Puppetry

I have always loved and made puppets since I was a a small child, and in high school, I began making puppets for stop motion animation projects I would craft together under a table in my childhood home. I began attending the RISD continueing education program to further my studies, deep diving on miniatures, developing my first narrative stop motion short, and learning puppetry through an animator's lense. I wanted to push further, and see what I could do with puppets in my community.

In the Studio for Interrelated Media (SIM) undergraduate program at Massart, I began working with Freddie Thomas and several other students on Sunnyside Manor, a show chronicling the daily dramas of the retired puppets stars from children's shows of old. While still in lockdown and remote leanring conditions, I collaborated with over 20 other students in the animation department to create a stop motion animated film. None of us ever met in person or had access to any on campus animation studio during this process, grabbing what we could find and making it work.

I wanted to develop my puppet making skills further, and had to look no further than professor Chuck Stigliano's class.Over 15 weeks I assisted with and built as many puppets as I possibly could, including a 10 foot snake, a giant mantis, a king crab, an 8 legged newscaster, and a certain carnivorous plant most puppet people know and love, Audrey II.

After this class, I couldn't get the plant out of my mind. I became transfixed on the movie, and enlisted the help of Megan Ross in developing a shadow cast, audience interactive, and live puppeteered production of Little Shop of Horrors.

I went on to TA the puppetmaking class at MassArt when it was brought back by Reid McPhearson, sharing the joy for puppetry with others was a central theme through my time at Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Megan and myself lead, facilitated, and designed multiple workshops for puppetry in the SIM major, and puppets remain a big part of that community to this day.

Eventworks 22-23 presents Little Shop of Horrors: Live!

Building a puppet production team and a shadow cast from the ground up, Little Shop took the big screen by storm once again at MassArt in Fall 2022. Produced by Megan Ross and myself, Little Shop was a night of growing Aundrey II puppets, noisemakers, streamers, audience participation, and a desperate plea that 'Whatever they offer you, don't feed the plants'!

Puppetmaking Class 2024 - Assistant Teaching

Following Chuck Stigliano's retirement, he reccomended me to professor Reid McPhearson to TA his well known Puppetmaking class. I was overjoyed to come back and share the fun of puppetmaking with a new group of students, and make a few new puppets myself.