{{short description|American interdisciplinary artist}} {{Use mdy dates|date=April 2018}} {{Infobox artist | honorific_prefix = | name = Theodora Skipitares | honorific_suffix = | image = | image_size = | alt = | caption = | native_name = | native_name_lang = | birth_name = | birth_date = | birth_place = San Francisco, CA | baptised = | death_date = | death_place = | resting_place = | education = {{plainlist| *University of California, Berkeley *New York University's School of the Arts }} | alma_mater = | known_for = Puppeteering | notable_works = | style = Interdisciplinary arts | movement = | spouse = | partner = | children = | parents = | father = | mother = | relatives = | family = | awards = New York Innovative Theatre Awards | signature = | signature_type = | signature_size = | signature_alt = | elected = | patrons = | memorials = | website = {{URL|https://theodoraskipitares.net}} | module = }}
'''Theodora Skipitares''' is an American interdisciplinary artist, based in New York. Trained as a sculptor and theater designer, she began creating autobiographical solo performances in the late 1970s. She moved on to examine diverse social and political themes using a wide variety of puppets, of all sizes. She has created 26 original works featuring various forms of puppetry, original commissioned music, video, and documentary texts.
Skipitares is Associate Professor of Art and Design Education at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, and has taught workshops in various U.S. universities as well as abroad, influencing many emerging artists. She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, and UNIMA (the International Puppetry Association), as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rockefeller Fellowship and a McKnight Playwriting Fellowship, among other honors. She won the American Theatre Wing's Henry Hewes Design Award in 1999, and her productions garnered two New York Innovative Theatre Awards in 2005. Her visual work has been exhibited widely in the U.S., Europe, and Asia. In 2014 her work was on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art in ''Rituals of Rented Island: Object Theater, Loft Performance, and the New Psychodrama.''<ref>{{Cite book|title=Rituals of Rented Island: Object Theater, Loft Performance, and the New Psychodrama—Manhattan, 1970–1980|last1=Sanders|first1=Jay|last2=Hoberman|first2=J.|publisher=Whitney Museum of American Art|year=2013|location=New York}}</ref>
== Early life in Bay Area == Skipitares was born in San Francisco to Greek parents.<ref>{{Cite news |title=Theodora Skipitares |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/25/theater/25kath.html |access-date=2026-03-22 |newspaper=The New York Times |last=Shattuck |first=Kathryn |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160414200134/https://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/25/theater/25kath.html |url-status=live |archive-date=2016-04-14}}</ref> From an early age, she made objects, usually sewn objects that were worn. As a teenager she began performing in the streets or in public parks, usually for a political cause. When she went to UC Berkeley, she continued sewing and gluing together body coverings for her street performances. These objects included a robe of 3,000 walnut shells, a jump suit of 1,000 baby-bottle nipples, and a 12-foot tall construction of tree branches and bark.<ref>{{Cite book|title=Puppets, Masks, and Performing Objects|last=Bell|first=John, Ed.|publisher=MIT Press|year=1999|location=Cambridge, MA|pages=125}}</ref>
== Move to New York == In 1969 Skipitares arrived in New York City to attend New York University's School of the Arts. After completing her MFA in theater design, Skipitares worked briefly as a costume designer for Richard Schechner's Performance Group, Omar Shapli's Section Ten and Carl Weber. She then began creating solo performances, highlighting some of the conflicts between Greek and American culture she had experienced as a young woman. Using masks or costume extensions of her body, she focused on the female body as the source of storytelling and ritual in such works as ''Mask Performance'' (1975), ''The Venus Cafe'' (1977), ''The Mother and the Maid'' (1979), and ''Skysaver'' (1980)<ref name="Skipitares 1999">{{Cite journal|last=Skipitares|first=Theodora|date=Fall 1999|title=Articulations: The History of All Things|journal=TDR: The Drama Review|volume=43| issue = 3|pages=135, 138–39|doi=10.1162/105420499760347379|s2cid=57565411}}</ref> and was the lead off performer at ''Public Arts International/Free Speech'',
== The first puppets == Skipitares introduced 30-inch self-portrait figures into her performances in 1981, initially in supporting roles but eventually taking over the stage. She saw these "puppets" as having an innocence and a purity that make them especially effective in illuminating and critiquing social and political issues.<ref name="Skipitares 1999" /> She has explained that "the puppet is an empty shell, and the puppeteer's job is to breathe life into the empty vessel. And if the intention of the puppeteer is pure, then the soul of the puppet is pure. And so you can ask the puppet to be a person, and it will be that person with a lightness and innocence and authenticity."<ref>{{Cite journal|last=Stanley|first=N. J.|date=June 2003|title=History as Theme Park: Reconfiguring the Human Journey in the Art of Theodora Skipitares|journal=TDR: The Drama Review|volume=47| issue = 2|pages=35|doi=10.1162/105420403321921238|s2cid=57568111}}</ref> Her first play for puppet figures was ''Micropolis'' (1982), a collection of miniature scenes based on actual events taking place in New York and other cities.
Marrying documentary material (from historical accounts to breaking news) with puppets of all sizes, Skipitares began creating large-scale puppet performances on a variety of topics. ''The Age of Invention'' (1984), with a cast of 300 puppets and 5 live performers, traced the saga of American invention from Benjamin Franklin through Thomas Edison to a twentieth-century salesman/surgeon. ''Defenders of the Code: A Musical History of Genetics'' (1987) was described by ''New York Times'' critic Mel Gussow as “an illuminating exploration into the laboratories of life."<ref>{{Cite news|url=https://www.nytimes.com/1987/02/19/arts/stage-music-and-puppets-in-defenders-of-the-code.html|title=Stage: Music and Puppets in 'Defenders of the Code|last=Gussow|first=Mel|date=February 19, 1987|work=New York Times|access-date=March 8, 2018}}</ref> ''Empires and Appetites'' (1989) presented a history of food and famine, and ''The Radiant City'' (1991) exposed how New York City was shaped by power broker Robert Moses.
== Works at La MaMa == In 1992 Skipitares became a resident artist at La MaMa, an experimental theater in New York City. She has presented 25 productions at La MaMa, including ''Under the Knife'' (1994), a site-specific history of medicine that took an audience to 12 different environments, and ''Body of Crime'' (1996/1999), a history of women in prison. Reviewing ''Underground'' (1992), ''New York Times'' critic David Richards noted, "Ms. Skipitares is a social critic…. At the same time, she is something of a metaphysician and a disquieting sense of dread and dislocation attend her endeavors…. She wants you to look hard and close into dark nooks and spooky crannies."<ref>{{Cite news|title=Sunday View: When Games Become Acts of Heroism|last=Richards|first=David|date=December 6, 1992|work=New York Times}}</ref>
From 1995 to 2005 Skipitares traveled frequently with La MaMa's founder, Ellen Stewart, to create projects in Vietnam, Cambodia, Serbia, Albania, and South Africa. In 1999 Skipitares went to India on the first of three Fulbright fellowships there.<ref>{{Cite journal|last=Skipitares|first=Theodora|date=September 2013|title=A New Aesthetic in Indian Puppetry|journal=PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art|volume=35|issue=3|pages=61–68|doi=10.1162/PAJJ_a_00162|s2cid=57562063}}</ref> Its impressive traditions of storytelling and puppetry led her into a reexamination of her own roots and the dramatic literature of ancient Greece. Beginning in 2003, she created three works connecting the Trojan War with the Iraq War: ''Helen: Queen of Sparta,'' ''Odyssey: The Homecoming,'' and ''Iphigenia''. In 2009 she premiered ''The Travelling Players Present the Women of Troy,'' a play in which giant 13-foot-high puppets representing contemporary real-life female activists from Africa and Afghanistan "gave birth" to Euripides' characters in the play ''Trojan Women''.
Skipitares continued to explore Greek texts with a production of ''Lysistrata'' in 2010 and ''Prometheus Within'' in 2011. Skipitares then shifted to an exploration of absurdist plays of the twentieth century. Her ''The Chairs'' (2014) was a "puppet theater response" to Eugene Ionesco's play.<ref>{{Cite news|url=https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/27/theater/a-puppet-theater-response-to-ionesco-in-the-chairs.html|title=If Chairs Could Talk? These Can|last=Jaworowski|first=Ken|date=May 26, 2014|work=New York Times|access-date=March 8, 2018}}</ref> She created 29 "performing" chairs and let each chair tell the story of a real-life person, in contrast to the invisibility of Ionesco's "guests." Judith Malina, a founder of the Living Theater, was the voice of the Old Woman, the host for all the guests. In 2016 Skipitares staged ''Six Characters (A Family Album),'' a reimagination of Luigi Pirandello's classic play.<ref>{{Cite journal|last=Larkin|first=Daniel|date=April 8, 2016|title=Six Characters in Search of a Puppetmaster|url=https://hyperallergic.com/289494/six-characters-in-search-of-a-puppetmaster/|journal=Hyperallergic}}</ref>
== References == <references />
== External links == *{{Official website|http://theodoraskipitares.com/artist.htm}}
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Skipitares, Theodora}} Category:American puppeteers Category:Artists from Brooklyn Category:Year of birth missing (living people) Category:American interdisciplinary artists Category:New York University alumni Category:Pratt Institute faculty Category:Puppet designers Category:University of California, Berkeley alumni Category:Living people Category:Women puppeteers