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John Bell is Director of the Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry, and Associate Professor of Dramatic Arts at the University of Connecticut. He is a founding member of Great Small Works theater company; was a member of the Bread and Puppet Theater company from 1976 to 1986; and received his PhD in theater history from Columbia University in 1993. He is the author of many books and articles about puppet history and theory, including American Puppet Modernism (2008), and Strings, Hands, Shadows: A Modern Puppet History (2000); edited Puppets, Masks, and Performing Objects (2001); and, with Dassia Posner and Claudia Orenstein, edited The Routledge Companion to Puppetry and Material Performance (2014). He is a contributing editor of Puppetry International, the publication of UNIMA-USA.