Leslye Orr is a playwright, performer and teacher with an extensive background in theater education for children and adults. She is also well known for her workshops on the integration of people with disabilities, and was a speaker/specialist with the U.S. Department of State, for which she has toured her disability awareness play Hand in Hand through the American embassies in Latvia, Lithuania and Israel. Leslye is also a children’s book author and illustrator, and a sound-effects enthusiast featured on A Prairie Home Companion.

Leslye was a company member and voice coach at The Children’s Theatre Company for ten years. She was a member of Ballet of the Dolls, and has written scripts and performed with Illusion Theater, Jungle Theater Outreach Series, Dudley Riggs and The Arkansas Children’s Theater. Leslye was awarded a Jerome Fellowship and a Jones Commission through the Playwrights’ Center and a playwriting fellowship and a 2004 Artist Initiative grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board. Born legally blind, for the past thirty years Leslye has taught workshops internationally in which she upholds the possibilities of disabilities. From 2005-2023, she and her husband, theater artist Zaraawar Mistry, owned and operated Dreamland Arts, a 40-seat theater attached to their house in St. Paul.

Learn more about Leslye’s work as an Inclusion Advocate.