Open Eye Theatre (OET) is a multi-disciplinary, multi-cultural arts hub that serves artists and audiences through adventurous and imaginative arts programming. OET produces and presents profound experiences that open eyes, hearts, and minds through unforgettable performances in theater, puppetry, live music, dance, and storytelling. Puppet Lab is an artist incubator committed to radical, genre-expanding, boundary-pushing puppet work led by Co-Artistic Directors Oanh Vu and Sofia Padilla.

Open Eye Theatre was co-founded in 2000 by Susan Haas and Michael Sommers, and is currently led by Producing Artistic Director Joel Sass. OET’s space—a 110-year-old historical storefront in Minneapolis—is now home to an intimate theater that seats up to 90, with adjacent shops, studios, and gardens that provide a creative haven for artists. Both OET and Puppet Lab originated as artist-driven, artist-supporting endeavors, and the guiding philosophy is one of expansive creativity. Celebrating its 12th year in 2024, Puppet Lab was developed expressly to provide early career artists an avenue to explore the possibilities of puppetry without traditional parameters. While the program offers proven development techniques to guide exploration, the resulting techniques, aesthetics, narrative models, or forms is left intentionally broad. Puppet Lab does not exist to promulgate a singular mode of puppetry, but to serve as an experimental space to test new forms and hyphenated ways of storytelling.

Jerome Foundation supports Open Eye Theatre’s Puppet Lab program. Led by Co-Artistic Directors Oanh Vu and Sofia Padilla, Puppet Lab is an intensive 6-month developmental laboratory for four early career Minnesota-based generative puppetry and mask artists to advance their artistic development while creating new work in a supportive workshop environment. Each artist is awarded a stipend, and the cohort meets twice per month to review work and provide each other with feedback. Additionally, artists may choose a mentor who will provide up to 40 hours of contact time. The Puppet Lab culminates with each artist creating an original short, presented in a two-week festival of public performances at Open Eye Theatre and supported with professional marketing, lights, sound, and documentation.