Leslye Orr is a playwright, performer and teacher with an extensive background in theater education for children and adults. She is also well known for her workshops on the integration of people with disabilities, and is a speaker/specialist through an appointment by the U.S. Department of State, for which she has toured her show Hand in Hand through the American embassies in Latvia, Lithuania and Israel. Leslye is also a children’s book author and illustrator, and a sound-effects enthusiast featured on A Prairie Home Companion.

Watch a short video of Leslye’s work as an Inclusion Advocate.

Leslye regularly performs and tours her original plays, What I Thought I Saw: Random Acts of Blindness, Hand In Hand, Women Who Drink, and Wisecracks from my Father. She also performs The Stuffed Animal Show, an interactive play for young children and their stuffed animals, as well as Characters, Sound Effects and Theater Games an acting workshop she presents at schools and libraries. Leslye is the author and illustrator of The People on the Corner, a children’s book about how kids of all abilities can be included in fun and games.

Leslye was a company member and voice coach at The Children’s Theatre Company for ten years. She was a member of Ballet of the Dolls, and has written scripts and performed with Illusion Theater, Jungle Theater Outreach Series, Dudley Riggs and The Arkansas Children’s Theater. Leslye was awarded a Jerome Fellowship and a Jones Commission through the Playwrights’ Center and a playwriting fellowship and a 2004 Artist Initiative grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board. Born legally blind, for the past thirty years Leslye has taught workshops internationally in which she upholds the possibilities of disabilities. She and her husband, theater artist Zaraawar Mistry, own and operate Dreamland Arts.