Due to the impending weather for Friday, 2/20, we are rescheduling Calle Allende by Pinned & Sewtured for Saturday, 3/7 at 7 p.m. If you already purchased a ticket, it has automatically been transferred to that date, but if you prefer a refund, please email emily.wicks@uconn.edu. Tickets are still available for 3/7 here: https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/bimp-0/calle-allende
Thank you for your understanding and stay safe!
[caption: UConn Puppet Arts alumni Joe Therrien (left) and Mackenzie Doss (right) will perform at the 2026 UConn Winter Puppet Slam.]
The Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry and the UConn Puppet Arts Program will present the 2026 UConn Winter Puppet Slam on Friday, March 6, 2026 at 8 p.m. in UConn’s Harriet S. Jorgensen Theatre, on the lower level of the Jorgensen Performing Arts Center at 2132 Hillside Road, Storrs, CT 06269. The UConn Winter Puppet Slam will feature new and experimental short works by professional puppeteers and performers, including Puppet Arts alumni Joe Therrien and Mackenzie Doss, as well as new works by UConn Puppet Arts students. Mansfield’s Waldron’s Studios 88 will return once more as the Puppet Slam house band.
The 2026 UConn Winter Puppet Slam welcomes back UConn Puppet Arts alumni Joe Therrien and Mackenzie Doss. Brooklyn-based Joseph Therrien, from Boxcutter Collective, will perform Inside the Palace of Your Mind, which will transport the audience from the Here-And-Now to the upper reaches of the human mind, using hand puppetry, music, and whatever the audience has in their pocket. Vermont-based puppeteer Mackenzie Doss will perform Transcendence, which explores transformation as a universal process governed by chance and the things we are willing to let go, and how entering a state of transformation includes finding that anything is possible. The UConn Winter Puppet Slam also features new works by graduate and undergraduate students from the UConn Puppet Arts Program, and music by Mansfield’s Waldron’s Studio 88 band, led by Derek Waldron. Funding for the Slam is made possible, in part, by the Puppet Slam Network. These performances are recommended for mature audiences.
The UConn Winter Puppet Slam is free and open to the public; donations are greatly appreciated. Seating is on a first-come, first-served basis. Doors open at 7:30 p.m. The event will take place in UConn’s Harriet S. Jorgensen Theatre, located at 2132 Hillside Road, Storrs, Conn. 06269, on the lower level (use rear entrance). For directions to the Harriet S. Jorgensen Theatre, visit crt.uconn.edu. For more information about these performances, or if you require accommodation to attend this event, please contact Ballard Institute staff at 860-486-8580 or bimp@uconn.edu.
As part of its 2026 Spring Puppet Forum Series the Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry at the University of Connecticut is pleased to host “Becoming Modern: U.S. Puppetry in the Twentieth Century,” a discussion with Dr. Claudia Orenstein, Bart Roccoberton, and John Bell on April 22 at 7 p.m. in the Ballard Institute Theater, located at 1 Royce Circle, Storrs, CT. This forum will also be broadcast via Ballard Institute Facebook Live.
This forum will celebrate the Ballard Institute’s new exhibition of the same name, with acclaimed puppet scholar Dr. Claudia Orenstein of the CUNY Graduate Center in New York, UConn Puppet Arts Program Head Bart Roccoberton, and John Bell, Director of the Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry. The speakers will explore the ways that puppetry in the United States transformed during the twentieth century from a popular low-culture entertainment to an accepted form of legitimate theater and a massively influential mass-media phenomenon.
The Becoming Modern exhibition, curated by Professor Bell, includes examples of early 20th-century work by Yiddish puppeteers Zuni Maud and Yosl Cutler, and Russian émigré Basil Milovsoroff; but focuses specifically on innovations in puppetry beginning in the 1960s by such puppeteers as Bob Baker, Robert Anton, Charles Ludlam, Brad Brewer, Dan Hurlin, Stephen Kaplin, Janie Geiser, Larry Reed, Theodora Skipitares, Sandy Spieler, Amy Trompetter, and Charles Ludlam. What made U.S. puppetry “modern,” and how has twentieth-century U.S. puppetry affected what we see today in person and on our screens?
Admission to this event is free (donations greatly appreciated!), and refreshments will be served. For more information or if you require accommodation to attend a forum, please contact Ballard Institute staff at 860.486.8580 or bimp@uconn.edu.
Claudia Orenstein is an acclaimed scholar of puppetry, performing objects, and material performance, both in regard to contemporary practices globally and to traditional forms in India and Japan. She is the Founding Editor of Puppetry International Research, an online, peer-review, scholarly journal devoted to puppets, masks, and related arts, and author of Reading the Puppet Stage: Reflections on the Dramaturgy of Performing Objects. Dr. Orenstein has co-edited several scholarly anthologies devoted to puppetry: Puppet and Spirit: Ritual, Religion, and Performing Objects, with Tim Cusack, Women and Puppetry: Critical and Historical Investigations, with Alissa Mello and Cariad Astles, The Routledge Companion to Puppetry and Material Performance, with Dassia Posner and John Bell. She has also worked as dramaturg on Stephen Earnhart’s multimedia production Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and on Tom Lee and kuruma ningyō master Nishikawa Koryū V’s Shank’s Mare.
Bart Roccoberton is Program Head of UConn’s internationally renowned Puppet Arts Program and has been a professional puppet artist for nearly fifty years. He studied puppetry at UConn under Professors Frank Ballard and Albrecht Roser, and has toured popular puppet performances to schools, libraries, colleges, theaters and museums with his troupe The Pandemonium Puppet Company and with the students of The Eugene O’Neill Theater Center’s Institute of Professional Puppetry Arts and The University of Connecticut’s Puppet Arts Program. Bart has created and performed characters for television programs, Broadway productions and special commissions, and conducted workshops for elementary, secondary and college students and teachers across the United States.
John Bell is the director of the Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry, teaches at UConn’s Puppet Arts Program, and is a puppeteer and theater historian. He is the author of American Puppet Modernism and other books and articles about puppetry. A member of the Bread and Puppet Theater company from 1976 to 1986, and a founding member of the Great Small Works theater collective in New York City, he is also a founder of the Honk! Festival of Activist Street Bands in Somerville, Massachusetts.
As part of its 2026 Spring Puppet Forum Series, the Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry at the University of Connecticut is pleased to host “Sidney Chrysler’s Miniature Puppet Operas,” moderated by John Bell on Wednesday, March 4 at 7.pm. in the Ballard Institute Theater, located at 1 Royce Circle, Storrs, CT. This forum will also be broadcast via Ballard Institute Facebook Live.
This event focuses on the work of Chaplin, Connecticut artist and puppeteer Sidney Chrysler (1915-1999), building on current research at the Ballard Institute. The forum will include Puppet Arts alumnus Stefano Brancato, director Michael Goldfried, Victoria Northrup (who performed with Chrysler as a child), and Puppet Arts student and researcher Alfi Free.
Frank Ballard considered Sidney Chrysler to be the best Connecticut puppeteer of his time, but his work remains relatively unknown. Chrysler’s extravagant miniature puppet operas were performed infrequently, and only for the few people who could fit into his shed theater. Those who were able to see Chrysler’s work were thrilled as they watched operas like Aida and Tosca through Chrysler’s miniature opera glasses. A rare news article noted that Chrysler “turned paper doilies, netting from a produce bag and spray paint into Gothic cathedral windows; tiny hand-stitches are used to gather strips of draped crepe paper into full skirts and ruffles.” Frank Ballard noted that “once the house lights die and the curtain goes up, it seems like you’re in the second balcony at the Met.”
Admission to this event is free (donations greatly appreciated!), and refreshments will be served. For more information or if you require accommodation to attend a forum, please contact Ballard Institute staff at 860.486.8580 or bimp@uconn.edu.
As part of its 2026 Spring Puppet Forum Series, the Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry at the University of Connecticut is pleased to host a “Mexican Puppetry: Lormiga Títeres” with Ailin Ruiz and Sarina Pedroza of the celebrated puppet company Lormiga Títeres on Wednesday, Feb. 18 at 7 p.m. in the Ballard Institute Theater, located at 1 Royce Circle, Storrs, CT. This forum will also be broadcast via Ballard Institute Facebook Live.
This event, moderated by Ballard Institute director John Bell, will take place in conjunction with the Ballard Institute’s current exhibition Somos Uno: Mexican and Mexican American Puppetry, and is co-sponsored by UConn’s Puerto Rican and Latin American Cultural Center (PRLACC) and El Instituto, the Institute of Latina/o, Caribbean, and Latin American Studies.
Lormiga Títeres is a non-profit puppet company headed by directors and dramaturgs Ailin Ruiz and Sarina Pedroza. The organization’s objective is to support “full and happy childhoods,” and their work incorporates the production and performance of puppet shows and puppet films as well as publishing materials through their press Editorial L. Their community programming includes Theater at School, Theater Saturdays, research into Sonora’s puppet history, and online programs such as Cuentos para Contar Estrellas (Stories for Counting Stars). Lormiga Títeres curates the Puppet Slam México, sponsored by Green Feather Foundation, Arroyo Arts Collective, and the Puppet Slam Network. The company has performed in festivals across Mexico and represented Mexico internationally. Their work is represented in Somos Uno: Mexican and Mexican American Puppetry by image frames from their stop-motion animation films, La Casa de mi Abuela (My Grandmother’s House), Como una Niña (Like a Child), and Olivia y el Don Extraordinario (Olivia and the Extraordinary Gift).
Admission to this event is free (donations greatly appreciated!), and refreshments will be served. For more information or if you require accommodation to attend a forum, please contact Ballard Institute staff at 860.486.8580 or bimp@uconn.edu.