Visiting Artist Colloquium: Felice Amato

Felice Amato is an assistant professor at Boston University, where her interdisciplinary practice and teaching focus on puppets and masks. She fell in love with puppets, so to speak, while completing her MFA and subsequent PhD in the art department at UW-Madison in 2017. As part of the larger category of material performance, puppets have become the unifying core of her work and have opened pathways to a broad yet coherent interdisciplinary practice. As an arts-based researcher, Amato creates a variety of work, exploring in-depth the phenomena of performing objects. She is engaged in scholarly writing and research and uses the genre for pedagogical innovations and to cultivate community. Collaboration and leadership within the field are important aspects of her life and research; she developed a yearlong global conference on the theme of women and masks in 2021-22. Amato is currently writing on female embodiment and the representation of trauma through material performance. Having worked extensively with an Italian mask family, she is engaged in using the mask as a tool of research. She is a founding member of an international feminist mask collective, that has, as one of the principal goals, the creation of a mask lending library that would expand access, involvement, and insights.