Deaf Professional Arts Network

D-PAN, The Deaf Professional Artists Network, is a 501(c)(3) national nonprofit organization based in Detroit, Michigan, founded by Sean Forbes and Joel Martin. D-PAN creates music videos featuring deaf and hard-of-hearing performers. D-PAN is dedicated to promoting professional development and access to the entertainment, visual and media arts fields for individuals who are deaf or hard of hearing. Their first video for "Where'd You Go" by Fort Minor, with Sean Forbes and Rosina Switras, got hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube. On Oct. 28th, 2011 D-PAN released their first new ASL music video in a couple years, 'We're Going to be Friends' by the White Stripes. After an announcement on the White Stripes Facebook page, the video went viral, making the front page of reddit, appearing on CBS news and was briefly shown and mentioned on 'The Today Show' on November 3, 2011.

The D-PAN staff consists of Joel Martin (Co-Founder), Scott Guy (Executive Director), Sean Forbes (Co-Founder & Chief Creative Officer), Adrean Mangiardi (Director of Film) & Mark Levin (Tour, Merchandise & Online Promotions Manager).

The D-PAN DVD compilation called "It's Everybody's Music, volume 1" sold more than 5000 copies. It includes:

  • John Mayer's "Waiting on the World to Change"
  • Christina Aguilera's "Beautiful"
  • Eminem's "Lose Yourself" performed by Sponge
  • Mini - Documentary "Signing Songs: Making of D-PAN Music Videos"
  • And more music videos from community performers.

D-PAN also produced a DVD titled 'Wee Hands Vol.1'.

Famous quotes containing the words deaf, professional, arts and/or network:

    and the deaf soul
    struggles, strains forward, to lip-read what it needs:
    and something is said, quickly,
    in words of cloud-shadows moving and
    the unmoving turn of the road, something
    not quite caught ...
    Denise Levertov (b. 1923)

    I sometimes wonder whether, in the still, sleepless hours of the night, the consciences of ... professional gossips do not stalk them. I myself believe in a final reckoning, when we shall be held accountable for our misdeeds. Do they? If so, they have cause to worry over many scoops that brought them a day’s dubious laurels and perhaps destroyed someone’s peace forever.
    Mary Pickford (1893–1979)

    These arts open great gates of a future, promising to make the world plastic and to lift human life out of its beggary to a god- like ease and power.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    How have I been able to live so long outside Nature without identifying myself with it? Everything lives, moves, everything corresponds; the magnetic rays, emanating either from myself or from others, cross the limitless chain of created things unimpeded; it is a transparent network that covers the world, and its slender threads communicate themselves by degrees to the planets and stars. Captive now upon earth, I commune with the chorus of the stars who share in my joys and sorrows.
    Gérard De Nerval (1808–1855)