Anna Mindess, M.A.

Anna Mindess has worked as an American Sign Language Interpreter for more than 25 years in business, medical, educational, and legal settings. While pursing her graduate degree at San Francisco State University, she discovered the field of intercultural communication and realized that it provided the perfect template to explain the cultural misunderstandings she observed daily between her deaf and hearing clients. She is the author of the ground-breaking text Reading Between the Signs (Intercultural Press, 1999), which was the first to describe deaf culture from a multicultural perspective. Her book is widely used in interpreter training programs worldwide.

Anna has presented workshops all over the U.S. and Europe and has been a featured speaker at several international conferences. Her articles have appeared in American, French, and German publications. Anna, and her Cultural Detective collaborator, Thomas Holcomb, are also co-producers of a popular video/DVD, entitled See What I Mean: Differences between Deaf and Hearing Cultures, whose goal is to sensitize viewers about cultural contrasts in an educational yet entertaining manner.

Co-author of Cultural Detective Deaf Culture