Model Nyle DiMarco and interpreter Grey Van Pelt. Nyle DiMarco
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Grey Van Pelt, 31, is the personal interpreter for deaf American model, actor, and activist Nyle DiMarco.
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Van Pelt has been traveling and working with DiMarco for 3 years, and says his favorite moments to interpret are fan interactions.
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This is what his job is like, as told to freelance writer Claire Turrell.
This as-told-to essay is based on a transcribed conversation with Tom Kerss, a Grey Van Pelt, a sign language interpreter, about his career. It has been edited for length and clarity.
When I was a kid, I loved the circus. I watched the Cirque Du Soleil film by Franco Dragone called “Alegria,” in which there’s a deaf clown who meets a girl and signs to her underneath the bleachers. I asked my mother what he was doing and she told me it was called sign language. She bought me a book about it, and then I found out there was a class I could take.
When I saw the way two people can come together with sign language, and the way it makes the space between a picture, I thought it was the most beautiful thing. In college, I studied American Sign Language (ASL) for interpreting. Three years after graduating, in August 2017, I founded my agency, Flamingo Interpreting, to bring together interpreters to work as a collective and book gigs in the corporate or entertainment world.
I first met Nyle DiMarco three years ago in New York, after his manager called my agency to book an interpreter. The first job I did with him was a business meeting in New York, the second was his TEDx Talk in Austria.
Grey Van Pelt (right), Nyle DiMarco, and a colleague at a UN conference in Portugal. Sami Housman
As Nyle comes from a multigenerational deaf family, he’s incredibly fluent. I joke that he signs like butter. He can easily move between ASL grammatical structure and English grammatical structure and also plays with sign in really interesting ways. He’s incredible at communicating and always makes sure I don’t trip up.
There are times when I have to go back and study Nyle a little bit. When we have an event about a certain project that he previously worked on, I’ll go through past interviews and refresh. He was the producer for the Netflix show ‘Deaf U’ and the movie ‘Audible’ and he runs the Nyle DiMarco Foundation, a nonprofit that supports the deaf community.