For its third installment of the 2021 Spring Puppet Forum Series, the Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry at the University of Connecticut will host “Working on Race and Ethnicity in Puppetry” with curator Dr. Jungmin Song and Ballard Institute Director John Bell on April 8 at 7 p.m. ET. This forum will take place on Facebook Live (facebook.com/BallardInstitute/) and will be available afterwards on Facebook and the Ballard Institute YouTube Channel (youtube.com/channel/UC3VSthEDnYS6ZjOwzT1DnTg). 

This forum is a work-in-progress discussion about the challenging process of creating a puppet exhibition on race and ethnicity, focused on objects from Ballard Institute collections. Join curator Jungmin Song and Ballard Institute director John Bell in a discussion about the challenges they face navigating language, biases, objects, provenance, and databases as they try to re-think Ballard Institute collections for their next exhibition.

Dr. Jungmin Song is adjunct faculty at the University of Connecticut. Her writings have appeared in Performance Research, Artpress 2, Asian Theatre Journal, and Contemporary Theatre Review. In 2017 she edited a special issue of the British journal Puppet Notebook on Shakespeare and puppets, and was a researcher in residence at the Institut International de la Marionnette (IIM) in Charleville-Mézières, France to lay the ground for a book on Shakespeare and puppetry. She curated the Shakespeare and Puppetry exhibition at the Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry in 2020. As a puppet maker she has participated in numerous projects, including the Royal Shakespeare Company and Little Angel Theatre’s co-production of Venus and Adonis (2004). 

For more information and to learn about other online programming, visit bimp.uconn.edu or email bimp@uconn.edu.

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