Oscar-winning actress Marlee Matlin was recently announced as one of this year’s Sundance Film Festival jury members. According to Variety, she joins playwright Jeremy O. Harris (Slave Play) and writer-director Eliza Hittman (Never Rarely Sometimes Always) as the jurors for the U.S. Dramatic Competition program. There will be 16 jurors in total, each of whom, like Matlin et al., will be tasked with assessing the awards potential for the films within their respective programs. Per Sundance’s press release, winners will be announced in an intimate ceremony on Friday, January 27.
“It’s going to be fun,” Matlin said in our interview ahead of the festival, “because, as an artist, as an actor, as someone who has a passion for film and television, I have my own unique perspective.” Indeed, Matlin made history in 1987 by becoming the youngest performer to win the Academy Award for Best Actress. She was also the first-ever deaf actor to win an Oscar, that is, until her CODA co-star Troy Kotsur nabbed his Best Supporting Actor trophy just last year.
On top of her work on the screen, Matlin has also been a staunch advocate for the deaf community when it comes to authentic representation and accessibility. In a 2021 interview with The Guardian, she details how she almost quit CODA after learning that early financial backers of the film wanted to cast big-name, hearing actors to play the two major deaf characters. Matlin has also fought for decades for better access to closed captioning, eventually working with the National Association of the Deaf in the early-2010s to send Congress a letter mandating closed captioning on streaming sites.
