Janie Geiser

Janie Geiser is a leading figure in the renewal of American avant-garde puppet theatre, choreographing objects, projected images and human attention into intimate, psychologically charged performances that dissolve boundaries among stage, screen and installation. Born in Baton Rouge in 1957, Geiser studied visual art at the University of Georgia before moving to Atlanta, where she encountered contemporary puppet performance including the work of Bruce Schwartz. With encouragement from Vince Anthony at the Center for Puppetry Arts, she began making short experimental puppet pieces and co-founded Jottay Theatre with composer Chip Epsten in 1981.

Jottay's Atlanta productions moved beyond conventional puppet presentation. Works including *Little Eddie*, *Sleep*, *The Glass Dream*, *Blue Night* and *Stories From Here*—which received an Obie Award in 1989—joined drawing and sculpture to stylized motion, live music and theatrical framing rather than treating puppets as substitute actors. In 1984, *Blue Night* was presented at UNIMA's 13th World Puppetry Festival in Dresden. After relocating to New York in 1990, Geiser continued as a puppeteer, director, designer and filmmaker within the city's experimental-performance community, developing works such as *When the Wind Blows*, *Evidence of Floods* and *Night Behind the Windows* that explored miniature environments and fragmentary narratives. A 1992 Guggenheim Fellowship recognized her puppetry and interdisciplinary performance.

Film became an independent strand of her practice during the 1990s. Her shorts use painted figures, toys, found photographs, collage, rephotography and stop-motion to create unstable memory spaces. *The Red Book* (1994) was selected for the National Film Registry in 2009, placing Geiser's experimental animation within the U.S. preservation canon. In 1998, Geiser was appointed to direct the Cotsen Center for Puppetry and the Arts at CalArts. In 2004, she and Susan Simpson founded Automata in Los Angeles as a home for experimental puppet theatre, film and art organized around performing objects. Geiser remains a School of Theater faculty member and a founder and co-director of Automata.

Later projects have continued to dissolve boundaries among performance forms. In works such as *Clouded Sulphur* and *Fugitive Time*, live puppeteers, projections, scrims, shadow and miniature figures produce shifting scales and times. Geiser's honors include a 2016 Doris Duke Artist Award, a 2018 MacDowell Fellowship, the 2023 Stan Brakhage Vision Award and a 2025–26 Rauschenberg Residency.