Marina Tsaplina

Marina Tsaplina is a Russian-born social practice puppetry artist, writer, teacher, advocate, and independent scholar in disability/health humanities with a focus on anti-colonial and anti-ableist thought, research, and practice. Through puppetry animation and poetic thought, she creates participatory spaces to help awaken the deep connections between land, bodyminds, imagination, and healing. She co-founded Reimagine Medicine and was a visiting artist at Duke University (2017-2020), was a Kienle Scholar in the Medical Humanities at the Penn State College of Medicine (2016-2018) , and recently organized and facilitated Indigeneity and Disability: Futures of Personhood, Care and Consent as part of the 2021 Cleveland Humanities Festival. Following a recent commission by Orion Magazine, “Dream Puppet, Wild Forest, Disabled Futures” that was co-created with nearly 100 people from the disability and environmental communities, her focus is on fostering connections between disabled embodied knowledges and old-growth forests, protecting an ancient forest in the Yaak Valley, Montana from extractive logging, and securing partners for a long term initiative of temporary puppetry installations in ancient forests across the country. You may contact her at [email protected].

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