Talk

Brendan Gramer

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Brendan Gramer was born profoundly deaf in Chicago to a hearing family. He grew up using oral communication, and later in life, transformed himself from deaf to Deaf and is bilingual using ASL and English.

With a lifelong passion for the visual arts, cartoons, and comic books, he attended Marquette University where his studies focused on Advertising & Marketing. Outside the classroom, he got involved with the student newspaper and magazine as an Editorial Cartoonist, Art Director and Advertising Design Director at different times which built the foundation for his career after college.

After graduation and a year as an Art Director in advertising, he saw the Internet become more popular and with the emergence of the World Wide Web, switched careers taking his design skill sets and applying it to Web Design. Brendan worked for over a decade organizing information and designing websites for clients of internet consulting & marketing firms then landed at Orbitz, where he designed products and services for the website. Brendan is now a Senior User Experience (UX) Designer at Amazon in Consumer Payments, where he designs how customers pay on Amazon.

Now living in Seattle with his Deaf wife, Deaf sons, and 2 dogs, Brendan uses his life experience, self-advocacy, and unique perspective today to help make the world a more inclusive place for the Deaf community.

Seattle, WA May 6, 2017
How Self-Advocacy can help create a richer, more inclusive life experience

People who self-advocate work to push for change which can also benefit others around them. Advocacy isn’t always an easy process and it can be long and slow, and sometimes not arrive at the desired result. It takes confidence, bravery and humility of the individual to acknowledge their need for access and ask for accommodations, to understand what the law allows, and to use positive advocacy to create inclusive allies along the way.

Through his personal experience of being deaf and Deaf, Brendan's talk discusses why self-advocacy is important and what to consider when advocating to enrich your environment.