Nyle DiMarco: A Voice for Deaf Culture

In 2015, the U.S. modeling competition “America’s Next Top Model” crowned its first-ever deaf winner: Nyle DiMarco. What is interesting is that the production team had reached out to him after seeing photos on his social media, unaware at the time that he was deaf. 

Born in Queens, New York, in 1989, Nyle grew up in Maryland with American Sign Language (ASL) as his native language. Later, he attended the Maryland School for the Deaf and also earned a mathematics degree from Gallaudet University in 2013.

In 2016, he won Season 22 of “Dancing with the Stars” alongside professional dancer Peta Murgatroyd, challenging the common prejudice that Deaf people cannot do music.

He continued to expand his activities thereafter. He established the Nyle DiMarco Foundation in 2016 to support deaf children and their families, and served as an executive producer for the Netflix series “Deaf U” in 2020 and the short documentary “Audible” in 2021.

Furthermore, in 2023, he published his memoir, “Deaf Utopia,” and in 2025, he directed “Deaf President Now!”, a documentary about the 1988 Gallaudet student protests.

Nyle describes himself not as a "person with a disability," but rather as someone with a language and a culture of his own. Indeed, whenever he appears on television, many people are introduced to ASL for the first time and inspired by him.