Visiting Puppeteer

Starting in 2024, each year the Movement Lab will host a puppeteer to teach students in a multidisciplinary art form with broad historical and global roots. Learn more below.

Puppetry engages a range of disciplines, including performance, sculpture, textiles and illustration, with movement and gesture as the basis of identity. Through the generosity of RISD parent Cheryl Henson P 24, whose late father was internationally celebrated puppeteer Jim Henson, the Movement Lab will host RISD’s first visiting puppeteer in Wintersession 2024. Over the course of five years, different visiting puppeteers will help students develop a foundational understanding of puppetry, a multicultural art form with roots in Africa, Asia, Europe, Mexico and the US.

Andrew Murdock — 2024 visiting puppeteer

five people dressed in Western-style coats and hats work on a film set as a screen in the background projects a pair of hands working with a grain-like substance

Andrew Murdock is an interdisciplinary artist whose work often bridges the tangible and digital by utilizing techniques in video, physical theater and puppetry. He is very excited to be the first visiting puppeteer at RISD for Wintersession 2024, where he will teach a puppetry course for students to draw from preexisting knowledge and explore inherent movement in materials to create original live puppet performances.

More about Andrew Murdock

Get to know RISD

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Movement Lab home

Through experimental research, active learning and exchange, this space supports investigations of the social, cultural, ecological and expressive properties of movement.

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Film/Animation/Video department

Explore the art of the moving image and master the tools you need to articulate a creative vision, through film, animation, installations, interactive media and more.

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Campus resources

From the expansive collections of the RISD Museum and Fleet Library to interdisciplinary labs and student galleries, you’ll find many ways at RISD to inspire, refine and share your best work.