Marina ‘heron’ Tsaplina is an eco-puppetry artist and disability culture activist who forms participatory poetic enchantments through puppetry performance, site-specific installations and, upon occasion, writing. Whether on the stage, in a classroom or in an ancient forest, she invites collective community participation into her artistic process and vision.

Her Russian upbringing informs her sense of animacy of the living world. The Slavic poetry, animation and fairytales that cradled her shape her perception of how the more-than-human earth speaks, feels, and dreams, even as these languages remain unknowable and immeasurable. Animacy becomes political refusal of racial-colonial hierarchies of worth, intelligence and human domination that have rendered the speaking earth mute.

She is a conservatory trained performing artist under master teacher Kari Margolis, the Ernst Busch School of Puppetry Performance in Berlin, Germany, Sandglass Puppet Theater and Pochinko Clown.

Her work has been presented and supported by Duke Arts, Carolina Performing Arts, Penn State University, Georgetown University, La MaMa, Dixon Place, Puffin Foundation, amongst many others.

Dream Puppet (2021), an installation in an ancient endangered forest in the Yaak Valley, Montana was commissioned by Orion Magazine for their special issue on disability and environmental justice and helped galvanize momentum for the forests’ protection while centering disability wisdom.

She is on the eco-puppetry committee of the National Capital Puppetry Guild, a group “dedicated to exploring and sharing the concepts and practices of eco-puppetry.”

From 2022-23, she was a Visiting Artist at Duke University for her latest work, Soils and Spirit, a participatory performance and installation in ancient, endangered and disappeared forests that will premiere in 2026.

Between 2013 - 2020, she brought her puppetry work into the heart of medicine and developed a 40-hour medical education training program, Embodiment Disability and Puppetry that was called “ahead of where medical education currently is” by leading doctor and educator, Dr. Rana Awdish.

Marina has lived with Type 1 Diabetes since she was two years old. Her disabled ancestors did not survive prior to 1921, the year that insulin was discovered. Access to insulin and healthcare is a human right and profit-driven medicine is a crime. Marina is thankful for every day that she gets to walk, dream and breathe upon and with this earth.