Felice Amato

Felice Amato works at the intersection of the fields of visual arts, art education, and theater. She has a particular passion for puppetry, masks, and object performance, which integrate the body and the element of time into narrative and cross the boundaries between disciplines. Amato is an assistant professor of art education at Boston University in the College of Fine Arts. In addition to teaching and research, Amato approaches scholarship through practice, as an arts researcher. She has performed short works in a variety of venues, including the Ballard Institute at U-CONN and Open Eye Figure Theater in Minneapolis. She has received numerous awards for her artistic work including a Jerome Foundation grant and two Minnesota State Arts Board grants. She has published in Puppetry International and the Journal of Mother Studies and presented at a2ru (The Alliance for the Arts at Research Universities), USSEA (United States Society for Education through Art), NAEA (the National Art Educators Association), the CAA (College Arts Association), and Puppeteers of America. She currently serves on the Board of UNIMA-USA (Union Internationale de la Marionnette). Amato’s interest in puppets and masks and their connection to the female the body as well as her focus on using object performance to explore the abstract and the theoretical both developed during her doctoral work at UW-Madison where she began working at the intersection of creative investigation and scholarship through arts-based and embodied research methods. She was chosen as an emerging artist for the Eugene O’Neill Center’s National Puppetry Conference in 2018, where she created a puppet piece based on Simone de Beauvoir’s 1949 work, The Second Sex. Last year she convened a panel at the College Art Association on Masks in Contemporary Art, which laid the grounds for proposing a conference with that theme this year.