Kaitlyn Mielke, the current Miss Deaf Minnesota appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show this week. Katie grew up as a Deaf child exposed to a hearing world when she was just five years old. This is when she received her first cochlear implant. Though hearing bilaterally now wearing two cochlear implants, Katie uses ASL (American Sign Language) as her primary mode of communication.
Miss Mielke can be found advocating for hearing impaired people in her efforts to attain quality closed captioning for film and videos. She is a moderator for Deaf Village, an online blog aggregator for hearing loss related topics, including blogs about hearing impaired children. She also advocates for interpreted theatre being a fan of performing arts. After all, her musical passion is actually the reason she was chosen to be on the Oprah show.
As Miss Mielke explained on Oprah, her first musical experience was listening to The Sound of Music. She stated that she was overwhelmed, feeling as if a full orchestra had entered her head after she spent her first five years of life in silence. The Oprah episode was a reunion episode of The Sound of Music cast after performing the musical film 45 years ago. Congratulations to Kaitlyn for a job well done. She is truly an inspiration and fantastic role model.
If you would like to receive alerts when new articles are published, click subscribe above or follow me on Facebook.
Comments