“Thanks to this program, I see a bright professional future. That’s something that I will always hold and keep in mind. And it’s something that I want others to experience. I came here with just a little knowledge of puppetry, but now, I can’t look at things in my surroundings in the same way that I was looking at things two years ago – because I see a potential puppet everywhere!” – Dr. Noemí Maldonado-Cardenales, Puppet Arts Online Graduate Certificate, Graduate Spring 2024

Why Not? Following Her Dream

Dr. Noemí Maldonado-Cardenales has a great love for the magic of puppetry. Throughout her educational and teaching journey, she has been inspired to learn everything she could. When she serendipitously discovered the Puppet Arts Online Graduate Certificate program at the University of Connecticut (UConn), it felt like an impossible dream come true. Recently graduating from the program, Noemí now feels connected to a vibrant puppet arts community. She has already begun publishing academic articles that explore a variety of topics in puppetry and masks, and she is excited to integrate her new knowledge and skills into creating course offerings to inspire her students majoring in engineering and agriculture.

“Puppets and masks are following me!”

Noemí has a long history of feeling drawn to the magic of puppetry. She was first exposed to creating puppets in 1990 as an undergrad student pursuing a BA in Drama at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras. “One of the last courses I had to take for the teacher’s college preparation was a course that included a lot of theater topics. I always remember this professor with so much love and admiration. He taught us the basics of puppetry. So, I made a lot of puppets back then. He taught us to use recycled materials to make puppets and to teach kids. As part of the class, I had the chance to go to an elementary school and a junior high school with some basics. It was my last class, and I was like, ‘Oh my god, what am I going to do after this?’”

Several years later, Noemí relocated to Ontario, Canada to pursue her M.Ed. in TESL Curriculum Studies at Brock University. This was when she next encountered her love for puppets. “That first year, I studied drama and education courses. There was a professor who was teaching with masks. And I’m like, ‘Okay, puppets and masks are following me.’ But I couldn’t take the course because I had just entered the Master’s in Education, and as part of my internship, they sent me to Thailand. That was a year of wonders.”

What is the relationship between Thailand and puppetry? Noemí exclaims, “You can’t imagine! I went there to teach English and Spanish. Then my students brought me to places that I sometimes think I dreamed. They were the ones who introduced me to puppetry again. Not just any kind of puppetry: Asian puppetry. I had a chance to see shows: Indonesian shows, Thai shows, and more. I bought a few puppets, and I was always taking pictures of all the arrangements they did with puppets. And I’m like, ‘Oh god, this is following me.’ But I returned to Canada, completed the Master’s, and started teaching there. Then I wanted to pursue a PhD, so I crossed the border and completed a PhD in Romance Languages, Literature, and Linguistics at State University of New York (SUNY) in Buffalo. In my dissertation, I tried to make a connection between theater and the evolution of Puerto Rican Spanish.”

Teaching about puppets

When she returned home to Puerto Rico, Noemí had three job offers and accepted the one at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez. “I’ve been there since 2008. I’m a full professor, and I teach Western civilization and theater courses: acting, directing, production, and history of theater. Something was nudging me: Why don’t I teach something related to puppetry? Well, I felt that I lacked a strong background on puppetry. So, I started to do research on my own. Then I started to create special topic courses. The first one was shadow puppetry, and I created another one on the history of masks. Then theater for children.”

Puppets continued to follow Noemí wherever she went. “On two occasions during my summer vacations, I had the privilege to attend the Avignon Theater Festival in France. Most of my days were spent on puppetry plays. I was the only adult who was not a parent. I was sitting in the front row with the kids: I was another kid there. I kept teaching and buying puppetry books on all my trips. It was something that I was doing unconsciously, I think. It was a way of preparing myself for something that I didn’t have a clue was even possible and could be real.”

Serendipitously discovering the program

While there is no BA in theater on her campus, Noemí works with the teacher’s preparation program when a students want to do a practicum in theater. One of Noemí’s students was recruited to teach elementary school in Connecticut. In 2022, after a year of teaching, that student decided to apply to the Fine Arts MA program at UConn and requested a letter of recommendation from Noemí. As Noemí says, “That’s how everything started.”

As she was preparing to write the recommendation letter, Noemí accidentally discovered UConn’s Puppet Arts Online Graduate Certificate program. “I saw the program she wanted to get into, but in that little corner, I saw the word puppetry. I’m like, ‘Oh, let’s see.’ Then when I saw ‘online,’ my heart wanted to leave my chest and jump to UConn. I’m like, ‘Oh my god, just take it easy. There’s no way you can do this. There’s no way you will move. Even if it is online, be realistic. Stop dreaming.’ I prepared her letter, and that night I couldn’t sleep. The next day I was checking on the UConn website, and I saw all these puppets, and I saw the testimonials, and I said, ‘Ok, why not? They are not all professional puppeteers. They’re people who work in other fields. So, why not?’”

Summoning the courage to investigate, Noemí reached out to Donna Campbell, Enrollment Specialist, and then Paul Spirito, Director of the program. “Donna oriented me and gave me all the information I needed. Then she put me in contact with Paul. He just cleared up the sky. It was amazing. I will never forget that. Donna and Paul are the main doors. In one way or another, both of them just let me know that it wasn’t impossible, and I just needed to believe that it wasn’t. Every few words, I was like ‘Are you sure I can do this?’ And well, I did it.” Noemí  was granted a 3-credit per semester release time from teaching and began the 4-course, 12-credit program in fall 2022, recently graduating in spring 2024.

It’s THE program

While it was initially challenging for her to shift roles from professor to student again, Noemí says she was like a “fish in water” from that very first course. It was all that she imagined and more. “Those four courses are packed, especially the one on the history of puppetry around the world (World Puppet Theater - DRAM 5617). It’s everything you want to know. It’s not just the basics, that’s why it’s called Advanced Shadow Theater (DRAM 5613) or Advanced Materials Techniques (DRAM 5607), because it goes beyond what you would expect in a basic course. I was afraid in the beginning that when it says ‘advanced,’ it means that you need to have some background. And I’m like, ‘Ok, I didn’t study puppetry, but yeah, I have a background, because I’ve been teaching myself during these past many years.’”

Noemí continues, “It is a prestigious program because it didn’t start yesterday. It wasn’t a promise, but it was a guarantee I will learn the real thing. You can’t go wrong with a program that has lasted so many years. It has weight, validity. Maybe it’s not the only program, but it’s THE program.

Feeling present and connected online

The fact that the program was online was what made Noemí’s involvement from a distance possible. Yet, contrary to what many may expect, she says she felt a sense of connection and presence that was enabled by VoiceThread and the discussion forum on the HuskyCT/Blackboard online platform. “I never felt like I was in an online, asynchronous class. When I reached out, there was always someone via the discussion board, VoiceThread, or even the instructor. If you sent a message to Paul, in two seconds you got an answer back. If something is online, people have that mentality that it’s something you do on your own. VoiceThread is, if you use it in the right way, a present tool.” VoiceThread is a web interface tool for collaborating and sharing that allows students to upload images, documents, and videos, to which other students can add their voice, text, audio file, or video comments.

Building a feedback community

A highlight for Noemí was engaging collaboratively with her classmates in constructive feedback, which allowed her to broaden her perspective and refine her work. “With all the puppets and the things that I made through the program, the seed of the original idea was mine, but the whole product has a lot of people in there. Through feedback, you can see the way others see and incorporate that. I was able to get all the feedback, process it, and apply it to the piece I was working on. It was worth it. When you get that feedback and do what the person is suggesting, you make that person part of it. In that way, we were part of each other’s work. I can see myself in some of my classmates’ work, and they can see themselves in my work. If those classmates didn’t have the chance to see my work and give me feedback, I would have thought that everything was okay, and I would have ended up with the first thing that I made. Having that support and feedback made me feel like my work is never final. There’s always something to fix or to add or to take out. I was always grateful for the time that my classmates took to not only see my work through their eyes, but then see it through my eyes.”

According to Noemí, this level of engagement forged a thoughtful feedback community and the kind of connections that endure over time. “The program built a community. I think that bond is something that will last over time. It’s a door that you can always knock on and say, ‘Hey, look what I have done, or this is a project I have, what do you think about it?’ So, I know I have a community of people who will give me feedback in the most thoughtful way, because they know your work; you know their work. You know their strengths; they know your strengths. It’s something that I wouldn’t change.”

Inspiring faculty shared their secrets

Of the faculty, Noemí has abundant praise for all her instructors. “Faculty are very professional in their field, and very professional in the way they engage in creative conversations with us. They shared everything, even their secrets. In other places, people won’t share their secrets. You know, ‘This is something that I invented, and it’s mine.’ No. Here it is always this approach of ‘Let me show you what I do and see if it works for you.’”

Noemí continues, “It's the way they showed us it is not impossible. You may fail the first attempt, the second, the third, but you’ll make it. They were able to see where we were coming from in terms of our experience at the beginning of the course, and then where we were at the end of the course. Sometimes Paul said to me, ‘I see what you want us to see,’ but then he told me the way he would have seen it if he did not know what I wanted to do. That’s when he said, ‘You are developing your style.’ And I’m like, ‘What style is that?’” Reflectively, she adds, “We are leaving pieces of ourselves in the little puppets that we’re making.”

Expanding her community through writing

Throughout her time in the program, Noemí found many opportunities to stretch her academic writing skills in a new direction, while also expanding her community. In her first course, DRAM 5613 - Advanced Shadow Theater with Dr. Annie Rollins, Noemí had the opportunity to connect with Deborah Hunt, a mask-maker, puppeteer, and performance artist with over 50 years of experience. As Noemí explains, “Deborah Hunt has been living in Puerto Rico since 1990. I’ve heard about her and have her books, but I had never met her. My last presentation for the shadow puppetry course was an interview with Deborah. That was something that I will never forget. It was an amazing interview. Then I went to see one of her shows she was promoting about two or three months later, and I wrote something for one of the other classes about that show.”

While engaged in DRAM 5617 - World Puppet Theater, Dr. Paulette Richards encouraged Noemí to keep exploring and publishing articles. “Many people just think puppets are toys for kids and storytelling. Paulette inspired me to take puppetry beyond simple explanation, such as learning how to express what I see with puppetry to people outside the puppetry field. My last essay was about one of the festivities that we have here in Puerto Rico. They use coconut masks. My essay was about the mask as an object, but at the same time, the way in which four characters of the festivity were linked to the church back in 16^th or 17^th century. Today, the festivity is still on, but it has little to do with the church. That mask that 300 or 400 years ago represented something with the church now represents Puerto Rico’s resilience and subversion of roles. Paulette found it interesting, and she put me in contact with a few people. So, a publication might come out of that. Maybe this is the beginning of something else, because especially Paulette was very keen on motivating me to keep exploring different areas of that topic. We’re working on some articles together that are a product of that class.”

In her very last course, DRAM 5607 - Advanced Materials Techniques with Paul, Noemí again applied her writing finesse in writing an article that will soon be published. “Thanks to Paulette, I had the opportunity to write an essay for the Materials panel of the Chicago International Puppet Festival symposium. Since I was taking the course with Paul, it was something that validated all the things that I’ve learned in the course. It has been accepted for publication. Something that I haven’t been able to do through my university, I have done through this program. That is something that I will always value and remember. I loved that course.”

Putting art in technical minds

Looking forward, Noemí has high aspirations for how she will integrate what she has learned into her university’s course offerings so she can inspire a love of puppetry in her students. “I would like to revisit the special topics that I taught. I want them to be part of the catalogue of the humanities department within the theater courses. I’d like for as many students as possible to learn what I’ve learned. What I’m aiming to do is not easy, because it is one of the campuses of the University of Puerto Rico that specializes in engineering, science, and agriculture. Most of my theater students are students that are working on an engineer or agricultural BS. Well, I’m putting some art in those technical minds. Puppetry can be related with any of them. Engineering? Well, we’ll build puppets that needs some technicalities. Puppetry has been doing things since time immemorial. So, what can puppetry do now with all the things we are living through? Anything could be possible. That’s what I’m aiming for.”

Reflecting on her journey, Noemí adds, “Thanks to this program, I see a bright professional future. That’s something that I will always hold and keep in mind. And it’s something that I want others to experience. I came here with just a little knowledge of puppetry, but now, I can’t look at things in my surroundings in the same way that I was looking at things two years ago – because I see a potential puppet everywhere!”

“If you’ve always wanted to go further into puppetry, this is absolutely the program. It gives you context, history, current practices, community, performance skills. If you’ve always wanted to write a puppet show, and you never thought you could do it, do this course! Now I know that if I had to write a puppet show, I’d feel confident that I could not only write it, but I could look at with a critical lens to build the show to be the strongest that it can be.” And to everybody, regardless of interests, she adds, “If you get the urge to pick up a puppet, don’t resist!” – Susie Boeselt, Puppet Arts Online Graduate Certificate, Graduate Spring 2023

Bringing Imagination to Life

As a visual artist, Susie Boeselt takes her love of puppetry very seriously. Despite limited access to formal skills, she’s always made puppets. She loves her work as an illustrator and animator, but puppetry is the art form that brings her imagination to life. While taking an online course through “Puppets in Prague,” Susie discovered the Puppet Arts Online Graduate Certificate at University of Connecticut (UConn). This has been a game-changer for Susie. Having recently completed the program, she is excited by the ways she is pushing her ideas forward. She now feels fully equipped to confidently engage with others as a practitioner in the puppetry arts community.

Growing up in Australia, Susie’s love of puppets was first inspired as a child. “Puppetry has always been something I loved my entire life because I was introduced to it very young. There used to be an Australian group called the Tintookies. And a lot of us that were kids in the 70s were exposed to Tintookies. I was one of those kids that was lucky enough to be exposed.” Tintookies, an Aboriginal word meaning 'little people who come from the sandhills,’ were large-scale marionettes, created by Peter Scriven. In addition, to Tintookies, Susie fondly remembers Jim Henson’s Sesame Street and the Muppets, as well as earlier children’s programming, such as H.R. Pufnstuf, and Sigmund and the Sea Monsters. Contrasting her childhood with present day, Susie explains, “I’ve found puppetry to be a more prevalent and accessible artform in Europe and America than at home. So it’s whatever I’ve been able to do by myself pretty much.”

With a background in visual arts, including illustrating, animating, printmaking and sculpture, Susie explains, “I’ve always made puppets. There’s something about puppetry that’s incredibly accessible across social economic demographics. If you can make up a paper glue paste, you can make a puppet. Papier-mâché is the cheapest art form ever: You just need paper and flour and water.” Susie adds, “Because I’ve been trained as a visual artist, I’ve always found that puppetry is a very direct line to my imagination. I think it might be for others as well. I don’t think it’s unique to me. But I’ve been lucky enough to experience that.”

Discovering UConn from Australia via Prague

Susie first learned about UConn’s Puppet Arts Online Graduate Certificate while she was taking an online workshop with “Puppets in Prague.” Puppets in Prague had put together a music video featuring marionettes created by participants in their breakaway skeleton workshop. One of those participants was also a student in UConn’s Puppet Arts graduate program, and he shared a link to UConn’s Spring 2021 Puppet Slam, which included this video as a featured performance. While traditionally an in-person event, the Puppet Slam had been shifted to online during the Covid-19 pandemic, which made it accessible to Susie from her South Australian location. She was captivated: “Prague was offering various skills: I was doing a traditional puppet, but the UConn student was doing a trick skeleton. (The trick skeleton is a unique Czech technique.) A heap of American students had done a trick skeleton, and Puppets in Prague put together a video called ‘Death Can Dance.’ I went to see that, but I stayed to watch everyone. I was just fully drawn in.”

When Susie noticed that there were international UConn students performing, she realized the program could be accessible to her despite her distant location. Intrigued, she went to UConn’s website and made an inquiry, figuring, “What’s the worst thing that can happen.” She was delighted when Paul Spirito and Donna Campbell got back to her, explaining, “I felt really supported navigating the administrative process.”

Still, Susie was nervous that the distance would be too much of a barrier: “At first, I thought, ‘this is going to be completely out of my time zone. And it’s going to be too much to do as someone who works full-time.’ Paul just chatted me through: You just do one course per semester, at your own pace, and it’s asynchronous so you don’t have to go out of your time zone.” She thought, “This sounds like fun. I’ll give it a crack.” Susie began the 12 credit, 4-course program in fall 2021, and has just completed her last course in May 2023.

Building skills by design

For Susie, the strengths of the program include three core features: interconnected program design, high caliber feedback and guidance from the professors, and amazing fellow students. As she explains, “The intelligence of the way it’s built was key. It has four core component subjects. You could start with any of those components and build upon it. It’s designed so that each course builds upon the other, but it doesn’t matter at which point you start. And within a course, week by week, it builds on the skills, and it develops you as you go along – and you find yourself pulling in learning from any other courses that you’ve done. You’ve got this inherent structural strength that lifts up your professionalism and your ability. And then you’ve got these incredible teachers that are so professional. They are able to look and see and give you clear instructions on what you need to know to be able to get to where you want to be with your craft, or with your idea, or with your story.” Susie continues, adding a third component of strength: “The way it’s designed is incredible. And the people that deliver it. And also, the people you do it with – your fellow students! You find yourself learning so much. It’s this wild group of people who are just so lovely to learn with.”

Susie also appreciated the generosity with which professors shared their knowledge and expertise: “A lot of the teachers have their own creative life and their own professional life, but you don’t ever feel like you can’t approach them. You don’t ever feel like any question is too stupid. I was blown away by the generosity that was shared. Because some people can be very protective of their professional knowledge. There was none of that. It was really open and really generous.”

Separate but never alone

Interacting with her classmates via the HuskyCT/Blackboard online platform was a highlight for Susie. “It was something to look forward to. I’m going to really miss accessing my online course at the end of the day to check who’s been around and who’s said something. It was like being part of an unfolding conversation that didn’t have the pressure of time attached. I liked it. You never feel alone with it, even though you are quite separate.”

Susie especially enjoyed the level of interaction enabled by the VoiceThread platform: “It was one of the most beneficial ways that we interacted with each other. You’d make a video and put it up. Then everyone in the class was invited to comment and give constructive feedback, such as what they like about it, or how they think you can push the idea to be closer to what you’re aiming for. I would find that there were ways that I hadn’t even imagined about approaching a problem or something that I was doing. A suggestion would be made, and suddenly you’d be open to not just another way to approach it, but perhaps a whole line of people who had seen this problem before and had dealt with it in certain ways. So you’re introduced to not just different problem solving, but different lines of practice that people were sharing. And it also challenged you to look at people’s work, not just like ‘oh, I really love it’ but to actually really look. And to go, ‘okay, I can see what you’re doing’ – and feel confident to ask questions and to have those questions asked of you too, because you understand that it’s about trying to get the best result.”

Not only did she learn from sharing her own work, but Susie appreciated being inspired by her classmates’ work: “You’re constantly making things, but other people are constantly making things. You see so many beautiful ideas. I’m going to miss seeing that.”

Discovering new materials

Susie thoroughly enjoyed all her courses, exclaiming, “They’re all my favorite,” but she found DRAM 5607 - Advanced Material Techniques to be particularly impactful. “Because I have a visual arts background, a making background, the advanced material techniques really stood out for me because I now have suppliers for materials that I didn’t know existed. There’s a material that I learned about, called Chicago Latex, and I’ve never experienced it before. It’s so much more environmentally friendly than using plastics and silicone. And being introduced to that was really exciting. Material techniques has really helped me feel like anyone could ask me for a design, and I’d feel confident that I’d know how to make it because I’ve been through the industry-standard materials.”

An exciting outcome for Susie is the ways in which she is already applying this new knowledge in developing curriculum for kids: “It’s already helped me in my work. I work with the arts curriculum teacher, and they wanted a puppet. I designed a puppet, and I could do it confidently in a way that I could select materials so that kids who have zero money and zero access to supplies could make a successful puppet. I feel confident that I can actually do this. And I don’t have to feel like I have to try to hide behind doing any extra detail. I can pass something along.”

Learning to perform

Highlighting DRAM 5610 - Advanced Hand Puppet Theatre, taught by Fergus Walsh, Susie shares, “This last course I just completed, Hand Puppetry with Fergus, was incredible. It was the lens he brought to performance and how to improve it without feeling destroyed but feeling built up every step of the way.” The project for this course was one of Susie’s favorites: It was to create and perform her own puppet show. “I loved taking someone else’s story and making my version of what their characters look like. And going, ‘okay, I want them to look like this’ and then being committed to trying to make something as close as possible to how I visualized it. Then taking that and making that into a story, and then getting all the feedback from everyone in the class to get that story to something that could be told without worrying that it was possibly the worst thing that anyone had seen.”

For this project, Susie chose the children’s story Giant John, written by Arnold Lobel. As she explains, “It’s about a giant that every time he hears fairy music, he has to dance. The fairies make him dance so much that he knocks down a castle. It’s an accident, it’s terrible. He didn’t want it to happen.” Explaining her technique, she continues, “He was giant relative to the other puppets. The giant was a hand puppet, and the other puppets were finger puppets, so it made it look like he was big in his world.” (See image above of Susie performing with Giant John and Little Owl.)

Live form of imagining

For Susie, nature and puppetry have always been intricately intertwined, but now she’s pushing that connection further in ways that will enable her to share her work with others: “I love to go out in nature. When I build a new puppet, I’ll often go to a favorite national park. There’s a salt lake I like to go to, and I like to take my puppets there and photograph them in nature. This time around, rather than just photographing them, I was performing with them. This is huge for me. I’ve always wanted to hide and make puppets. But I wanted to share and hadn’t learned how. So that’s a huge leap forward for me. I’m not sure where it’s going to go, but I don’t want it to stop.”

Puppets, for Susie, are a direct pathway to bringing her imagination to life. As she explains, “I’m not sure what it’s like for everyone, because I’m not a writer. But sometimes you’ve got something inside of you that you want to get out, and puppetry expresses something inherently human. I feel like it lets me express or bring life to my imagination in ways that drawings and even animation don’t. And it’s something that I can return to, in a way that I can’t return to drawings. Like I can pick up a puppet I built ten years ago and bring something new to it now. It’s a very live form of imagining.” She adds, “I found this learning has been another way to bring life to the things that have been sitting there dormant that I didn’t want to go dormant.”

Susie elaborates with a specific example: “I have a set of papier-mâché puppets that I made 25 years ago. There was one that I made, and it was specifically related to a place that I love. It’s a place that gets me into seaweed. And she’s a little sea witch person. It took me until after doing this program to feel like I could pick her up. I could go out into the environment where she was supposed to be and always live. I could take her to the winter seaweed, and I could film her running around in winter seaweed. She’s 25, older than my child. And I felt like that for the first time ever I could actually realize something that had been sitting there waiting to be done for ages. I feel like now I don’t just have to make them in privacy and hide them away. Now I can actually push the ideas further. I can do things that I’ve wanted to do with my puppets for a long time. Here’s a link to Susie’s Sea Witch Playing in Seaweed.

Developing confidence through new ways of seeing

After completing the program, Susie now feels confident to push herself in making new connections in the puppet world. “There’s not a lot of formal education around puppetry where I am. Puppets are a huge part of my life. I take them seriously. And I want to be taken seriously when I say that I do puppetry. So having an academic certificate helps me feel like I’ll be taken more seriously than ‘oh yeah, puppets, that’s lovely.’ It makes me feel less dismissed.”

She’s excited to start making new connections at the upcoming puppet festival in Melbourne. “I feel like I can meet with anyone on any level in Australian puppetry after this UConn learning experience.  It’s this incredible confidence that I’m not coming in blind to things that other people might know. I’m not coming in blind to techniques. I’ve had some performance experience. I actually feel like it’s okay to show my face, like I’m not some kind of fraud.”

Emphasizing the role of the critique process, Susie explains, “It’s also going through two years of collective critique. Not just receiving critique, but being part of other people’s work in process – to actually know how to engage with other practitioners. So it’s not just about having confidence, but how to see properly. I can actually really see skills that I didn’t even know I was looking at.” She adds, “I feel really quite excited now that I’ve completed the program. I’ve got these skills and I’m in this place where I’ve got so many things I could do with them. I’m not quite sure yet, but there’s a lovely potential for different directions.”

For those considering this program, Susie urges, “If you’ve always wanted to go further into puppetry, this is absolutely the program. It gives you context, history, current practices, community, and performance skills. If you’ve always wanted to write a puppet show, and you never thought you could do it, do this course! Now I know that if I had to write a puppet show, I’d feel confident that I could not only write it, but I could look at with a critical lens to build the show to be the strongest that it can be.” And to everybody, regardless of interests, she adds, “If you get the urge to pick up a puppet, don’t resist!”

“Going into the program, I didn’t realize the faculty are among the heavy hitters of the Puppetry Arts world. They are internationally known experts in the field. But they were very down to earth, helpful, and responsive. They never just plopped a bunch of videos on HuskyCT/Blackboard; they were so involved in everything we did.” — Amy West, Graduate, Fall 2018, Puppet Arts Online Graduate Certificate Program

Amy West, who earned the Puppet Arts Online Graduate Certificate in 2018, shows off her “puppet friends,” most of whom she created during DRAM 5610 - Advanced Hand Puppet Theater. The course was taught by Fergus Walsh, adjunct faculty member in UConn’s School of Fine Arts, Dramatic Arts Department.

Bringing Together a Myriad of Artistic Talent

Sometimes it takes years of experience to decide what we really want to do in life—at least it did for Amy West. Writer, photographer, musician, communications expert…Amy was finally able to bring together all of her artistic passions and expertise as a puppeteer extraordinaire! She credits the Puppet Arts Online Graduate Certificate program from the University of Connecticut (UConn) with helping her hone her skills—and take her puppetry career to an entirely new level. While she continues in her day job, she fuels her love of Puppetry Arts in all kinds of ways. Lately, during the COVID-19 Pandemic, she has been producing puppet video performances for Facebook Live to help entertain children—and adults—and raise money for Puppet Showplace Theater in Brookline, Massachusetts. And thanks to her experiences with the online program, she had no trouble at all transitioning to a whole new situation in March 2020, when her employer, the Tufts Clinical and Translational Science Institute, required its employees to work at home due to the Pandemic.

All of her life, Amy West has dabbled in various aspects of the arts—as a writer, a photographer, musician, stage manager, wedding DJ…some for money, some for fun, she says. And of course, she has had many day jobs over the years. “While all of my jobs have been satisfying in some way or other, they have never lit me up the way my artistic pursuits have,” says Amy.

Amy is one of millions of people who grew up in the 1970s, along side Mister Rogers, Sesame Street, and the Muppets. In fact, she can recall crouching behind the couch with her sister and putting on puppet shows with their stuffed animals.

More than two decades passed, during which time she didn’t give much thought to her early interest in puppets—until her niece was born in 2008. “I remember when she was very little, I picked up her Lamb Chop puppet and started talking to her. She was transfixed. Her focus was solely on the puppet; I disappeared in her mind. That made me think about the power of puppetry and an idea started to form.”

Then, as Amy recalls, she visited some friends in San Francisco in 2015. While there, she discovered Puppet Up!, a live show by Brian Henson and Henson Alternative. “It was so interesting because it was a TV-style puppet show, with the performance projected on a big screen. But you could see the puppeteers right on stage interacting with each other. It was really cool. That changed everything for me.”

Puppet video production begins

Amy began making short online videos featuring puppets. Although she wasn’t sure what she was doing, she found that she was able to express ideas in a different way than she might express them herself. “My puppet character was very cranky and forthright in a way I would never be. I tend to be more reserved.”

Fast-forward to 2016, when Amy realized she wanted to up her game by developing more formal skills in Puppetry Arts. That’s when she began looking at various programs and came across the University of Connecticut’s Puppet Arts Online Graduate Certificate. “The online program was perfect. I could participate while working full-time,” says Amy, who began the program in January 2017 and completed the last course December 2018.

Online? Yes, it’s the perfect venue!

Before she jumped in, she did have one big concern. “I thought, ‘How in the world will they be able to teach the courses online, when puppetry is such a hands-on experience?’” So instead of committing to the entire program right off the bat, Amy signed up for one course, DRAM 5610 - Advanced Hand Puppet Theater, as a Non-Degree student. To her surprise, she discovered the online platform was the perfect venue. “I have always been a bit of a loner, and I’m a night owl. So when my wife goes to sleep, I have time to do my thing. I discovered that online is the ideal medium for me, and especially now, in the midst of the Pandemic, the online learning experience through UConn prepared me for working at home full time.”

Amy also wondered how interactive the courses would be. Another big surprise! The VoiceThread platform enabled her and her classmates to watch lectures, upload performances, and even critique each other’s work. “We could slow the video down and actually circle something that needed attention, for example, if the performer’s wrist was not straight and it was affecting the puppet’s posture. VoiceThread, along with HuskyCT/Blackboard, which facilitates back and forth discussions, really connected everyone in the program. And because of the online platform, we could literally be connected all the time if we wanted to be.” Amy also says that one of her favorite aspects of the program was meeting people from all over the world with different goals and at different stages of their puppetry arts careers. She even had classmates from Alaska and South Africa!

From her first puppet slam to Trustee

While in the program, Amy learned about puppet slams, attending her first Puppet Showplace Theater in Brookline, MA. As she notes, this is a cabaret-style adult-oriented show, with short puppetry performances showcasing a variety of techniques, like shadow, marionette, or hand puppetry. She contacted the artistic director and submitted a video she created in the UConn program. She ended up performing that piece at her first puppet slam in 2018. “That evening was so great,” she recalls. “It was actually UConn night. Many people were from its Puppet Arts, MA/MFA programs.” Now, not only is she a regular at the Puppet Showplace Theater’s puppet slams—here’s a piece she performed for the February 2020 UConn Puppet Slam—she also sits on its Board of Trustees. In addition, she has joined several organizations, including Puppeteers of America, through which she attended her first national puppetry arts festival in 2019.

Says Amy: “One of the key takeaways from the certificate program is the notion of puppetry as creative problem-solving. How can I make this puppet look like it’s blowing out a birthday candle? How can I add depth to my playboard, to give my characters set pieces to walk behind and in front of? How can I make this snail shadow puppet extend its body in a comical way? How do I make this cut-out of the moon rise up over this mountain? Figuring these things out—with help from instructors, classmates, and my handy wife—was very satisfying.”

Two years of online learning at UConn also prepared Amy for our current pandemic reality. Since March 2020, Amy has been putting together 30-minute Facebook Live shows to entertain kids and adults, while raising money for Puppet Showcase Theater. “Whether working remotely at my day job or performing in an online puppet slam, the technical skills and adaptability I learned are critical to my daily life and work.”

"Thanks to the knowledge and experience I have been gaining, I'm able to put my new skills into actual use. I'm learning techniques to make puppets take certain actions that you wouldn't think you could, such as having a shadow puppet jump across a pond and showing the surface water actually rippling at the same time. I'm getting puppet arts training from a university with a world-class reputation in the field, while being able to continue working at a job I love." — Brandon Kirkham, Puppet Arts Online Graduate Certificate Student

Brandon Kirkham, Brandon has been building puppets professionally for more than 10 years. But with just two courses from the Puppet Arts Online Graduate Certificate Program under his belt, he's taking his work as Design Supervisor at First Stage in Milwaukee, Wisconsin to the next level.

For the Love of Puppets

Brandon Kirkham has been immersed in theater for many years — first as an undergraduate student in Costume Design at the University of Evansville, then as a student in the Master's in Costume and Scenery Design program at Ohio University. Today, he works as Design Supervisor for a children's theater company in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, called First Stage. As much as he loves theater, there's something about the world of puppetry that's taken hold of Brandon. While the Master's program at Ohio University allowed him to tailor his education to reflect his interest in puppetry, it wasn't part of the formal curriculum and didn't provide the in-depth training he was looking for to take his interest to the next level.

"At the time I was looking into getting a Master's degree, I knew about the University of Connecticut's (UConn) Puppetry Arts Master of Fine Arts program, but decided to stick with theater design," Brandon recalls. "But I had always wondered what it would have been like going to UConn. So when I saw a post on a friend's Facebook page about the Puppet Arts Online Graduate Certificate Program, I immediately knew it would be the perfect way for me to fill in my knowledge gaps and allow me to get a more formal education in puppetry."

Part of the "inaugural" class, Brandon has completed two of the four required courses: DRAM 5607 — Advanced Materials Techniques and DRAM 5613 — Advanced Shadow Theater. Both courses incorporated extensive opportunities to critique other students' work and to be critiqued. Says Brandon: "In any artistic pursuit, critique is essential. We are creating art to be viewed and knowing how your peers see your work helps you understand whether you are communicating your story and characters clearly, or not. I find VoiceThread to be a great platform for critiquing."

An interactive, collaborative sharing tool.

So what is VoiceThread and how is it used in the Puppet Arts Online Graduate Certificate Program? An interactive collaboration and sharing tool, VoiceThread allows students to add images, documents, and videos — then other students can add their voice, text, audio file, or video comments. "VoiceThread allows you to be as close as possible to other students without actually being in the same space," says Brandon, who used the tool extensively to provide critiques and in return, received the same level of feedback. "Since the courses are asynchronous, I'm able to provide my critique at a time convenient to me, usually later in the evenings when my wife has gone to bed."

Putting his new skills to good use.

Brandon's experience to date has already made a big impact on his work at First Stage, which operates the nation's largest theater academy for children. As part of his job as Design Supervisor, Brandon is involved with 11 productions a year. Says Brandon:

"We seem to be incorporating puppetry into more shows, which conveniently coincides with my involvement in the online graduate certificate program. For example, Lovabye Dragon, a show we adapted from the book by Barbara Joosse, features three styles of puppets — hand, shadow, and a 14-foot walk-around dragon puppet that takes three performers to operate. I would never have known how to create intricate shadow puppets before I took the Advanced Shadow Theater course with Penny Benson.

"Thanks to the knowledge and experience I have been gaining, I'm able to put my new skills into actual use. I'm learning techniques to make puppets take certain actions that you wouldn't think you could, such as having a shadow puppet jump across a pond and showing the surface water actually rippling at the same time. We also had a session on learning how to use old-school projectors to achieve very intricate special effects, like having puppets appear to weave in and out of trees in a forest."

Learning some of the business side, too.

The program isn't all fun and games. As Brandon notes, "Using Blackboard to have online discussions, we are exposed to a lot of very interesting ethical topics, such as rights, royalties, and copyright rules." Brandon is also required to write research papers. But the effort he has put in thus far has been well worth it. As he says, "I'm getting puppet arts training from a university with a world-class reputation in the field, while being able to continue working at a job I love."

Brandon's final project: Lovabye Dragon shadow music video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=lvk31eeCDEc
Another class project: to emulate the style of Australian puppeteer Richard Bradshaw
https://youtube.com/watch?v=HRIK_1pHw3A

"If you can't get to Storrs, the online graduate certificate program is ideal. You can complete the courses from your home or studio, wherever. It's also a great way to test the waters to see if you're interested in getting an MFA in Puppet Arts from UConn. I know my degree will open all kinds of doors for me in the future. — Kimberly Van Aelst, Puppet Arts Online Graduate Certificate Student

Kimberly Van Aelst lives with her husband and four-year-old son in Hamden, Connecticut — and an ideal place to create puppets, especially with her studio (shown here) located right on their property, just steps from their home.All About Timing

Timing is everything, at least for Kimberly Van Aelst it is. Since 2008, she had been interested in applying for a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Puppet Arts at the University of Connecticut (UConn), School of Fine Arts, Dramatic Arts. But life has a funny way of sneaking up on you and taking over. Finally, eight years later, the timing was just right, and Kimberly applied to the program. At the same time, she discovered the Puppet Arts Online Graduate Certificate program and decided to get some credentials under her belt while she was waiting to hear about being accepted.

Who would have thought someone with a Master's of Public Health, specializing in International Health, could end up in UConn's Puppet Arts MFA program? Kimberly Van Aelst did. While working overseas in Afghanistan as a Social Media Project Manager with Handicap International, she met a puppeteer who produced educational puppet films for children to help prevent land mine injuries. As she recalls, "It inspired me and helped me to envision a way to blend puppetry with my public health and occupational therapy background. I started thinking of applying to the MFA in Puppet Arts program in 2008. I remember telling my colleagues, 'One day I will be in the graduate puppetry program at UConn.'"

Life can take over.

But like so many of us, life has a way of taking over. Kimberly and her husband, a professional freelance photographer, bought a house, got married, and had a baby. "We put other dreams on hold as we lived in bliss as new parents," says Kimberly, whose Mystic Aquarium wedding in 2011 became a YouTube hit, with nearly 5,000,000 views, when the couple's mariachi band was filmed serenading a Beluga whale!

While Kimberly continued to work in her field, she found time to cultivate her passion for puppetry, performing in puppet slams — in New York City, New Haven, Boston, and even on the West Coast — and with performance companies, such as Drama of Works in Brooklyn, New York. In fact, Kimberly developed a new puppet show piece called "WAAC the Puppet Show,"* which was recently showcased at Dixon Place in New York City during a World War II-themed slam hosted by Drama of Works.

But finally the time was right.

In January 2016, the time was finally right, and Kimberly applied for the Master's program. Knowing she would have to wait to hear about acceptance — then wait several months before coursework would begin — she decided to jump into the Puppet Arts Online Graduate Certificate program and took DRAM 5607 — Advanced Materials Techniques. Says Kimberly, who also took DRAM 5613 — Advanced Shadow Theater to hone her skills in shadow puppetry: "I wanted to start accruing credits, get a feel for the Master's program, and meet some of the faculty. The online courses were fantastic."

So what specifically did she find so worthwhile?

During Advanced Materials Techniques, Kimberly learned all about puppet construction using a wide variety of materials and tools. For example, she says, "We learned how to design a puppet head and construct it out of neoprene latex. Our teacher, Paul Spirito, showed us exactly what adhesives and paints would work on latex, and how to add eyes, a nose, and even a mouth that can move." Kimberly also found VoiceThread, to which she uploaded her various project for critique, to be extremely easy to use.

Even though Kimberly has had a lot of experience in shadow puppetry, taking the Advanced Shadow Theater course from Penny Benson taught her how to use multiple projectors at once. She also learned how to incorporate her body into the performance while greatly improving her masking and rod techniques. "It was so helpful. Penny taught us how to attach puppet joints so they aren't stiff and how arms and legs can move and appear three-dimensional, rather than being flat and lifeless."

A great way to test the waters.

When Kimberly completes her MFA in 2019, she envisions developing puppets for local theater companies, such as the Downtown Cabaret Theater in Bridgeport, Connecticut. She encourages anyone with a love of puppetry to give it a try, even for people like her with a background in a field unrelated to performance arts. Plus she says, "If you can't get to Storrs, the online graduate certificate program is ideal. You can complete the courses from your home or studio, wherever. It's also a great way to test the waters to see if you're interested in getting an MFA in Puppet Arts from UConn. I know my degree will open all kinds of doors for me in the future, hopefully helping pave the way for me to develop and perform larger scale pieces in festivals around the world."

* WAAC stands for Women's Army Auxiliary Corp.