Jaehn Clare

Jaehn (pronounced "Jane") Clare is a professional theatre artist, and a woman with a disability.

She began her career in theatre at the age of 16, recruited by her mother to audition for the local community theater in Rapid City, South Dakota. Jaehn was promptly bitten by the "theatre bug" and has been pursuing her dream of working in the theater professionally ever since.

In 1980, Jaehn fell 27 feet from the top of a ladder leading up to the lighting grid, while working on a university theatre production of Samuel Beckett's play "Endgame." She sustained a T-12 incomplete compression fracture, dramatically and permanently altering her life. Jaehn uses a manual wheelchair to get around, and much of her work reflects her perspective of life on wheels.