including at Tanya Towers. Educated at ISD, she was the first Deaf graduate of CUNY Lehman College in Psychology, holds a Master of Arts in Deafness Rehabilitation from NYU, and is rated Superior Plus on the Sign Communication Proficiency Interview. Generations of NYU students made their first signs in her classroom.
