Puppet Place is your hub for all things animated on stage and film in the UK. We are dedicated to sharing our passion for puppetry and animation with the wider public and supporting artists and professionals working with these artforms. Our building, on Bristol’s Harbourside, is home to a community of resident companies and artists producing brilliant work in puppetry, animation and the creative sector more widely. We support the greater puppetry and creative sector through residencies, networking and training.

For the public we run events, workshops and activities in Bristol and beyond, including the internationally recognised, Bristol Festival of Puppetry. Check What’s On to find out more.

History

Puppet Place was founded by Di Steeds and Jim Still in 1984. It offered resources and training in puppetry to artists in the South West and ran regular workshops in schools. In the late 1990s the organisation lost its funding and was forced to close.

In 2007, four Bristol based companies came together to reinvigorate Puppet Place: Stuff & Nonsense Theatre Company, Full Beam Visual Theatre, Green Ginger and Pickled Image. In 2008, we moved into one half of our current premises, Unit 18. In 2009 we ran the first ever Bristol Festival of Puppetry and decided to continue it as a biennial event. Since then, each festival has grown in ambition and scope.

In 2014, Puppet Place developed from a largely voluntary run organisation and we appointed our first Executive Producer – Rachel McNally and started to run activities and events outside of the festival, including workshops, a puppetry prototype and our first international presentation, Stuffed Puppet’s Punch & Judy in Afghanistan, in collaboration with Tobacco Factory Theatres.

In early 2015, Puppet Place secured the lease on Unit 18 and took over the whole building, with the support of our previous landlords, Bristol Old Vic. We are currently in a transitional phase between organisational models; working towards a ‘flat’ structure in which Resident Artists share greater responsibility for the day-to-day running of the building. We continually strive to develop our premises and our work to provide further support and development opportunities for the puppetry and animation communities in the UK and introduce more people to the wonders of all things animated!

Puppet Place would not exist without the support and goodwill of the artistic community in Bristol and we offer them our whole-hearted thanks.