Dive deeper into the world of puppetry with these Winter and Spring Courses for 2026!
Learn from Toronto’s best puppeteers, and guest artists from around the world. Whether you are just starting to dabble in puppetry, or honing your skills, there are courses for everyone.
Head to the Toronto School of Puppetry website for up to date information on adult learning courses.
Please note, registration deadlines are one week before each class begins.
June 1-2 at Puppetmongers Studio, Toronto
This annual mini-conference-and-festival showcases artists taking new and ground-breaking directions in puppetry. It is an event for exciting innovations and explorations, presentations, demonstrations and discussions, culminating in an evening cabaret of short fresh new performances. A stimulating event for everyone interested in current developments in puppetry.
If you are interested in presenting a talk, a discussion, a demonstration, a show & tell, or a short performance, either live of online, please contact Puppetmongers – email ann@puppetmongers.com
Fresh Ideas in Puppetry is officially accredited by UNIMA Canada, and supported by our wonderful donors and funders the Toronto Arts Council and the Ontario Arts Council.
📸 Photo from the 2022 Fresh Ideas in Puppetry conference from Teatr Fraktal, Poland
The application deadline is January 26th, 2026.
The materials & workshop fee is $300
What is PXL? A mentorship program for individual artists and/or small groups to work on projects in puppetry or that integrate puppetry into multi-media arts projects.
Puppetry is an art form that combines literature, music, mime, dance, drama, and the visual arts to make a sum greater than its parts. It is among the last great under-explored frontier of the arts! Our Puppetry eXploratory Laboratory (PXL) is modeled on the famous XPT program at the Center for Puppetry Arts in Atlanta.
For full details and to apply to the program, visit the Toronto School of Puppetry website
About Last Landscape:
In a sometime somewhere devoid of nature, posthuman ‘workers’ enter an empty space and assemble a series of artificial landscapes out of found objects, striving with their bodies to recreate the natural world from memory. But is it the deep past we see, or some genetically modified future?
The world premiere of Last Landscape blends Bad New Days’ signature brand of physical theatre with an eco-dramaturgical, DIY aesthetic to create a slowly transforming, imagistic meditation on extinction, ecological grief and interspecies care, where colossal puppets of prehistoric megafauna roam free. On the brink of environmental collapse, Last Landscape offers hopeful possibilities for how we might share this big green miraclemarble.
Last Landscape was nominated for 8 Dora Awards in 2025, winning 2 for Scenic Design & Sound Design
Puppetmongers is proud to have contributed to the design for Last Landscape with puppet design and builds of the dog and geese puppets!
Last Landscape prioritises sustainability in every stage of its creation—from the artistic vision to the materials used in production . Because of its eco-dramaturgical ethos, Last Landscape was recently awarded the prestigious Ray Ferris Innovation and Sustainability Grant from the Ontario Arts Foundation and the Toronto Alliance for the Performing Arts.
Congratulations to all artists involved!
The Margo Bindhardt and Rita Davies Award celebrates individuals who have demonstrated creative cultural leadership in arts and culture in Toronto.
The award is supported by Toronto Arts Foundation’s general donations and is presented every two years at the Mayor’s Arts Lunch.
Puppetmongers proudly presents Foolish Tales in Foolish Times at their studio at Dundas and Carlaw this December for the whole family!
Four classic tales of misadventure are combined to take the audience on a journey of venerable folk wisdom, in a celebration of our shared humanity.
Join us this December 26-30 at 2pm, and December 28 at 7pm for a show that is guaranteed to please the young and young-at-heart alike, aged 4 to 104!
Take a course with Puppetmongers this fall to begin your puppetry journey, or to hone your skills as a puppeteer.
Please note, registration deadlines are one week before each class begins.
November 5th from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. $125 registration
Marionettes, or String Puppets, move and work quite differently from other types of puppet. Their unique relationship to gravity, and the balance of tension and weight created in their construction gives them a very special character. In this introductory workshop, each participant will create a simple cloth marionette, with just a few well placed strings, and with an emphasis on experimentation, discover how to animate it. N.B. If there is enough interest, we will also offer a Beyond Basics Marionette course in winter/spring 2024.
November 12th from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. $125 registration.
There is something mesmerizing about shadows. With the animator hidden, the audience’s eyes are drawn into the action on the screen, much as we are now seduced by computer and movie screens. Creating a shadow puppet play is like making a “live movie” for a live audience. This workshop will immerse the participants in contemporary shadow puppetry methods and technology, and visit the living traditions of shadow puppetry around the world. Participants will design and build their own shadow puppets, explore animation techniques and light sources, and then work together to develop short shadow skits.
November 19th from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. $125 registration
\At first glance looking like a set and costume designer’s scale model, a Toy Theatre is a complete theatre in miniature, with little puppet actors manipulated by rods from above or beside the stage, with scenery that rolls, folds or flies, and all kinds of wonderful theatrical surprises. In this workshop, participants will each transform an ordinary cardboard box into magnificent miniature theatre, complete with little puppet actors, and discover the possibilities of scenic effects – perspective and scale, pop-up scenery and scenic vistas, trap doors and moving dioramas to name a few.
November 26th from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. $125 registration
Puppets should act believably, just as actors do. What is the character feeling? What do they want? Why are they doing that? Bringing acting to your puppetry means creating a discernable inner life for your character. The audience should be able to see its feelings, understand its thoughts, and relate to the goals that it has from one moment to the next within a scene. Teach Your Puppets to Act will give puppeteers the basics of acting – from breath to movement to script analysis – so that your puppets can engage the attention of your audience and keep them with you all the way from “lights up” to “curtain”.
Date: October 22nd, at 3:00 p.m.
Location: Puppetmongers Studio (Carlaw and Dundas East)
Duration: 30-40 Minutes
Tickets: $15
Reservations only please – no walk-ups
“The Rain Bride” is a rain ritual from west Iran, traditionally performed with puppets, based on latent themes of femininity and fertility. During drought, young women build a wooden cross and adorn it with colourful fabrics to make it look like a young woman whom they call “The Rain Bride.” Afterwards, they walk her through the town, singing and encouraging onlookers to give money and food to the bride as an offering for her holy marriage to Heaven.
This workshop performance is the first development phase of an immersive project in which participants will take part in a journey to create their own” Rain Bride” and share food. Please bring some food, such as fruits and snacks, as the offering.
Afsaneh Zamani is an award-winning theatre director, puppeteer and performer. She has created and performed numerous interactive theatre and puppetry works focusing on rituals and folk stories. She has performed in international festivals across Asia, Europe and North America and received acclaimed international awards. She has experience being a board member of Mubarak UNIMA (the Iranian branch of UNIMA). “The Rain Bride” is her new project, exploring puppetry and recreating rituals.
We have a total of $5,000 to divide between all worthy projects
CLICK HERE for the full guidelines and application form
Puppetmongers is seeking applications from artists who wish to develop puppetry projects. Our priorities and areas of interest are:
Projects may be at any stage of development prior to production or workshop production. These small grants are particularly suited to helping artists with the earliest phases of creation, the development of ideas, the building of a creative team etc.
We have a total of $5,000 to assign between all successful applications, thus the grants we can recommend range from a minimum of $1,000 to the unlikely maximum of $3,000. In previous years, our recommendations have tended to be on the lower end, in order to spread the support over a few projects. We are curious and excited to see what the artistic community has percolating, and extremely grateful to the Ontario Arts Council for their increased support of puppetry.
Deadline for applications is 11:59 p.m. ET on Saturday October 26th, 2024. We strongly recommend that you submit your application at least by the day before this deadline, to avoid technical glitches.
Before you apply, note that we request that submissions include a budget and a short bio for all participants in their support material. NOTE: We do not wish to receive script samples but do want ideas in the form of sketches, influences, photos… which can be included as stills or video in the Audio/Visual link.
These small Recommender Grants for Theatre Creators are to provide time in which to explore, experiment, and develop an idea in its infancy, and the why, what and how of the puppetry of it. This is not a grant to write or finish a script; it is not a grant to build already-designed puppets; or to complete a show for performance bookings.
With puppetry being such a visual artform, we don’t find script samples useful in helping us get a feel for your proposed project: so please attach in your application any images, inspirations and influences; sketches and storyboards; any mock-ups of puppetry and performance ideas – anything that would give us insight into how puppetry is to be incorporated into your plans. We do not want scripts!
All applicants must meet the criteria requirements of the Ontario Arts Council.
For more information on Recommender Grants for Theatre Creators, and to access the full guidelines and the application form:
The Margo Bindhard and Rita Davies Award celebrates an individual artist, creator, volunteer or administrator who has demonstrated creative cultural leadership in the development of arts and culture in Toronto.
Ann and David Powell have been shortlisted for the award, along with D. Brainerd Blyden-Taylor and Naomi Johnson. The Puppetmongers are grateful to be among this incredible group of finalists.
The recipient of the Margo Bindhardt and Rita Davies Award will be announced on April 17, 2023.
