HEAVN HERE • Puppet Design, Art Direction, and Concept Development

Emmy Award-winning shadow puppet theater company Manual Cinema brought me on as an artist lead to create a video short to accompany Jamila Woods’s HEAVN HERE. This show, held at the Harold Washington Cultural Center in November 2018, was Jamila’s final live performance of her HEAVN album, and featured prominent artists, dancers, singers, poets, and performers from around Chicago and the U.S. I collaborated closely with local artist, illustrator, and puppeteer Lizi Breit to develop the concept for the short, storyboard, build dozens of puppets, and direct the two-day film shoot. The final short was played behind Jamila during the first song of the evening, HEAVN.