Gael Hannan is a writer, actor and public speaker who grew up with a progressive hearing loss that is now severe-to-profound.

Although she was diagnosed at age three with a sensorineural loss, Gael’s specialists told her parents that a hearing aid would not help her. In retrospect, this unfortunate advice was most likely due to the fact that, at that time, medical knowledge of sensory hearing loss still had many gaps. Whatever the reason, at the age of 20 she switched doctors, got a hearing aid and life changed.

Fast forward to age 40. Expecting her first child, Gael’s hearing loss suddenly took on a new urgency. What if she couldn’t hear her child crying in the night? What if she couldn’t hear the baby burp – would it blow up? Who tells you these things?

For the first time, and for answers that were beyond her own experience, Gael reached out to others with hearing loss. When she contacted a hearing organization, life changed, again. With one baby step, and with one baby, she entered the world of hearing loss advocacy and activism. Hearing loss is now a passion and a career.

At the 1995 Canadian Hard of Hearing Association conference, Gael met other people with hearing loss and realized that many had difficulty expressing how their disability affected them. Gael approached her close friend Dalene Flannigan, a fellow actor and a brilliant writer, to help her develop a one-woman play about hearing loss and its impact on a person’s life. Gael dragged Dalene, a hearing person, to meetings with groups and individuals, in living rooms, hotels and hospitals, and gave her a truckload of books to read. But Dalene’s best source of information was Gael herself. They are both award-winning community theatre actors, performing in The Odd Couple (Female Version) and Steel Magnolias, and working with an actor with hearing loss gave Dalene a keen insight. The result was a dynamic one-woman show that looks at hearing loss from the point of view of adults, children, service providers, men, women.

From its very first performance, Unheard Voices has inspired a passionate response, from audiences that include hard of hearing, deaf and ‘hearing’ people. As one young Newfoundlander said after seeing the show, “you walked through my life”. Since 1999, Gael has performed Unheard Voices to thousands of people around North America and in New Zealand.

Her repertoire has expanded to include other monologues, spoken poems and rap songs, in a show now called Ear Rage! Gael also presents a number of informational workshops for both consumer audiences and the business world. She is regularly invited to deliver her and performances that raise the bar on awareness of hearing loss issues.

Gael is a Director on the national board of the Canadian Hard of Hearing Association (CHHA). She is a speechreading instructor and volunteers for many hearing-related programs.

Gael is a key developer of The Hearing Foundation of Canada’s Sound Sense hearing awareness program which is being rolled out to elementary students across Canada, and in 2002 she created a national awareness campaign on infant hearing screening for the same organization. Her articles and reviews have appeared in magazines such as Hearing Health, Vibes and Abilities. Gael also wrote employment-related manuals for both the Canadian Hard of Hearing Association and The Canadian Hearing Society.

She has received several awards for her work and has recently been named as the 2007 recipient of the Consumer Advocacy Award by the Canadian Association of Speech Language Pathologists and Audiologists. She has received the CHHA Ontario Frank I. Algar Award and was the first recipient of CHHA’s Lynn Wheadon Education Award.

Gael lives in Toronto with her husband Doug and their son Joel.