The Academy of Puppetry and Allied Arts

Expand existing program

Bob Baker’s origin story begins with the first puppet show he saw at six-years old; yet the forces that shaped Bob Baker’s life-long dedication to puppetry did not stop with the curtain call. Rather, credit belongs to the adults, teachers, and mentors that gave Bob the resources to foster his curiosity and build a legacy that has entertained Angelenos for over half a century. The closure of our shows due to Covid-19 forced us to think about the impact we have on our audiences outside of the runtime of our shows. We want to play a deeper role in our community, pivoting our organizational focus from presentation to participation. Working with educators to develop curriculum around the various entry-points that puppetry has to offer, we also hope to break socio-economic obstacles to quality arts education, often expensive or exclusive to certain communities. We hope to become a long-lasting influence on students, just as those early adults were to the formation of Bob Baker’s calling.

From designing Disneyland’s storefronts to creating interactive children's museum exhibits as a new nonprofit, The Bob Baker Marionette Theater has played a multitude of roles. These experiences, along with our original shows, not only give us an oral tradition of artistic expertise and vital-resources for cultural safeguarding, but also highlight an ability to adapt to changing circumstances. We believe that this fluidity will be necessary in working with educators to find what is most needed for their classrooms. Already, our partnership with Zappos Kids has sponsored thousands of children from low-income and Title I schools, providing an inaugural theatrical experience to children that might have otherwise never received one. We recognize that each artistic experience is a valuable & rare use of funding, and for this reason we want the impact of seeing a BBMT show to last as long as possible, manifesting itself in the many creative paths that come from puppetry and the allied arts.

The broader impact of this work will be to instill in students an interdisciplinary understanding of soft and hard skills, offering hands-on technical knowledge, while also placing this training in a social context. We believe that sparking a child’s curiosity in STEM content goes hand-in-hand with the ability to teach empathy and explore social issues, tasks for which puppets, as externalized beings, are well equipped to do. In practicing this holistic pedagogy, we hope to meet the needs of schools with lower graduation rates, building long-term relationships with the students and educators that come through our program. By 2050, we hope to have gathered enough data to further defend the necessity of arts in STEM education.