Center for Puppetry Arts

Performances: in its first full theatrical season in the post-covid era, the Center offered nearly 550 performances496 family series and 51 new directions series for adults and teensacross sixteen fully-staged theatrical productions. Family series productions included Center productions like rudolph the red-nosed reindeer, little pirate mermaid, and duke ellingtons cat and new directions series productions included the ghastly dreadfuls, xperimental Puppetry theater, avanti da vinci, and the world premiere of tesla vs edison, which explored the rivalry at the heart of the current war and drew parallels to the present-day world of computers and cellphones, exploring how greed, ambition, mistrust, propaganda, and narcissism influenced the development of the nation's electrical grid.

Education: in addition to offering over 1,000 hours of the centers signature create-a-puppet workshops to nearly 40,000 participants, staff reached over 6,400 children and adults with outreach programming and over 4,900 students of all ages and abilities with special workshops. This included partnering with the 2nd grade classrooms of burgess-peterson academy (an atlanta public school) to ensure diverse voices and ideas were incorporated into the centers original production duke ellingtons cat, which premiered in 2008. Meanwhile, the digital learning team used zoom to share workshops and puppet shows with nearly 9,000 audience members and won another pinnacle award from the Center for interactive learning and collaboration (cilc).

Museum: in addition to welcoming over 110,000 visitors into the museums two permanent exhibition galleries, the Center offered a variety of pop-up and special exhibitions and programming. Special exhibitions included the exhibitions where the wild things are, which featured puppets used in the 2009 spike jonze film adaptation of maurice sendaks classic childrens book, festive features, which highlighted puppets created to celebrate the winter holidays such as two of the stop motion puppets from the 1964 rankin/bass rudolph the red-nosed reindeer television special, and a Puppetry now exhibition showcasing the work of tarish jeghetto pipkins, a ground-breaking artist who uses salvaged and recycled materials to create afro-futuristic puppets in a post-apocalyptic world.