Center for Puppetry Arts, Inc.

The Center for Puppetry Arts' mission is to inspire imagination, education, and community through the global art of puppetry. The Center’s doors opened September 23, 1978, with Kermit the Frog and creator Jim Henson leading the festivities. Vince Anthony, the Center’s founder and Executive Director for 41 years, envisioned and created an organization unlike any other—one that shares the art of puppetry through exhibition, performance, and interactive learning. Located in Midtown Atlanta’s arts district, the Center annually welcomes over 150,000 visitors. While the majority of these patrons are from Georgia, the Center regularly sees visitors from all 50 states and from dozens of other countries every year. By demonstrating the breadth and energy of the art form, its capabilities, and its cultural significance, the Center has become the largest non-profit organization in the nation dedicated solely to puppetry.

Since its inception, the Center has served as a leader in the field: collecting artifact puppets from around the world for the museum, creating new puppetry productions for the Center’s performance company, training artists of all skill levels, incubating independent puppetry projects with Xperimental Puppetry Theater (est. 1980), curating innovative guest performances, and mesmerizing audiences of all ages. Center intern and staff alumni have gone on to impressive and impactful artistic careers, most notably MacArthur Genius Grant recipient Basil Twist. In 1998, the Center created one of the world’s first distance learning programs, connecting the Center’s curriculum-supporting lessons and puppetry performances to audiences around the world. Center productions have earned 13 Citations of Excellence from the Union Internationale de la Marionnette (UNIMA-USA), and the Center has been recognized for programming excellence by the Center for Interactive Learning and Collaboration, the Georgia Association of Museum, and the Southeastern Museums Conference.

In 2019, Anthony announced his retirement at the end of the year. He now serves in a consulting capacity, advising the current Executive Director, Beth Schiavo, and representing the Center on national level as the head of UNIMA-USA. Schiavo came to the Center as Interim Managing Director in the fall of 2019 to assist in the executive transition, and when the Center faced the crisis of COVID-19, she was instrumental in leading the team to new and innovative programming practices. As a result, the Board ask Schiavo to become the Center’s permanent Executive Director. As the Center continues to move into the future, it will remain an institution unlike any other, truly interpreting this unique and far-reaching art form by combining the experience of live performance, static exhibition, and interactive education.

Performance: When not stifled by a global pandemic, the Center’s Performance program annually produces and presents more than 600 fully-staged live puppetry performances through the Center’s Family Series and New Directions Series for Adults and Teens. Both series include original performances written or adapted by the Center and created in-house by Center staff and/or by talented craftspeople and composers from the metro Atlanta area. These productions are performed by the Center Company, with all singing and speaking parts performed live. The Center also presents noteworthy guest artists from around the nation and the world each year, which not only enriches Atlanta’s artistic landscape with diverse talent and points of view, but it also provides opportunities for local artists to learn from and be inspired by other performers.

Cultivating local, national, and international artists helps to make the Center accessible to audiences of all backgrounds, and when combined with the familiarity of puppetry, makes it one of Atlanta's most approachable arts institutions for children. As such, the Center often serves as the first live theater experience for many children. Family Series performances such as Harold and the Purple Crayon, Pete the Cat, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer^TM, and our recently debuted production of Stellaluna use puppetry as a medium to teach, inspire, and mesmerize.

The Center is dedicated to serving audiences of all ages. While the Family Series brings in school groups and families with children, the New Directions Series for Adults and Teens draws in a different audience. Edgy, provocative projects such as Xperimental Puppetry Theater, offered annually since 1983; The Ghastly Dreadfuls, a critically acclaimed Halloween-inspired performance; and other adult-oriented performances from local and international puppetry companies, provide adult audiences with fresh and innovative puppetry experiences.

The Center has a long history of producing high-quality work, and the Center’s performance program has received numerous awards, including 13 Citations of Excellence from UNIMA-USA (the American branch of the international puppetry organization), the Spirit of Suzi Award from the Suzi Bass Awards (Atlanta’s Annual Theater Awards) in 2011, Kennesaw State University’s Flourish Award for Outstanding Arts Organization in 2012, a Governor’s Award for Arts and Humanities in 2013, a Children’s Theater Foundation of America Medallion Award in 2019, and ten Suzi Bass Awards, including one for the 2019 production of Harold and the Purple Crayon.

Museum: The Center houses two permanent museum exhibition galleries and one temporary exhibition gallery. The Jim Henson Collection Gallery, representing the largest collection of Jim Henson artifacts in existence, presents visitors with a chronological journey through the body of work of one of the most prolific artists in American History. The Global Collection Gallery, arranged geographically, sheds light on the global significance of puppetry in education, entertainment, politics, and religion by exploring the universal elements and themes of the art form. The Center’s most recent special exhibit, Jim Henson's The Dark Crystal: World of Myth and Magic, examined how Henson revolutionized puppeteering and film-making with the technologies and materials invented for the film’s creation and was honored with awards from the Georgia Association of Museums and Galleries’ 2019 Museum Exhibition Award and the Southeastern Museums Conference.

Since 1978, the Center’s Museum has curated a collection that includes over 4,000 puppets, costumes, and props from around the world. The Museum also maintains the largest puppetry library in the country. Serving scholars and the general public alike, the Nancy Staub Puppetry Research Library houses over 1,100 books, 1,900 videos, 1,300 periodicals, and 1,000 posters and includes a substantial number of Center-related videos, ephemera, photos, articles, and posters from the founding of the Center to present day.

While programming is currently limited due to COVID-19, the Museum normally attracts and educates visitors of all ages by offering events and programs for a wide range of ages in order to expand upon the learning that happens within its exhibitions. The Center’s Education and Museum departments collaborate throughout the year to provide additional enriching programs for school groups, homeschooled children, and families. Through storytelling and puppet building exercises, the curriculum-based programs of Discovery Days, Wiggle Wednesdays for Toddlers, and Tale Times celebrate the rich cultural history of puppetry and highlight the intersection of academic subjects and the arts. Meanwhile, events such as The Dark Crystal Ball, screenings of documentaries, and Puppets & Pints offer adult audiences a chance to enjoy the Center in their own way.

Education: The Center has spent over four decades improving enrichment opportunities that support educational standards across the curriculum for students and offer continuing education opportunities for adult audiences. For student audiences, the Center uses the art form of puppetry to facilitate educational experiences that encourage creativity, support school-day learning, fuel holistic development, and provide accessible, hands-on opportunities to participate in arts activities. The Center’s signature Education initiative for student and family audiences is the Create-A-Puppet Workshop™, which offers more than 1,000 hours of fun, hands-on programming each year.

The Explore Puppetry Series offers adult learners workshops on topics including puppet manipulation, costuming, fundraising for artists, sound design for puppetry films, and more. For students ages 9-12 who wish to develop their puppetry skills, the Center offers the Junior Explorer Series, based on the Explore Puppetry Series, which includes age-appropriate workshops taught by Puppeteers and Teaching Artists and a summer Puppet Camp. Through video conferencing technology, the Center’s award-winning Digital Learning Program (established in 1998) has provided puppetry performances and curriculum-supporting programs to audiences from all 50 states and nine countries (prior to the COVID-19 pandemic), and the Center also offers outreach activities to schools and community groups of all ages. Since the COVID-19 crisis began, Digital Learning’s Center@Home initiative has provided hundreds of thousands of viewers with free and low-cost educational content.