By Cecilia Cackley

Our next Puppet Lobby event is scheduled for Monday, November 6 at 7pm. We hope you’ll join us at the Brookland Artspace Lofts for some great conversation and community-building. We are excited to start talking about a subject our company has been interested in from the beginning–stop-motion animation using puppets. 

Stop-motion animation has a long history of artists using puppets very effectively from Jan Svankmajer to the Brothers Quay. At the Puppet Lobby we will hear from local artists Hamida Khatri and Noa Heyne about their experiences studying stop-motion at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). 

Art installation by Hamida Khatri

Hamida Khatri works in a variety of mediums — from figurative drawings, to photography, to sculptural puppets, to animation. As well as an artist, she is also a writer, curator, arts educator, community activist, and a creative arts therapist. We were lucky enough to screen her stop-motion short film, Mom & Me as part of our Puppet SlamNation back in September. 

Sculpture by Noa Heyne.

Noa Heyne holds an MFA in Sculpture from MICA and has also studied in New York, Italy and Jerusalem. Her work has been exhibited in Baltimore, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem and she will have an installation in CulturalDC’s Space4 mobile gallery next year. 

In addition to a presentation on stop-motion animation, this Puppet Lobby will also include a conversation between Cecilia Cackley and Nina Budabin McQuown, both Wit’s End Puppets company members, about the challenges of writing plays specifically for puppets. Whether you are a puppeteer yourself or an eager audience member, the Puppet Lobby will give you a chance to ask questions, meet artists and find out more about this infinitely varied art form. See you on November 6th!