An occasional look at Connecticut’s remarkable people, places and things John Bell sees puppets everywhere. Props at political protests, college sports mascots, Thanksgiving parade balloons, video game characters, Yoda — the list goes on. As director of the University of Connecticut’ s puppetry museum and associate professor of puppetry, Bell has imparted this way of seeing the world to scores of students and museum visitors since he arrived on campus in 2007.  “My definition of puppetry is performing with elements of the material world,” Bell said. “There are many different ways that people communicate, tell stories, celebrate with things that they make out of different materials.” The Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry showed Becoming Modern, an exhibit curated by John Bell, in Storrs on August 6, 2026. Credit: Julia Levine / CT Mirror To Bell, puppetry isn’t strictly for kids. It isn’t all that niche, either. It’s deeply embedded in everyday life, “invisible and ubiquitous,” he said.  Next month, after nearly two decades as the resident expert in puppetry history and traditions at UConn’s Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry, Bell plans to retire and turn his attention back to puppetry performance, where his interest in the art form started. Bell’s tenure leading the institute included the museum’s 2014 expansion and relocation to UConn’s main campus in Storrs — and its increasing renown within and beyond the professional theater world. UConn mascot Jonathan The Husky in the second half of an NCAA college basketball game against Xavier, Tuesday, Feb. 3, 2026, in Hartford, Conn. Credit: Jessica Hill / AP Photo The museum now houses more than 4,500 puppets from around the world. Each year, it welcomes about 8,000 visitors and hosts more than a dozen performances, along with puppet forums and exhibitions.  UConn offers the country’s only degree-granting program in puppetry of its kind, earning a reputation in the puppetry world akin to UConn’s legendary college basketball pedigree. The programs are aligned in another way, Bell likes to point out: Jonathan the Husky — the mascot, not the actual dog — is a puppet. Emily Wicks, manager of operations and collections at the Ballard Institute, said Bell made a big impression on her when she interviewed to work at the institute 14 years ago.  “He told me during that interview that anything can be a puppet, and that literally has stuck with me since,” Wicks said. Focusing outside the self Growing up in the 1950s, Bell first saw puppets on television shows geared toward children.  However, it was a live performance by the Bread and Puppet Theater in Vermont in 1972 that would ultimately change the course of his life. The performance group was known for using puppetry to address political and social issues — and for baking fresh bread that was served during performances.  One particular show about the Vietnam War resonated with Bell, then a young college student. Through it, Bell saw the ability of puppets to say things that might otherwise be difficult for a human performer to say directly. “It opens up what’s possible with politics,” Bell said.  John Bell leads flying lessons for a Bread and Puppet Theater performance in Istanbul in 2024. Credit: Photo Courtesy of John Bell As a student, Bell said, he was interested in acting, but he felt uneasy on stage.  “Acting is an amazing art form, but it requires you to focus on your body,” Bell said. “With puppetry, you focus just outside of yourself.” That distinction opened a new door. After graduating from Middlebury College, Bell joined the Bread and Puppet Theater troupe, touring throughout the United States and Europe.  He remembers one performance in Poland in particular. The piece was about the challenges of modern life in the communist country. During the performance, the audience rose from their seats, moved by the story. Bell had never seen anything like that before, and it helped him see the power of puppetry in connecting with audiences. Bell and his wife, Trudi Cohen, met while they were both members of the Bread and Puppet company, and they built a life around puppetry, eventually becoming founding members of a Brooklyn-based puppet company called Great Small Works. “We share this pleasure and faith in the power of puppetry to tell important stories, to change the world even,” she said. John Bell and Trudi Cohen perform a Living Newspaper toy theater show in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the early 2020s. Credit: Courtesy of John Bell After studying theater history at Columbia University and teaching puppetry at several schools including New York University, Emerson College and Rhode Island School of Design, Bell eventually found a home at UConn. He joined first as director of the Ballard Institute, named for the founder of UConn’s Puppet Arts Program, Frank Ballard, who started teaching puppetry to Connecticut students in the early 1960s.  Bell joined the faculty of UConn’s Dramatic Arts Program and began teaching classes in 2014. The following year, Bell teamed up with Bart Roccoburton, head of UConn’s Puppet Arts Program, to host the National Puppeteers of America Festival, which brought hundreds of puppeteers from 40 states and five continents to Storrs for performances. Bell continued to find ways to bring puppetry to campus. In 2022, Bread and Puppet Theater’s “The Persians” performed on UConn’s South Campus Lawn. More than 20 community volunteers performed alongside the company, giving students a chance to experience the company’s large-scale political puppetry firsthand.  “Anytime John is part of anything that we are doing, we all get richer for it. His energy, his creativity, his knowledge always play into anything that we do,” Roccoburton said. Bell has curated more than 30 puppet exhibitions at the museum, including “Living Objects: African American Puppetry” and “Somos Uno: Mexican and Mexican American Puppetry.”  In the classroom, he taught courses such as “History of World Puppetry,” introducing hundreds of students to the art form over the years.  Bell is also the author of several books and articles on puppetry, among them “American Puppet Modernism,” which won Iran’s Jalari Itari award and France’s Prix de la Recherche in 2011.  Many of Bell’s students have gone on to build careers of their own in puppetry.  Mel Carter, a recent MFA graduate in Puppet Arts at UConn, has taken her MFA project “B*tch Eat Dog” across the country and this month to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in Scotland, one of the world’s largest arts festivals.  Joe Therrien, a former graduate assistant of Bell’s, has gone on to work as a teaching artist and core member of Brooklyn-based BoxCutter Collective while producing his own puppet shows in New York City.  Sarah Nolen, another former student of Bell’s, became the third-ever resident artist at the Puppet Show Place in Brookline, Mass. For these students, Bell left a lasting impression. Carter described Bell as humble and generous with his knowledge. “John Bell kind of touches everyone that he meets just by showing that to be an intellect and to be respected, you don’t need to sit on a high horse and demand respect,” she said.  And while Bell spent plenty of time at the front of the classroom giving lectures, he also watched his students from the sidelines as they performed, offering notes and guidance.  Allison Free, a rising senior in the Puppet Arts Program, said, “He just teaches me new things all the time, and it’s like, ‘Wow.’ It’s such a wide world that you’re just constantly learning.” Therrien said that Bell and Cohen are such pillars of the puppetry community that their home in Cambridge, Mass., has become something of an “international puppet way station,” where performers from around the world can stay while passing through Boston.  Even while teaching, curating and writing about puppetry, Bell never stopped performing.  Bell takes part in UConn’s Puppet Slams, a showcase held each semester, where students and professional performers can put on new and experimental short works.  And throughout his time at UConn, Bell has continued performing with the Bread and Puppet Theater at its farm in Glover, Vt., during the summer. This summer, Bell performed in the “Upside Down World Circus,” a political spectacle that uses giant puppets, stilt dancers and a brass band to respond to the political turmoil of the present day.  As Bell put it, “Puppeteers love to perform.” Puppets in the exhibit Becoming Modern include recognizable characters like Mickey Mouse, alongside works from Yiddish puppet theaters in the early 1900s at the the Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry in Storrs on August 6, 2026. Credit: Julia Levine / CT Mirror Bringing life to the material world Bell sees puppetry as a fluid art form in the way it takes different shapes across cultures.  For example, the traditions of puppetry in Europe can look very different from those found in Native American, African and Asian cultures. But the foundational ideas are similar.  Puppetry also embodies something uncanny and mysterious, he said, in how it incorporates life and death. Humans are living beings who eventually return to the material world when they die, he explained. But puppets begin as part of that material world — wood, leather and paper — and are brought to life through humans’ movements.  Many of these big ideas permeate Bell’s final exhibition, “Becoming Modern: U.S. Puppetry in the 20th Century,” on display at the Ballard Institute through October. The exhibition traces five decades of American puppetry, featuring artists and objects that have shaped Bell’s own career. The collections explore themes such as immigration and feminism while showcasing the many forms puppetry can take, from marionettes and hand puppets to shadow theater.  For Bell, retirement from UConn doesn’t mean stepping away from puppetry.  “It’s really unusual. I mean, you’re giving up something you’ve done for a really long time,” Bell said. “What I want to do is to make more puppet shows and figure out ways to do that and other things — maybe write about puppetry and continue to be involved in puppetry in different ways and see what happens.” Next month, Bell and Cohen are headed to the Minneapolis Cranky Festival, where they will perform puppetry through scroll pictures. Bell also looks forward to working with his Bread and Puppet Theater colleagues on a project in Turkey about an environmental conference.  “I’ve told him he’s graduating,” Cohen said. “It’s not just ending but opening some doors.” John Bell performs a Dancing Bear act with the Bread and Puppet Theater’s Upside Down Circus in Brattleboro, Vt., in summer 2026. Credit: Photo Courtesy of Matthew Cohen ...read more read less