Theodora Skipitares is an award-winning New York–based interdisciplinary artist. 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.
Theodora Skipitares
Studios
Garland
Theodora Skipitares worked in the Garland studio.
Marian MacDowell and friends originally named this studio in memory of Anna Baetz, the nurse who helped care for Edward MacDowell in the waning years of his life. With generous support from the Garland family, the studio was renovated in 2013 and renamed the Peter and Mary Garland Studio. The inward opening, diamond-pane windows were replaced…