Wendy Sandler

Wendy Sandler was born in 1949 in Cleveland

Sandler was born in 1949 in Cleveland, Ohio. She first studied theater acting. She moved to Israel, volunteered for a year at Kibbutz Ein HaMifratz, and then worked as an assistant to an assistant director at the Habima Theatre in Tel Aviv.

She later turned to academia and studied linguistics at Georgetown University in Washington. There she first met sign language while teaching Hebrew at Gallaudet University, where all students are deaf. She earned her PhD from the University of Texas at Austin in 1987, with a dissertation on American Sign Language.

Sandler joined the University of Haifa, where she became a professor of linguistics and founded the Sign Language Research Lab. Her work showed that facial expressions in sign language work like intonation in spoken languages. With colleagues she studied Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language, a new language that arose in a Bedouin community in the Negev.

From 2014 she led the ERC project The Grammar of the Body. As part of it she founded the sign language theater Aviso with director Ati Citron. She lives in Haifa and is married to Yoav Moriah, a mathematics professor at the Technion.