Deborah B. Lewis
President
Deborah B. Lewis has been an audio describer and trainer since 1987 when she was trained through the Ohio Theatre Alliance. She brought Audio Description to the state of Georgia through her work as the Executive Director of Special Audiences whose mission was to make the arts accessible to people with disabilities. She described the premiere audio description season of 16 plays for the Alliance and Academy Theatres including “Steel Magnolias,” “Amadeus,” “A Christmas Carol,” and “Peter Pan.” She then went on to train over 40 audio describers in Georgia and enroll 50 theatres, museums and cultural institutions including the Alliance Theatre, Theatre in the Square, Seven Stages, Horizon Theatre, High Museum, Atlanta Ballet, and Atlanta History Center. During the Olympics in Atlanta, she facilitated the audio description program for all of the Cultural Olympiad and Cultural Paralympiad events from 1992 through 1996.
Upon moving to Los Angeles in 1997 she established audio description services through Audio Description Los Angeles (ADLA) and the Los Angeles Radio Reading Service. After training describers for the Tournament of Roses Parade, ADLA soon added nine theatres spread through southern California and cultural organizations including the Aquarium of the Pacific.
Deborah has trained describers for theatres and cultural institutions across the US and Canada as well as the LEAD conference through the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
In 2010 she joined forces with Audio Description Solutions as a Senior Writer and in 2016 became the President when Bill Patterson retired. Through her work with ADS, she created audio description scripts for exhibits and displays in seventeen national parks including the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island and the new Liberty Museum. She is a founding member of the Leadership Exchange in Arts and Disabilities through the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the California Audio Describers Alliance and the national Audio Description Coalition. She currently serves on the Audio Description Subject Matter Expert Committee.
We’re so grateful to have Audio Description Solutions as a partner in our efforts to make theatre accessible to everyone. Deb is wonderful to work with!
—Katie Hotchkiss, Director of Operations, Broadway in Hollywood
