Alison O’Daniel: Are You Listening?

Since March 2024 and through June 2025, the Walker has hosted artist Alison O’Daniel for a cinema residency to consider the question: What does a d/Deaf cinema sound like? As a d/Deaf/hard of hearing artist, O’Daniel moves across film, sculpture, and performance to investigate how we hear, experience, and understand sound.

Spanning multiple engagements over the residency period, beginning with her debut feature film The Tuba Thieves, O’Daniel’s residency activates the Walker Cinema as a space to think about film and its relationship to d/Deafness and accessibility.

In spring 2024, her first residency engagements included screenings of The Tuba Thieves, aalong with an artist-curated program of films made by hearing filmmakers that prominently feature d/Deaf actors and characters in their storylines. For her final residency program, a pair of screenings extends from O’Daniel’s current research into sound as a weapon or as a mechanism of control. The first screening presents A Disaster, a working document toward O’Daniel’s new feature film, which considers these themes via appropriated soundtracks to disaster movies. As a complement, O’Daniel will introduce a screening of Peter Weir’s 1977 film The Last Wave, inviting audiences to experience one of the artist’s favorite disaster films while we reconsider how we see and hear disaster in film.