Chris Pirie – Trustee & Resident Artist
Chris is Artistic Director of Green Ginger. He has thirty years’ experience as a freelance designer and maker of puppetry solutions for screen and stage and is also a lecturer and researcher in puppetry for performance.

Jo Kelly – Trustee
Jo is an award winning architect specialising in bespoke design and creative reuse, and is also a lighting tech in a local theatre. Jo led a project with UWE students to envision how Puppet Place’s home at Unit 18 might look and function in the future.

Isabella Whately – Trustee
Bella Whately is a Fundraising Manager with 10 years of fundraising experience, managing campaigns and leading teams to raise income via a range of different streams including Trusts and Grants, Individual Giving, Community Fundraising, Membership, Raffles/Lotteries and Legacies.

Rhys Williamson – Trustee
Rhys is an experienced communications and marketing professional. Over the past decade, he has written, directed and produced magic shows at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and worked on a number of creative projects across immersive experiences, fringe theatre, film and television. Rhys is passionate about storytelling and the performing arts and is interested in the potential of puppetry across both of these.

Cariad Astles – Trustee
Cariad is a puppetry trainer, teacher, researcher, director and performer. She is puppetry tutor at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in London and also teaches at other universities in the UK and elsewhere, including the University of Exeter, where she specialises in puppetry and applied theatre, the University of Grenoble and the University of Stockholm. She is currently working on the international project The Herds in Stockholm, training young puppeteers to perform. She has led puppetry projects worldwide including in China, Australia, Spain, France, Germany, Poland and Chile. She is co-resident of the UNIMA Commission on Professional Training and Research and was formerly Vice President of UNIMA. She is co-editor of the Routledge publication ‘Women in Puppetry: Critical and Historical Investigations’ and has published widely on puppetry. 

Cat Rock – Trustee & Resident Artist
Cat Rock is an award winning puppeteer, film maker and performer who makes wonderfully weird puppetry pieces for the stage, film and beyond. Cat is a co-founder for the House of Funny Noise and Director of the Bristol 48-hr Film Challenge. Creating original pieces and working with other organisations Cat performs, builds and experiments with puppets of all shapes and sizes.

Dr Noreen Masud – Trustee
Noreen is a Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Bristol, and an AHRC/BBC New Generation Thinker. She is interested in ‘wooden’ or atypical modes of communication, especially involving immobile faces or surfaces, and this underpins her research into puppetry. She is a forever beginner puppeteer: always trying, seldom improving, always loving it.

Ian Wilkinson – Trustee
Ian advises institutional investors and developers across Logistics, Living and Regeneration including acquisitions, disposals, forward funding, forward commitment, asset management, ground rent, income strip investments, options and development agreements.

Ian qualified at Osborne Clarke in 1997 and has been a Partner since 2006. He has been a member of Osborne Clarke’s Partnership Council, holds chair positions on the Bristol Harbourside Forum and is a board member of Underfall Yard Trust.

Andrew Webb – Trustee
Andrew was the Finance & Operations Director at Bristol Cathedral where he provided strategic financial leadership across the organisation and was an active member of the Senior Management Group, and he effectively managed the Cathedral’s finances. He is a motivated professional, bringing extensive experience, knowledge and skills acquired from working in a wide range of businesses.