Marissa Fenley

marissa fenley
Harper-Schmidt Fellow Collegiate Assistant Professor in TAPS
Gates-Blake 432
Teaching at UChicago since 2022
Education: PhD, University of Chicago, 2022

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.