Trudi Cohen and John Bell are theater makers, puppeteers, festival organizers, musicians, and founding members of Great Small Works, a visual theater collective created in 1995 in New York City, whose six members share roots in Bread and Puppet Theater. Its members are now dispersed, with outposts in Brooklyn, Montreal, and Cambridge, MA.  Bell and Cohen anchor the New England base in Massachusetts.

John Bell is the Director of the Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry and an Associate Professor of Dramatic Arts at the University of Connecticut.  He was a member of the Bread and Puppet Theater company from 1976 to 1986; and received his doctoral degree in theater history from Columbia University in 1993.  He is a respected scholar in the field of puppet theater, whose writing includes American Puppet Modernism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); and Strings, Hands, Shadows: A Modern Puppet History (Detroit Institute of Arts, 2000).  He edited Puppets, Masks, and Performing Objects (MIT Press, 2001), and co-edited with Dassia Posner and Claudia Orenstein The Routledge Guide to Puppetry and Material Performance (2014).  He is an editor of Puppetry International, the publication of the U.S. branch of the Union Internationale de la Marionnette; an organizer of the Honk! Festival of Activist Street Bands in Somerville, Massachusetts; and a trombonist in the Second Line Social Aid and Pleasure Society Brass Band.

Trudi Cohen was a full-time member of Bread and Puppet Theater's resident company in Vermont for 10 years, and has performed as puppeteer in productions directed by Peter Schumann, Janie Geiser, Amy Trompetter and David Neumann.  She was Director of Great Small Works' 2008, 2010 and 2013 International Toy Theater Festivals and has curated dozens of the company’s Spaghetti Dinner events.  She plays bass drum with the Second Line Social Aid and Pleasure Society Brass Band, and is a founder and organizer of the HONK! Festival in Somerville, MA. She is secretary of the Board of UNIMA-USA,  and on the boards of Bread and Puppet Theater, and Parts & Crafts, a maker space for young people in Somerville, MA.

Bell and Cohen offer original Toy Theater productions for both family and adult audiences. Original plays based on the daily news are more geared to adults; the retelling of folk tales and fables are designed for audiences of all ages, including very young children.

Great Small Works’ mission is to draw on folk, puppet, avant-garde and popular theater traditions to address contemporary issues. We value the beauty and potency of puppet theater, the urgency of speaking out about the news of the day, the power of creating theater with diverse groups of citizens and of bringing art to public spaces. We work for intelligent and engaged content in our work. We teach in public schools and at universities, and mentor young artists who are learning how to integrate critical thought into their creative work. Great Small Works performs in theaters, schools, parks, libraries, museums, prisons, street corners, and other public spaces, producing work on many scales, from gigantic outdoor spectacles with scores of volunteer participants, to miniature shows in living rooms. The individual members of the Great Small Works collective are each engaged in writing, scholarship, mentorship, and community organizing.

We stumbled upon Toy Theater (also called Paper Theater or Model Theater) 20 years ago, and were inspired by its accessibility, scale and beauty.  Since then, we have produced ten international Toy Theater Festivals, and have traveled around the world discovering practitioners of this arcane form of table-top storytelling. Through both workshops and performances, we have introduced Toy Theater to hundreds of artists and students. We believe that everyone has a story to tell, and with Toy Theater they can do it themselves.

We are willing to negotiate our fees, depending on the resources of each presenter.