Liz Oakley

Liz is a puppeteer, performance-maker, designer, and teaching artist who uses object performance to manipulate scale and challenge the rules of engagement with place. Her project The Anywhere Festival of Everywhere Stages, a collection of miniature site-specific puppet shows, appeared at the Art in Odd Places Festival and was the recipient of the May 2021 NYC Awesome Grant. Her original performance creations have appeared at Dixon Place, The Tank, the Wassaic Project, Coney Island USA, AS220, the Providence Fringe Festival, Judson Memorial Church, and various street corners and living rooms. Her puppet and prop designs have appeared at 59E59, Mixed Magic Theater, Saratoga Shakespeare Company, the Providence Fringe Festival, the New Masculinities Festival, Boston Center for the Arts, and Production Workshop. Liz has been a puppeteer and puppet marshal in various parades including the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, the Peoplehood Parade, the Village Halloween Parade, and the Mad Hatter’s Parade. In 2021 Liz was artist-in-residence at the Sable Project and the Object Movement Digital Puppetry Lab, and a fellow at the Headlong Performance Institute.

In 2016, Liz received her BA from Brown University with a concentration in Spatial Studies, an independently designed multidisciplinary course of study exploring the significance of people’s lived experience of space. In 2018, she received the UNIMA-USA Scholarship for American puppeteers to study puppetry abroad and completed a five-month puppetry training at the Théâtre Aux Mains Nues in Paris. Liz grew up in New York City and currently resides in Philadelphia.

Multi-scaled, ever-evolving puppet creatures explore the terrain of a human body, encountering reflections and iterations of form and self. Bodywhere considers the body as both performance site and landscape, exploring questions of how we navigate, rely on, exploit, and dynamically relate to land and location.

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