![marissa fenley](https://humanities-web.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/taps/prod/styles/square_image_large/s3/2020-03/Fenley2018thumb.jpg?itok=vMewoMzR)
Marissa’s current book project begins from a rather simple observation: puppets, with varying degrees of success, replicate people. As a predominantly anthropomorphic project, American puppetry in the 20th and 21st centuries borrows from various conceptions of what a person is in order to convincingly reproduce or renegotiate these dynamics through artificial, mechanized means. Marissa is also a puppeteer and her artistic work explores how puppetry assigns degrees of agency to objectified bodies and is especially interested in producing work that investigates power dynamics and their historical sedimentation.