Austin P. McKenzie

Austin P. McKenzie is an American actor and singer from Mesa, Arizona, who studied American Sign Language and vocal performance at Columbia College Chicago. Soon after graduating in 2014, he sent an audition tape to Deaf West Theatre hoping to work as an interpreter on its ASL-inclusive production of Spring Awakening, but the company asked him to try out for the lead, the radical Melchior Gabor, and he won the part. That Los Angeles run was his professional theater debut, and he kept the role when the show moved to the Wallis Annenberg Center and then to Broadway, where he made his Broadway debut in September 2015. Critics praised the cast, and McKenzie earned an Ovation Award nomination for Best Leading Actor in a Musical. He also starred as Howie in the film Speech & Debate (2017) and played the young activist Cleve Jones in the miniseries When We Rise.