Theodora Skipitares

Theodora Skipitares is an American visual-theatre artist born in San Francisco to Greek parents who transforms puppets, documentary text, music, video, and choreographed object movement into performances that examine history and institutions. She trained as a sculptor and theatre designer at the University of California, Berkeley, and earned an MFA from New York University before working with experimental theatre groups including Richard Schechner's Performance Group.

In the mid-to-late 1970s, Skipitares began making autobiographical solo performances built around handmade objects worn on or extending her body. Small three-dimensional self-representations gradually entered these works and became puppets, shifting her practice from embodied autobiography toward object-based theatre. This evolution opened a new artistic language: rather than performing autobiography through her own flesh, she began to stage it through figures she could manipulate, position, and multiply.

Skipitares used puppetry and large-scale sculptural environments to examine public history. *Under the Knife* moved audiences through twelve environments in a history of medicine, while *Body of Crime* engaged women and incarceration. These works combined documentary texts, original music, film, video, and casts ranging from intimate figures to hundreds of puppets—each scale choice altering how viewers experienced the content. Her long relationship with La MaMa, where she became a resident artist, provided the experimental-theatre context in which these large visual structures took shape.

In the 2000s, Skipitares developed a cycle of works engaging the Trojan War: *Helen*, *Odyssey*, and *Iphigenia*. She later responded to canonical modern drama with *The Chairs* and *Six Characters*, applying her visual-theatre vocabulary to canonical texts. International work in India, Vietnam, Cambodia, Korea, and elsewhere expanded her encounter with puppetry traditions and teaching, supported by Fulbright, Guggenheim, Rockefeller, NEA, NYFA, and UNIMA fellowships. Two New York Innovative Theatre Awards recognized *Iphigenia*.

As an educator at Pratt Institute and resident artist at La MaMa, Skipitares joins studio craft to rehearsal, research, and pedagogy. Her figures do not merely illustrate written history; their scale, materiality, and manipulated motion ask how bodies—live and constructed—become evidence, symbols, witnesses, and political subjects.