Eight Chicago artists from diverse backgrounds and disciplines have spent the past eight months in residence at the Chicago Puppet Lab, the Chicago Puppet International Puppet Theater Festival’s puppet theater incubator and residency program.
Operating out of the Festival’s education and work spaces in Chicago’s Fine Arts Building, the program supports emerging artists as they bring new, original works of puppet theater to life.
Thursday, August 20 through Sunday, August 23, the program culminates with this year’s cohort presenting works-in-progress at the Chicago Puppet Lab Showcase at Raven Theatre, 6157 N. Clark Street in Chicago’s Edgewater neighborhood.
Program A features works by Rachel Anne Healy, Raven See, Mikayla Wilson and Zachary Sun. Performances are Friday, August 21 at 7 p.m., Saturday, August 22 at 3 p.m. and Sunday, August 23 at 7 p.m.
Program B showcases works by Ashwaty Chennat, Jerrell L Henderson, Abby Palen and Justin D’Acci. Show times are Thursday, August 20 at 7 p.m., Saturday, August 22 at 7 p.m. and Sunday, August 23 at 3 p.m.
Take your pick or buy tickets to two rotating group shows. Each presents a varied quartet of short, experimental works-in-progress that have grown and developed the past eight months through the Festival’s new puppetry incubation laboratory. Tickets to each program are $15 for student and seniors; $20 regular; $50 booster. For tickets and information, visit chicagopuppetfest.org.
And mark your calendars: The 9th Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival is January 20-31, 2027, returning bigger and better than ever with puppeteers from around the globe presenting 12 straight days of spectacular shows, intimate works, the popular Free Neighborhood Tour, and more events all over the city. Sign up for the Chicago Puppet Festival e-news at chicagopuppetfest.org/signup to be the first to learn the 2026 line-up.
More about the Chicago Puppet Lab
In addition to presenting the largest annual puppetry festival of its kind in North America, the Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival’s Chicago Puppet Lab is an education space that incubates new works of boundary-breaking puppetry, expands equity in the field of puppetry, and encourages interdisciplinary experimentation in puppet theater. Now in its sixth year, the program accepts eight artists or artist groups for an eight-month, in-person laboratory process led this year by Puppet Lab Co-Directors Tom Lee, Grace Needlman and Vanessa Valliere. Lab artists participate in weekly meetings where they share, discuss, meet deadlines, and learn from one-another’s work as well as from expert guest artists. Together all contribute to the advancement of the cohort’s work.
Meet the 2026 Chicago Puppet Lab cohort
Program A
Friday, August 21 at 7 p.m., Saturday, August 22 at 3 p.m. and Sunday, August 23 at 7 p.m.
Rachel Anne Healy is a Chicago-based theater artist. Credits include The Goodman Theatre, Steppenwolf Theatre, Chicago Shakespeare Theatre, Writers Theatre, Chicago Children’s Theatre, Northlight Theatre & Timeline Theatre. Regional Credits: American Players Theatre, Cincinnati Playhouse, Alliance Theatre, Milwaukee Repertory Theatre, Indiana Repertory Theatre, Hartford Stage, Huntington Theatre, & The Alley Theatre. International Credits: The Prague Quadrennial, Letni-Letna Festival in Prague and Galway Theatre Festival. Healy is a professor at Loyola University teaching theater design. IG: @healyrachelanne
Raven See is a gender non-comforming artist who follows their impulse to create. They are a spoken word poet, a contortionist, and member of the interdisciplinary movement collective Such Creatures. See is a graduate of Aloft Circus Arts’ professional training program and a member of the Board of Directors for the European Beat Studies Network. Their work embodies queer experience as they seek to explore new modes of expression and test the limits of their own body. IG: @see.the.raven
Zachary Sun is a China-born, Chicago-based interdisciplinary artist working across performance, installation, text, video, sound and puppetry. His practice instrumentalizes observation and perception, dismantling relationships between body, identity, history, and material through weaving and collage. His recent work investigates personal experience, archaeological histories, and geopolitical transformations as structural expressions. His works have been presented internationally, and he currently works with the Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival. IG: @zzzzacharyyyy
Mikayla Wilson (she/her) is a theater and puppetry artist from Asheville, North Carolina. Wilson is a crafter, primarily a knitter and sewist, and uses puppetry to tell history by making the puppets the vessel for the horrifying and painful parts of black history and experiences, but also the levity and brightness inherent to the human spirit. IG: @mikaylas_makes
Program B
Thursday, August 20 at 7 p.m., Saturday, August 22 at 7 p.m. and Sunday, August 23 at 3 p.m.
Ashwaty Chennat is an interdisciplinary artist and performance maker based in Chicago. Rooted in dance, Ashwaty’s training includes bharatanatyam with Sudha Chandrasekhar, studio dance practices, and heritage forms learned through her Amma and community artists. She has performed in and created works including Beaten Path with Alvin Cobb Jr., Moods of Nayika, with Abhijeet, and the ephemeral (ice) puppet show Anywhere by Théâtre de l’Entrouvert. Their practice begins with long conversations, meets the thresholds of cultural structures, and then reimagines inherited narratives. IG: @shwatcat
Justin D’Acci is a Chicago-based clown, artist, and puppeteer experimenting with found objects and techniques of automatism. His puppets often take the form of shadows and grotesque humanoids, appearing in Rough House’s House of the Exquisite Corpse III, IV, & V; We Wiggle Dolls’ Midwest Tour; and Auricle’s scrap !!! attak. Recent exhibitions of clown and art objects include Survey at Unda.m. 93; Tenebrae at Weatherproof; and Pressure Dome at SULK CHICAGO. IG: @stevebuscemi
Jerrell L. Henderson is a director, puppeteer and Black theatre archivist. Past projects include the cinematic shadow play AmericanMYTH: Crossroads and directing projects with Virginia Stage Company, Raven Theatre, and Griffin Theatre. He co-developed and co-staged events with 12ft. Syrian puppet Little Amal in Chicago and NYC. Puppet short films include I Am The Bear with Chicago Puppet Fest, Hamlin: La Revue Sombre with Handmade Puppet Dreams and Diamond’s Dream with Chicago Children’s Theatre. IG: @directnu15, @black_theatre_vinyl_archive, @celebratingblacktheatrepod
Abby Palen is a director, designer, and performer whose fascination with spectacle puppetry fabrication and performance has taken them across North America. For Palen, puppets express ideas and emotions that transcend human form; a puppet can embody many anythings and anyones. Palen is the co-director of Rabbit Foot Puppetry and has worked with the Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival, Paperhand Puppet Intervention, Bread and Puppet Theater, Heart of the Beast, Fox and Beggar, and more. IG: @abbyart
About the Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival
The Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival is the largest of its kind in North America. Last January’s 2026 Festival attracted a record 25,000+ audience members to 24 different Chicago venues large and small for 106 shows and events showcasing entertaining and eclectic puppet styles from around the world.
Since its inception in 2015 as a project of Blair Thomas & Co., the Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival promotes peace, equality, and justice on a global scale, presenting artists presented from around the world including Belgium, Chile, China, Denmark, England, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Israel, Japan, Kenya, Korea, Mexico, Norway, Puerto Rico, Poland, Scotland, South Africa, South Korea and Spain as well as from Chicago and across the U.S.
In 2022, the festival moved from a biennial to an annual event, while it tripled its footprint in Chicago’s historic Fine Arts Building, opened its own in-house puppet fabrication division, the Chicago Puppet Studio, and launched the Chicago Puppet Lab, an education space and developmental residency designed to incubate more works of boundary-breaking puppetry in Chicago.
It’s kismet that the Fine Arts Building is home again to one of the most influential puppetry organizations in the world. In 1912, after Ellen Van Volkenburg founded the Little Theater of Chicago in the Fine Arts Building. She needed a name for the actors manipulating marionettes in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, so she credited them in the program with a new word, “puppeteer.” Many agree this marked the initial intersection of traditional puppetry with contemporary theater still practiced today, and now flourishing around the world.
The Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival continues to grow and expand under the guidance of Co-Founder and Artistic Director Blair Thomas, Executive Director Sandy Smith Gerding, a dedicated staff, and a generous, active board of directors. For more, visit chicagopuppetfest.org and follow the festival on Facebook, Instagram or Vimeo, hashtag #ChiPuppetFest.
