The Center as West Park Announces New Cohort Of Puppetry Artists

THE CENTER AT WEST PARK (CWP), the Upper West Side's cultural hub for diverse, engaging, and boundary-pushing performing arts, announces the Cohort of resident artists selected for the 2022/2023 Object Movement Puppetry Residency & Festival, an annual presentation of new short works developed in residence at The Center at West Park.

For eleven weeks in Fall 2022 and eleven weeks in Spring 2023, a cohort of artists will meet to share progress on developing new work with the goal to provide supportive feedback for the artists and a useful but flexible structure for making and sharing work. Each resident artist will develop a single piece over the course of the residency. The 2023 Object Movement Puppetry Festival will take place over two weeks from March 20 through April 1, 2023, in the Center at West Park's Sanctuary Space. Each week will feature a different program of four original short pieces 10 to 15 minutes long.

CWP's 2022/2023 Object Movement Puppetry Residency & Festival is curated by artists Maiko Kikuchi, Rowan Magee, Marcella Murray, and Justin Perkins, and features artists Mery Y.Y. Cheung, Sarah Finn, Amy Liou, Kip Miller, Karen Loewy Movilla, Heather Piper, PlayLab NYC (Kevin P. Hale and Jennifer Linn Wilcox), Kell Selznick, and Preston Wollner.

The 2022/2023 Object Movement Puppetry Residency & Festival is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature, the Jim Henson Foundation, and the Puppet Slam Network.

The Center at West Park is located at 165 West 86th Street, at the corner of Amsterdam Avenue and 86th Street, with access to the 86th street stops on the 1, C, and B subway lines. For more information visit www.centeratwestpark.org/evolution-festival.

INTRODUCING THE 2022/2023 OBJECT MOVEMENT PUPPETRY COHORT

MERY Y.Y. CHEUNG (she/they) is a puppeteer, producer, and arts activist local to New York City. Cheung started puppetry professionally in 2016 and has performed and collaborated on several puppetry projects with The Tank, Coney Island USA, Chinese Theatre Works, and the Puppetry Guild of Greater New York. Credits include Simon and His Shoes (The Tank), Murmurations (LMCC), Puppet Spread puppet slam series with Ladies of Mischief (The Tank), an international tour of Pedro Reyes' Manufacturing Mischief (The Tank). She performs puppetry-infused neo-burlesque under the alias Lambchop Suey. As one of this year's Object Movement Artist-in-Residence, Cheung identifies the intersection between puppet and body, re-learning practices of radical self-love, and exploring the object as mirror. Follow @Lambchop.Suey and @sideshowrat on Instagram.

SARAH FINN is a playwright, director, and performer based in Brooklyn. With her performance and videos, she creates queer and rewilded worlds using surreal storytelling, immersive media, puppetry, and highly physical performance. Her work has been seen internationally at the 2019 Prague Fringe Festival and the Ponderosa Tanzland Festival in Stolzenhagen, Germany; and at home in the U.S at the 2020 Philadelphia Fringe (FringeArts), and in NYC at The Tank, The Hudson Guild Theater, Cloud City, Movement Research, The Brick, Mabou Mines, and Dixon Place. She is a 2022-2023 Object Movement Artist-in-Residence at the Center at West Park and a 2022 Fresh Ground Pepper BRB Artist-in-Residence. Past residencies include Barn Arts Collective and The Cannery. In 2018, she was the recipient of the Sherman Fairchild Grant in Art + Technology. She trained at Ecole Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq in Paris, France, and got her BA from Sarah Lawrence College.

AMY LIOU is a performance artist from Taiwan who enjoys moving on stage and off stage. She started her journey as an actor and continues to create original works with objects and movements. Learned and trained with many teachers, her approach to theater is heavily influenced by Oleg Liptsin, T. Terzopoulos of Attis Theatre, and Siti Company in New York. She is intrigued by the tiny moments happening in our lives that shape emotions and stir thoughts and she celebrates those moments by bringing them on stage. Her greatest achievement would be when someone tells her, "I feel like a different person after watching your show" which she is still working hard to make happen. When not onstage, you'd probably find Amy experimenting with a new cookie recipe or dancing around her plants in her kitchen.

KIP MILLER is a writer and editor with a poetry MFA from the University of Michigan. She has published poetry in Indiana Review, West Branch, Cream City Review, and others, and has published an essay in Entropy Magazine. In 2019 she created a one-woman eco-puppetry show at St. Ann's Warehouse. Originally from Ohio, she currently lives in Brooklyn.

KAREN LOEWY MOVILLA is a Colombian artist based in New York City. She converges digital forms with crafted objects, like a giant fabric Uterus, to tackle myths and untruths placed on femininity, such as the concept of girlhood, dismissal of pain, and gender as biological. Her work celebrates hyper-femme aesthetics, female and trans biology, and maligned attributes of "womanhood". Her pieces use digital media, embodiment, spoken word, and puppetry to confront academic texts, inherent biases, and oppressive systems. Karen co-created and performed in Tia Talk which has been shown at Paper Kraine, The Tank, and Ars Nova's AntFest 2022. Karen designs for films, commercials, and theater, and costume designing for Meat Suit (Aya Ogawa) and prop designing for Sunflower (Sifiso Mabena). She assists scenic designer Jian Jung. She is a Boston University graduate and a 2021 MFA graduate at Sarah Lawrence College. Find more about her at https://karenloewymovilla.com/

HEATHER PIPER is an interdisciplinary artist located in Brooklyn, NY with work ranging from fine art painting to multimedia puppetry performance. She strives to create thoughtful new mythologies with moments of levity inspired by folklore, science fiction, and the occult. The artist's journey with puppetry began at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she studied writing and animation, and became involved with Rough House Puppet theater. In 2013 Heather moved to NYC to intern for the Henson Creature shop and went on to work as a freelance fabricator for Puppet Kitchen, Macy's window displays, commercials for Viacom, McDonald's, HBO, independent films, music videos, and more. She has also hosted both in-person and virtual puppet-making workshops with an emphasis on the use of recycled materials.

PLAYLAB NYC - Founded in 2008, KEVIN P. HALE and JENNIFER LINN WILCOX, are dedicated to taking fun way too seriously. Favorites include Mothra! and 4th Circle - Greed in Drama of Work's Punch Kamikaze: GODZILLA and INFERNO; Spirit in the Dark at Coney Island USA; Scar Stuff - An Invitation to the Undertaker at Boo! The Players Theatre Short Play and Musical Festival; Humorously Horrendous Haunted Hideaway at the 20th Annual FringeNYC; and Puppet Playlists 18i 20, 22, and 25. Their show, Poe‐Dunk - A Matchbox Entertainment, has appeared at Great Small Works Toy Theater Festival, Figment, FRIGID New York, FringeNYC, and Puppets & Poets 2014 & 2015. www.playlabnyc.org

KELL SELZNICK is a theater maker with a focus on telling stories they wanted to see. As a puppeteer, Selznick focuses on shadow and tabletop puppetry. Notable works include puppeteering in Jim Henson's Dinosaur Train Live, Erth's Dinosaur Zoo Live, Dorothy James' Tea Cups, and Mabou Mines' La Divina Caricature. As a puppet wrangler, Selznick worked on Frozen on Broadway and Avenue Q off-Broadway. Selznick is currently transitioning from working on others' work to focusing on developing a series of shows, including this one, intended to be performed in school to connect scientific developments with the personal stories of the scientists involved telling the story of scientists as relatable people. When not working on puppetry Selznick is drawing a comic book memoir.

PRESTON WOLLNER's sordid tale and work begins in Brooklyn, and ends in the same place, well, not ends per se but continues! The meat of this Brooklyn sandwich saw Preston studying at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where he got to explore performance art, animation, and sculpture. Following a brief stint as a gas station clerk in Shreveport, Louisiana, Preston was called home to Brooklyn once more where he has worked as a marionettist at the Puppetworks theater for the last three years. He continues to work as an animator and puppeteer in other projects such as Netflix's John Mulaney and the Sack Lunch Bunch and he has created original works like Morgus Bootouxs' Shadow Show in 2021. Preston looks forward to exploring his love of Horror, texture, and visual storytelling during his residency.

THE 2022/2023 OBJECT MOVEMENT PUPPETRY CURATORS

MAIKO KIKUCHI received her B.A in Theater Arts and Fashion Design from Musashino Art University, Japan in 2008, and her M.F.A in Sculpture from Pratt Institute in 2012. She is a multidisciplinary artist working in illustration, painting, drawing, collage, sculpture, animation, and puppetry/performance. Her object theatre pieces include Daydream Tutorial (Work in Progress) as part of Under The Radar Festival 2020; (INCOMING! Program) at The Public Theatre, LaMaMa, and FiveMyles Gallery; Pink Bunny at Japan Society and St.Ann's Warehouse; On The Other Side Of The Fence at Dixon Place; No Need For A Night Light On A Light Night Like Tonight at LaMaMa; Daydream Anthology at St. Ann's Warehouse. She is currently in an artist residency program at HERE collaborating with Spencer Lott. She presented her visual artworks at the Crown Heights Film Festival, group exhibition "In Time/Out of Place" at Parasol Project(NY), "NO PARKING" at Ca'd' Oro Gallery(NY), "By Chamber 02" at CITAN (Tokyo), WWW (Tokyo), etc. She has also committed to musicians and bands for creating their music videos both in Japan and The U.S.

Rowan Magee is a puppeteer and educator from Troy, NY. He has puppeteered on international tours with Phantom Limb Company, Robin Frohardt, Nick Lehane, and Dan Hurlin, and in New York City for American Opera Projects, Trusty Sidekick, Chris Green, Spencer Lott, and the National Theater in the 2018 Tony Award-winning Broadway revival of Angels in America. Rowan operated the reference puppet for the titular character in the upcoming feature film Clifford the Big Red Dog, in theaters in Fall 2021. He has designed puppets for The Dalton School, St Mark's School, and Lincoln Center Education, taught for CO/LAB, Marquis Studios, Manhattan Youth, The Brooklyn New School, and Story Pirates, and he has received a Jim Henson Foundation Grant for his marionette show No 1 Chinese. During the pandemic, Rowan directed puppetry for Yiddish New York 2020, The Dalton School's Hamlet Project, and is designing puppets for a recent Henson Workshop Grant Recipient: One Night in Winter, by Nekaa Lab/Sachiyo Takahashi.

MARCELLA MURRAY is a New York-based theater artist from Augusta, Georgia. She is a playwright, performer, collaborator, and puppeteer. Murray's work is heavily inspired by the observed ways in which people tend to segregate and reconnect. Her work tends to focus on themes of identity within a community and forward momentum in the face of trauma. Performances include The Slow Room, a piece directed by Annie Dorsen at Performance Space New York; a workshop of Ocean Filibuster which was co-created by the team Pearl D'Amour (Lisa D'Amour and Katie Pearl) with composer Sxip Shirey at Abrons Arts Center; I Don't Want to Interrupt You Guys which was created in collaboration with Leonie Bell and Hyung Seok Jeon during RAP at Mabou Mines; New Mony created by Maria Camia; and Shoot Don't Talk at St. Ann's Warehouse/Puppet Lab created by Andrew Murdock. Along with David Neumann, she recently co-created Distances Smaller Than This Are Not Confirmed (Obie Special Citation for Creation and Performance) which opened at Abrons Arts Center, co-produced by Chocolate Factory, in January 2020.

Justin Perkins is a puppet artist and performer. Recent puppet performance includes Madama Butterfly at Met Opera (cover), and Hansel and Gretel at Michigan Opera Theater (principal). He has appeared in works by Ping Chong+Company (Alaxsxa|Alaska, LaMama, US tour), Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew (And Here We Are, National Sawdust), Tom Lee (Shank's Mare, LaMama, US tour), Lake Simons, Patti Bradshaw, Puppet Cinema, Unitards, imnotlost, and more. In 2019, his puppet installation DIANAMAS was developed at Puppet Lab at St Ann's Warehouse. Justin's forthcoming work Unicorn Afterlife is supported by the Jim Henson Foundation and developed through residencies at the Jim Henson Legacy Carriage House and The Center at West Park, premiered May 2021 at Dixon Place. He is also the Program Director at New Country Day Camp in Staten Island. http://www.justinaperkins.com