Lauren Ridloff (née Teruel; born April 6, 1978) is a deaf American actress known for her roles as Connie in the TV series The Walking Dead and Makkari in the film Eternals. Her breakthrough role was in 2018 with her lead performance in the Broadway play Children of a Lesser God, for which she was nominated for several awards, including a Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play. She was subsequently cast in The Walking Dead as Connie in its ninth season that aired in late 2018. In Eternals, released in 2021, she played the deaf superhero Makkari.
Early life and education
Lauren Ridloff was born on April 6, 1978 in Chicago, Illinois in the United States. She was born deaf to hearing parents, a Mexican-American father and an African-American mother. Her father Hugo was a counselor at University of Illinois at Chicago. He was also a musician, and Ridloff's mother was an artist. Ridloff grew up in the Chicago community area of Hyde Park. Her parents thought their infant had a developmental delay, but by the time she was two years old, they learned that she was deaf. They learned sign language with her and enrolled her in Catholic school with hearing children. She performed well in school. When she was 13 years old, she stopped using her voice so people would stop judging her intelligence based on her vocal intelligibility. Following Catholic school, she attended the Model Secondary School for the Deaf in Washington, DC, where she was among deaf and hard-of-hearing peers. She began exploring the arts, starting with ceramics and becoming involved with drama. In a school production of The Wiz, she played Dorothy. She was also on the cheerleading team and became one of the first deaf American cheerleaders to compete internationally.
Ridloff chose to attend California State University, Northridge, a university with a large deaf and hard-of-hearing student population, because of its National Center on Deafness. She majored in English with an emphasis in creative writing, completing her degree in 2001. While in college, she joined a local deaf performing group and took up hip-hop dancing. After she graduated in May 2000, she began working at the NCOD, where she was involved in a program to improve post-secondary school education for deaf and hard-of-hearing students. Later in the year, she decided to compete in the National Association of the Deaf's Miss Deaf America competition, having been inspired by the competition she saw two years prior. She won the preliminary competition of Miss Deaf Illinois and ultimately won Miss Deaf America. She was the second consecutive CSUN graduate to win the crown, and she was also the first competitor of either African-American or Mexican-American descent to win the pageant. Her activities in competition included an ASL performance of the book The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein. After winning Miss Deaf America, she began a two-year stint of attending luncheons and graduation ceremonies as a spokesperson for NAD.
After graduating from CSUN, Ridloff went to Hunter College in New York to study education with the goal of becoming a children's author. After earning her Masters Degree in Education in 2005, She started teaching kindergarten and first grade at Public School 347 in Manhattan. She was also involved with deaf community theater and film work for friends. She married Douglas Ridloff, who she met at CSUN, in 2006, and they have two children, both boys and both deaf. After nine years of teaching, she left her teaching job to take care of the boys. The family lived in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, a neighborhood of New York, until they moved to Austin, Texas in 2022.
