I am a puppeteer and teaching artist based in Rhode Island.

 

As a child, I was petrified of puppets, especially marionettes and those glove puppets featured in the Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood television show -  Lady Elaine and King Friday were prominent characters in numerous nightmares I still recall!  My perception of puppets shifted years later, though, when I studied Indonesian gamelan and wayang kulit (shadow puppets) in an ethnomusicology graduate class. I fell in love with the art form. So much, in fact, that I shared it with my music students. Soon they were performing their own Indonesian-inspired gamelan/shadow puppetry creations.

 

Since then, I have been fortunate to study other forms of puppetry with puppet artists from around the world, such as Bernd Ogrodnik, Galia Levy-Grad, Sandglass Theatre, and others. My work combines various puppet styles - shadow, tabletop, rod, crankie, toy theatre - and integrates my skills in music and visual art. I intentionally choose to use only recycled and sustainable materials in my puppet creations for environmental purposes.

 

I view the puppet as a tool for communication - an evocative means for visual storytelling. Additionally, I see puppetry not as mere children’s entertainment but as an art form - the art of bringing an inanimate object to life, to communicate through the heart. A puppet is made to perform; therefore, I teach puppet building in conjunction with puppet animation/performance. For me, the two aspects (building and performing) are critically integral to each other.

 

Puppetry combines all the other arts - the best of all worlds. I continue to grow and experiment in the world of puppetry, learning new styles and techniques, studying with puppet artists, and sharing with others. And yes, I still recoil from images of Lady Elaine and King Friday!

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