The Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry is a public puppetry museum and research centre at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, holding one of the three largest puppet collections in the United States.
What is actually there
More than three thousand puppets from around the world — marionettes, glove puppets, rod puppets, shadow figures, body puppets and stage materials. The collection includes work by Bil Baird, Jim Henson, Marjorie Batchelder, Paul McPharlin and Rufus and Margo Rose, alongside hundreds of puppets designed and built by Frank Ballard himself.
The archive is the part builders overlook
The Kay Janney Library and Archives holds thousands of books, scripts, manuscripts, posters, clippings and photographs on puppet theatre worldwide, and it is open to visiting researchers by appointment. If you are trying to work out how something was built forty years ago, this is a place that can actually answer you.
It also holds the Puppeteers of America Audio-Visual Collection
, the largest media collection on puppetry in the country.
Why it exists
It began in 1987 as a committee of UConn alumni preserving the puppets Frank Ballard had designed and built for university productions. The collection grew, absorbed others, and was renamed the Ballard Institute in 1992. It moved to its current site in downtown Storrs in 2013 and is part of UConn’s School of Fine Arts.
It is not a storage facility
The Institute runs rotating exhibitions, touring shows, performances, workshops and artists’ forums, and hosted the National Puppetry Festival in 2015.
Why a builder should care
Photographs flatten construction. Standing in front of a puppet and seeing how a seam runs, how a jaw hinges and how a shape was actually achieved teaches things no tutorial can. This is one of the few places in America where that is possible at scale.