John Bell is a puppeteer who has a Ph.D. degree with a dissertation on the rediscovery of performing objects on European stages from the 1890s to the 1930s. He is based in New England, Massachusetts and is at the head of direction for the Ballard Institute & Museum of Puppetry.
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He started performing as a puppeteer with the Bread and Puppet Theater, and as a member of that company for over a dozen years learned about the global breadth of puppetry. Recognized as one of the preeminent historians of puppet theater in the US, he performs, directs, and otherwise collaborates with Great Small Works, a Brooklyn-based theater collective. He is the author of Strings, Hands, Shadows: A Modern Puppet History (Detroit Institute of Art), and edited Puppets, Masks, and Performing Objects (MIT Press). His newest book, American Puppet Modernism, a study of US confrontations with puppet and object theater over the past 150 years, will be published by Palgrave-Macmillan in July 2008.
While studying for his Ph.D. in theater history at Columbia University he began to create shows with the group of friends who became Great Small Works. He conceived and directed the Great Small Works production A Mammal’s Notebook: The Erik Satie Cabaret, and with his wife Trudi Cohen and son Isaac Bell has created various Great Small Works projects in Boston, where the family lives. He is the author of Strings, Hands, Shadows: A Modern Puppet History, and edited Puppets, Masks, and Performing Objects; a forthcoming book project is American Puppet Modernism. He is recognized internationally as an expert on the history of puppet theater.
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FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/GreatSmallWorks/ INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/john.bell.puppeteer/ WEBSITE: https://greatsmallworks.org/ TWITTER: https://twitter.com/greatsmallworks
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