Nina Vogel is a multi-award-winning Brazilian multidisciplinary artist, performer, and researcher. Her work has been presented in more than 20 countries across five continents. From the intimacy of one-on-one miniature forms to performing as a soloist with symphony orchestras in grand concert halls, her creative practice brings together her work as a director, puppeteer, actor, classical singer, and costume designer within the field of visual and contemporary puppet theatre.

 

Selected for the RARE Performances programme of the Prague Quadrennial 2023, Vogel has been invited to participate in artistic residencies, workshops, talks, and international artistic exchanges in countries including Japan, Taiwan, Senegal, Canada, the United States, Norway, and Sweden, among others. She has also been invited as a guest artist by institutions including Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo, DePaul University in Chicago, Stockholm University, Aalto University, and Uniarts Helsinki, where she has led workshops and talks on her artistic practice and research.

 

At the core of this research is Playing Costumes, an original artistic methodology developed by Vogel, through which costume is conceived not simply as something worn by a character, but as a performative structure and active agent of creation. Her research investigates the relationships between body, costume, object, space, and transformation, bringing together her interdisciplinary background in puppetry, music, visual arts, and design.

 

Vogel has also served as a cultural Ambassador for Brazil, representing the country at major international conferences in the fields of puppetry and performing arts. She was elected Independent Councillor at the UNIMA International 2021 World Congress and invited to join the UNIMA Professional Training Commission. In 2022, she represented Brazil at the AVIAMA and UNIMA International World Congresses in South Korea.

 

Vogel’s trajectory has received international recognition through significant awards, scholarships, and artistic grants. In 2020, she received the Outstanding Work Award at the Chuncheon International Puppet Film Festival in South Korea for the adaptation of ConCordis – the Heart into a stop-motion short film. In 2021, she was awarded two scholarships by the O’Neill Theater Center in the United States to participate in its National Puppetry Conference: the Lisa Simon Scholarship, recognizing a woman director in the puppet arts, and the Founders Award Scholarship. In 2023, she received the AVIAMA Mobility Award for the research and development of WE-ME, a pioneering exploration of puppetry entirely in apnea, in which Vogel performs underwater alongside sculptures and animated forms. The project extends her research in animated forms into a new territory of artistic innovation and is being developed toward the realization of a short film. The award was endorsed by representatives of five AVIAMA International member cities: Plzeň (Czech Republic), Minami Awaji (Japan), the borough of Outremont (Québec, Canada), Tolosa (Spain), and Tournefeuille (France).

 

In 2017, Vogel received two excellence scholarships from the Government of Québec and the École Supérieure des Arts of the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQÀM) to pursue a DESS (Diplôme d’études supérieures spécialisées) in Contemporary Puppetry in Canada. This advanced specialization built upon an interdisciplinary formation that began in music: she studied piano at the Carlos Gomes Institute in Carazinho, Rio Grande do Sul, from 1985 to 1994, and pursued classical vocal training between 1997 and 2012. She subsequently earned a Bachelor’s degree in Theatre from the Célia Helena School of Arts in São Paulo in 2012. In 2015, her participation in the PLAN B Artistic Residency in Santiago, Chile, was sponsored by GPA – Grupo Pão de Açúcar. During the two-month residency, she worked under the guidance of Russian artist Natacha Belova and Chilean puppeteer Tita Iacobelli, creating and performing with a human-scale inhabitable hybrid puppet inspired by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, from which she developed an original solo performance and theatrical work.

 

Through her art, Vogel has experienced a vast spectrum of human experiences across the globe. From the maternity ward of a health clinic in a village in Senegal to the mountaintops of Japan; from diving into the deep waters of Okinawa to obtain her freediving certification, to moving through megacities such as Tokyo and into fancy living rooms in the suburbs of Chicago. Learning and sharing love and humanity, because for Nina, sharing is as important as traveling with her art. It is through the encounter between cultures that the possibility of imagining new worlds, and therefore creating new realities, comes to life.