Dr. John Bell, Director of the Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry, was given Iran’s Jalal Sattari award for his essay “Shalako Puppets and Nineteenth-Century Ritual” at the Third International Traditional-Ritual Performances Seminar in Tehran on July 16, 2011. The award, according to Dr. Hamid Reza Ardalan, the Seminar’s organizer, is “one of the most prestigious scientific and scholarly awards of our country.” Jalal Sattari is a prominent Iranian scholar in the areas of mythology, philosophy of art and ritual dramatic arts. Dr. Bell’s essay appears in his 2008 book American Puppet Modernism: Essays on the Material World in Performance (Palgrave/Macmillan).