Terry Galloway is a writer, director and performer for stage, radio, video and film. She started her long, eclectic career in theater arts in 1968 after the University of Texas at Austin’s Drama Department denied her admittance to its acting program. Before her cochlear implant in 2010, Galloway was a deaf lip reader with a lateral lisp. In 1969 she became affiliated with UT’s Shakespeare at Winedale Summer Theater Festival, first as a student, then from 1973-1976 as a Research Associate/Assistant Director, making a reputation for herself as a cross-dressing performer of comic male roles in Shakespeare.
In August 1977, she became a founding member of Austin’s legendary Esther’s Follies, one of the longest-running musical comedy theaters in the Southwest. Until 1979, she was one of two head writers - writing, directing and performing hundreds of original scripts for Esther’s weekly cabarets. In 1979, while still working at Esther’s, she was hired by PBS’s Austin affiliate. KLRU, to perform the title role for Khan-du, a series targeted towards children with disabilities. In 1980 she became co-writer, and that year the series won five CPB awards for Excellence in Writing.
In June of 1983, while a Heckscher Fellow at Columbia University, she saw her first play Heart of a Dog produced at the American Place Theater after trial runs at W.O.W. and Limbo Lounge. She won that year’s Villager Downtown Theater Award for Outstanding Solo Performance. In August 1984 she was awarded a J. Frank Dobie Fellowship from the Texas Institute of Letters.
In 1986 she created a solo performance Out All Night & Lost My Shoes for and won two B.Iden Payne Awards for Best Script and Best Actress from the Austin Circle of Theaters. The L.A. Weekly in giving Out All Night its Performance Pick of the Week called it, “a searingly funny, unflinching glimpse of various states of alienation, ostracization, survival and triumph con chutzpah.” As a recipient of a PEW Development Grant in 1991, Galloway went on to write another solo show, Lardo Weeping. The NY post wrote, “Lardo drips with wit,” and the Village Voice called it “hilarious...and captivating.” In 1992, a year after the debut of Lardo Weeping, Galloway received a National Endowment for the Arts Grant in Theater.
From 1989 though 1990, she was a member of the P.S. 122 Field Trips performing excerpts for her solo work all over the world. The Toronto Globe and Mail (October 16,1990) called her work with the Trips, “a tour de force performance...studded with unexpected asides and glorious apostrophes to life, love and the great beyond.” In 1998 she tried her hand a radio commentary, and won three Public Radio New Directors Incorporated, Commentary Awards (Second Place in 1998, First Place in 2000 and 2001).
In 1986 she co-founded and became the Artistic Director of the Mickee Faust Club in Tallahassee Florida, a 25 year-old non-profit theater for the queer, disabled, minority community that teaches novices the art of writing, performing and producing original cabarets, radio shows and short comic videos. Under her guidance, Faust has generated over 600 original theater scripts, produced 49 hour long cabarets of original material, been awarded 24 national and regional grants (including two from the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation), produced 21 video shorts that have been featured in over 106 national and international film festivals and garnered over 31 awards of filmmaking excellence.
In 1991 as a Visiting Artist at the California Institute of the Arts, Galloway developed a writing and performing workshop called Actual Lives, a workshop she fine-tuned in the fall of 1998 as a Visiting Artist at the University of Texas, Austin. In August 2000, she co-founded Actual Lives Austin, an activist theater for adults with disabilities, which received the Austin Chronicle’s 2007 Best Theater Activism Award. In 2001, she was given the National Communication Association’s Leslie Irene Coger Award for Outstanding Performance. That same year the Kennedy Center awarded her a grant to write an instructional monograph about Actual Lives. From 2003-2006, she was the Artistic Director for $700,000.Federal Arts in Education Model Development Grant based on those Actual Lives workshops and administered by Florida State University.
In 2009, her memoir Mean Little deaf Queer, called by Dorothy Allison, “a damn fine piece of work that is unbelievably powerful, “ was published by Beacon Press and became a Lambda Award finalist, a winner of the Golden Crown award for non-fiction and garnered Galloway one of her three Florida Division of Cultural Affairs Individual Artist Awards–one for literature in 2010, and two, in 1990 and 1995, for theater.
Her solo show, You Are My Sunshine, a work-in-progress about her new post-cochlear life in the world of sound, premiered at Cornell University’s Resoundingly Queer Conference in April 2012.