The wide red eyes of an albino animal head, fitted onto a lace-covered wire base, greet visitors entering Pandora Gastelum’s studio in the Marigny, where puppeteers have started assembling bits and bobs of their crafts ahead of New Orleans’ annual Giant Puppet Festival.
Her headquarters, the Mudlark Public Theatre, has been a center for New Orleans puppetry since it was established in 2009. Gastelum further fanned the spark of Crescent City puppetry when she started The New Orleans Giant Puppet Festival.
Now in its 12th year, the festival features local and traveling artists, jam-packed into a five-day lineup. Walk into Allways Lounge and you’ll find a psychedelic vampire fantasia, performed by Naughty Little No Good. Beanlandia will host family-friendly alphabet puppetry by Honey Goodenough. The New Marigny Theater will host Boxcutter Collective’s sci-fi musical theater. The list goes on, with over 50 shows at multiple venues across the city.
Gastelum heads the Mudlark Puppeteers and lives above the theater, combining studio, blackbox performance space and home.
Pandora Gastelum works on a puppet at the Mudlark Theater in New Orleans, Wednesday, March 11, 2026.
“Puppetry is a very honest form of storytelling, and that the puppets are a physical representation of the story itself,” Gastelum said. “The puppets are made to inhabit a world and communicate a message, and it’s very easy to accept a story from a puppet, because you understand that the puppet doesn’t have any ulterior motives. They have a uniquely persuasive nature, and they’re very pure in that way. … it’s a very accessible and even universal art form.”
The characters for her festival performance will star in “Cinderella and Charlie,” a performance written by Gastelum’s partner, Jack Norcross, described as a post-modern fable. The “Cinderella and Charlie” puppet heads are made of lightweight papier-mâché plastered over a sculpted clay base. When the papier-mâché dries, she is ready to begin the painting, creating intricate painted details. At the final stage, each puppet is coated in an acrylic gel.
Gastelum made her first puppet at age 15, and generally makes all of her own puppets.
“It’s an enormous amount of work,” she said. “But I think when you have a really strong vision, it’s better to just be honest, to say I’m gonna go ahead and do this part so that there’s no disagreement about how a thing should be.”
Each of the animal heads takes about 20 hours to complete, not including the time it takes for the papier-mâché to dry.
Gastelum said she was going into “build mode” following the wrap-up of her giant puppet workshop on March 10. She also juggled rehearsals of a Tennessee Williams play that ended March 29, and planned to have the puppets ready for show rehearsal on March 31.
“It’s a tight squeeze, but we got it,” she said.
Pandora Gastelum shows the camera a puppet at the Mudlark Theater in New Orleans, Wednesday, March 11, 2026. (Staff photo by Enan Chediak, The Times-Picayune)
New pieces require new characters, but sometimes puppets from previous works can be repurposed. No puppets are thrown away. After shows, Gastelum stores the characters in plastic bins labeled by performances.
For “Cinderella and Charlie,” she has made two marionettes, four table-top-scale rod puppets and four giant-suit puppets. An accompanying army of shadow puppets — just a little under 100, Gastelum estimates — are under production. In the past year alone, she has made 12 puppets and helped with the creation of 45 giant puppets through the theater’s “Dream It, Be It” Giant Puppet Workshop.
Her puppet-building workshops are geared toward helping other puppeteers shape their craft and launch their own performances. One of these students, Samille Ganges, will be performing at the festival for the first time.
Ganges is producing “Butter Woman,” a reimagining of an oral story told around southern Nigeria. As an environmentalist, she uses upcycled material such as cardboard, clay, scraps of clothing, chicken wire and tape.
She crafts after her full-time job, spending about 10-20 hours a week sculpting, using a clay base and papier-mâché to form the faces. Coming from a background in drama, Ganges describes the challenges of performing puppetry.
The New Orleans Giant Puppet Festival runs April 3-7.
“I think about moving with them and figuring out how to move with them and interact with them and somehow make them emote, even though their faces are not emoting,” Ganges said. “The way that you design their faces, and the way that they move and the clothes that they wear, kind of really help us ground them as like an archetype, like they will always be this through the story. This is who we’re looking for.”
In the other corner, Playdoh Kolo has commandeered several tables for their found-object puppetry, a production set around the Batture and meant as a reflection on New Orleans history and heritage.
The performance consists of a shotgun shell, foam, other pieces of reclaimed trash and broken piano bits. Kolo walks their “piano creatures,” made of piano hammers, across a table.
Playdoh Kolo demonstrates a puppet at the Mudlark Theater in New Orleans, Wednesday, March 11, 2026.
“The story itself isn’t a linear narrative,” Kolo said. “The show is wordless. It’s more like a meditation than like a traditional story. So I kind of invite people in the audience to gather around the table where this takes place, and walk around as they please, or sit down.”
Anthony Sellitto-Budney, who goes by the performance name Crazy Hard Stuff, has been part of the festival for the past three years. This year, their performance will feature the Rave Wizard, a gigantic foam puppet carved with a carpet razor, covered in UV paint and fluorescent paint. They describe their work as mixed media; other props for the production include a fried egg made out of a bicycle wheel and fabric.
They will act as the clown Crazy Hard Stuff, entering into a “Dance Dance Revolution” competition against giant puppets and monsters. Sellitto-Budney views the festival as a space where artists can make boundary-pushing “crazy and new” decisions.
“I feel like I have seen a lot of puppet shows, and I am always surprised when I come to the festival,” Sellitto-Budney said. “Some folks are just doing some crazy stuff, and their aesthetic is shining through in a very different way.”
New Orleans Giant Puppet Festival
WHEN: April 9-13
WHERE: The Mudlark Public Theatre, 1200 Port St., and various locations around the Marigny
TICKETS: $15-$25, and $150 for a weekend pass
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.nola.com ’
