Theodora Skipitares is a visual artist and theater director who has created shows incorporating puppets, spectacle, live music, film, video, and mythology.  She worked as a solo performer in the beginning of her career moving into collaborations with artists and students.  From 1977 her works include: MASK PERFORMANCE (1977), THE VENUS CAFÉ (1979), THE MOTHER AND THE MAID (1980), SKYSAVER (1981), MICROPOLIS: SEVEN PORTRAITS AND A LANDSCAPE (first play with puppets) (1982), THE AGE OF INVENTION (1985), DEFENDERS OF THE CODE: A MUSICAL HISTORY OF GENETICS (1989), EMPIRES AND APPETITES: A HISTORY OF FOOD AND FAMINE (1989), and THE RADIANT CITY (Robert Moses: 1991).  Once she became Resident Artist at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club (1992) her works included: UNDERGROUND (1992), UNDER THE KNIFE (1994), BODY OF CRIME (1996), THE ENCHANTED PIG (1997), A HARLOT’S PROGRESS (chamber opera: 1998), INDIA (1999), OPTIC FEVER (2001), THE RISE AND FALL OF TIMUR THE LAME (2002), HELEN QUEEN OF SPARTA (2003), ODYSSEY:THE HOMECOMING (2004), IPHIGENIA (2005), THE EXILES (2007), MEDEA (2008), THE TRAVELING PLAYERS PRESENT THE WOMEN OF TROY (2009), LYSISTRATA (2011), PROMETHEUS WITHIN (2012), THE CHAIRS (2014), SIX CHARACTERS : A FAMILY ALBUM (2016), THERE’S BLOOD AT THE WEDDING: SONGS FOR LORCA (2018), THE TRANSFIGURATION OF BENJAMIN BANNEKER (2020), GRAND PANORAMA (2022), MICROPOLIS: VIEWS FROM THE MINIATURE CITY (2023), THE FOUR LIVES (2024), WALKING (2026).  

Theodora Skipitares was born in San Francisco to Greek parents.  As a teenager, she started using her body as a platform for artistic expression festooning it with outlandish imaginative coverings made from fabrics, shells, glass, twigs, fresh fish, whatever was at hand.  Abetted by her sister, they would drive to a public area where Skipitares would run out costumed, perform a ‘movement,’ then run back into the car.  As she said, “I made stuff I needed to show people and it needed to be on my body.”  Being shy, she would obscure her face.  Arriving in New York City in 1969, she found a world of like-minded artists.  Training as a sculpture and theater designer, she designed many shows for her teacher Richard Schechner’s The Performance Group and Omar Shaplia’s Section Ten.  She started creating autobiographical solo performance pieces.  Feeling alone on stage she created different size dolls of herself to join her.  She incorporated puppets for the first time in 1982 in MICROPOLIS: SEVEN PORTRAITS AND A LANDSCAPE.  Now, leaving the realm of autobiography, she was free to direct and create pieces exploring American politics, invention, and medicine, using the ‘purity’ of the puppets to illuminate social and political issues.  She re-examined her Greek heritage and its myths in relation to current politics.  In response to the Iraq war, she created TRILOGY: (HELEN QUEEN OF SPARTA, ODYSSEY: THE HOMECOMING, IPHIGENIA).  In 1997 she went with Ellen Stewart to Vietnam where they developed an opera together for the National Theater and the Vietnamese National Water Puppet Theater.  This was to be the first of many trips to Asia working with groups creating collaborative pieces.  As a Fulbright Fellow in 1999 and 2000, she worked with puppeteers and choreographers in India to create two new collaborative works and again in both India and Cambodia in 2002.  Skipitares also worked on the scripts of modern playwrights Eugene Ionesco in THE CHAIRS, and Luigi Pirandello in SIX CHARACTERS (A FAMILY ALBUM) putting her particular perception and stamp on the re-imagining of these classics.  Her acute sense of the power of scale learned by using puppets of different sizes solved many dramaturgical challenges for her.  Her awards include (1999) American Theatre Wing Henry Hewes Design Award, and (2005) New York Innovative Theatre Award. She received a UNIMA Citation for Excellence in Puppetry, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rockefeller Fellowship, and a McKnight Playwriting Fellowship.  DEFENDERS OF THE LOST CODE was named one of the best plays of 1997 by The New York Times.   A HARLOT’S PROGRESSwas named by Burns Mantle as one of the 10 BEST PLAYS of 1997 as well as winning The American Theater Wing Design Award. Her visual work has been exhibited widely in the United States, Europe, and South America.