Marina ‘Heron’ Tsaplina is a Russian-born, NYC-based award-winning artist, writer and teacher whose work centers the intelligence of the body in environmental healing, medicine, and disability through puppetry, Butoh movement-meditation, ritual, and collective making.
She is known for her boundary-breaking artistic vision that forms new languages of performance. Her work “defines its own terms” (Duke Arts) and is “creating a new language of theater.” (Claudia Orenstein). Achille Mbembe, one of the world’s most profound critics of colonialism, described her work as “breathtaking, deeply playful and incisive.”
Her vision to connect the public to the intelligence of the soil brought her to Butoh. She merges Butoh and puppetry animation to “deepen conservation efforts by helping people connect to the unseen world.” (Larry McDermott, Algonquin Elder; Executive Director, Plenty Canada).
Tsaplina’s work has been presented and supported by Duke Arts, Carolina Performing Arts, Penn State University, Georgetown University, La MaMa, Dixon Place, Urban Soils Institute, The Poetry Foundation, Orion Magazine, and many others.
Marina’s medical training curriculum, Your Body is Medicine, brings embodied artistic practice into medical education to restore the intelligence of the body in the Western medical paradigm. She holds a Master’s in Bioethics and Medical Humanities and was a Kienle Scholar in the Medical Humanities at the Penn State College of Medicine (2016), co-founder of Reimagine Medicine at Duke University (2018-2020), and was an invited Artist-in-Residence at Henry Ford Health (2024-2026). She was awarded the 2024 Nancy Staub Award by UNIMA-USA and her work is also featured in the 2026 USA Today bestselling medical memoir by Dr. Rana Awdish.
Tsaplina is a conservatory-trained performing artist who trained with master teacher Kari Margolis for seven years, in addition to studying at the Ernst Busch School of Puppetry Performance in Berlin, Sandglass Puppet Theater, Pochinko Clown, and Vangeline Theater.
She is also a certified Developmental Trauma Somatic Therapy Coach.