Julie Taymor is an American director and writer of theater, opera, and film. Her stage adaptation of The Lion King debuted in 1997 and received eleven Tony Award nominations, with Taymor receiving Tony Awards for her direction and costume design. Her film Frida, about Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, was nominated for five Academy Awards, including a Best Original Song nomination for Taymor's composition "Burn It Blue". She also directed the jukebox movie musical Across the Universe, based on the music of The Beatles.
Gretchen Mol is an American actress and former model. She is best known for her role as Gillian Darmody on the HBO series Boardwalk Empire (2010–2014). She also appeared in films such as The Funeral (1996), Donnie Brasco (1997), Celebrity (1998), Rounders (1998), Sweet and Lowdown (1999), The Thirteenth Floor (1999), 3:10 to Yuma (2007), and Manchester by the Sea (2016). For her portrayal of the title character in The Notorious Bettie Page (2005), she was nominated for the Satellite Award for Best Actress – Motion Picture Drama.
The Bread and Puppet Theater is a politically radical puppet theater, active since the 1960s, based in Glover, Vermont as of January 2020. The theater was co-founded by Elka and Peter Schumann. Peter is the artistic director.
Nikki Tilroe was an American actress, dancer and puppeteer. She is best known for her work as the "Mime Lady" on the children's television series Today's Special. She also operated Muppets on the TV show Fraggle Rock and played "Beaver" on Cucumber.
The Jim Henson Foundation was founded by puppeteer and Muppet creator Jim Henson to promote and develop puppetry in the United States. Since 1992 Jim Henson's daughter Cheryl Henson has served as the president for the Foundation.
Dixon Place is a theater organization in New York City dedicated to the development of works-in-progress from a broad range of performers and artists. It exists to serve the creative needs of artists—emerging, mid-career and established—who are creating new work in theater, dance, music, literature, puppetry, performance, variety and visual arts.
Rajiv Joseph is an American playwright. He was named a finalist for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his play Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, and he won an Obie Award for Best New American Play for his play Describe the Night.
Mary Gallagher is an American playwright, screenwriter, novelist, actress, director and teacher. For six years, she was artistic director of Gypsy, a theatre company in the Hudson Valley, New York, which collaborated with many artists to create site-specific mask-and-puppet music-theatre with texts and lyrics by Gallagher. These pieces included Premanjali and the 7 Geese Brothers, Ama and The Scottish Play. In 1996-97, she directed the Playwrights Workshop at the University of Iowa, and she taught playwriting and screenwriting at New York University/Tisch School of the Arts from 2001 to 2010. She is a member of Actors & Writers, a theater company in the Hudson Valley, and the Ensemble Studio Theater in New York City. She is an alumna of New Dramatists, where she developed many of her plays and created and moderated the series, "You Can Make a Life: Conversations with Playwrights" from 1994 to 2001.
Toni Schlesinger is a journalist, theater artist, and fiction writer. She was the author of "Shelter", a long-running column in The Village Voice between 1997 and 2006, and in New York Observer between 2006 and 2007.
Melissa James Gibson is a Canadian-born playwright based in New York.
Great Small Works is a performance collective founded in New York City in 1995. Its six founding members—John Bell, Trudi Cohen, Stephen Kaplin, Jenny Romaine, Roberto Rossi, and Mark Sussman—draw on avant-garde, folk, and popular theater traditions to address contemporary social issues in a various scales, from tiny toy theater spectacles to giant puppet pageants.
Kitchen Theatre Company (KTC) is a non-profit professional theater company in Ithaca, New York that focuses on making “bold, intimate, and engaging" theater. The Kitchen was founded in 1991 and is now in its 27th season. KTC is a member of the Theatre Communications Group and operates under a Small Professional Theater contract with the Actors’ Equity Association.
Annie Katsura Rollins is an American artist, scenic designer, and puppeteer. She specializes in traditional Chinese shadow puppetry.
Kristina "Tina" Satter is an American filmmaker, playwright, and director based in New York City. She is the founder and artistic director of the theater company Half Straddle, which formed in 2008 and received an Obie Award grant in 2013. Satter won a Guggenheim in 2020. Satter was described by Ben Brantley of the New York Times as "a genre-and-gender-bending, visually exacting stage artist who has developed an ardent following among downtown aesthetes with a taste for acidic eye candy and erotic enigmas." Her work often deals with subjects of gender, sexual identity, adolescence, and sports.
Tina Huang,, is an American stage and television actress of Taiwanese descent known for her recurring roles in Rizzoli & Isles and for her semi-regular role as Melinda Trask on the NBC soap Days of Our Lives.
Cheryl Lee Henson has served as the President of the Jim Henson Foundation since 1992. She is a philanthropist and supporter of puppetry arts and artists, and serves as a board member of The Jim Henson Company. She was honored in 2010 at the LaMama Gala, and in 2011, she won the New Victory Arts Award for her leadership in puppetry.
Aditi Brennan Kapil is an American playwright and screenwriter.
Dominique Morisseau is an American playwright and actress from Detroit, Michigan. She has written more than nine plays, three of which are part of a cycle titled The Detroit Project. She received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2018.
Caden Manson is the co-founder and director of Big Art Group, a performance ensemble based in New York City. Dedicated to advancing the boundaries of contemporary performance, Manson has expanded the field through their use of digital media, creative interdisciplinary collaborations, and teaching. Manson is the Editor in Chief and co-curator at Contemporary Performance Network, a community organizing platform and social network dedicated to facilitating collaboration among artists, presenters, scholars and festivals. They are the co-Artistic director of the Special Effects festival, an experimental performance festival which premiered in January 2014. They were the Head of the John Wells Directing Program at Carnegie Mellon University from 2014-2019 and is currently the Director of the Undergraduate and Graduate Theatre Program at Sarah Lawrence College in New York.
Amelia Lirag Lapeña-Bonifacio was a Filipino playwright, puppeteer, and educator known as the "Grande Dame of Southeast Asian Children's Theatre". In 1977, she founded a children's theater troupe, Teatrong Mulat ng Pilipinas, the official theater company and puppetry troupe of the University of the Philippines. Lapeña-Bonifacio served as the President of the International Association of Theatre for Children and Young People-Philippines (ASSITEJ-Philippines) and Union Internationale de la Marionnette-Philippines (UNIMA-Philippines). She was recognized in 2018 as a National Artist of the Philippines for Theater.
