“It’s been a long time since we’ve experienced craft, image, and emotion blended together like this.” – Helen Shaw, Time Out New York

Manual Cinema is a performance collective, design studio, and film/video production company founded in 2010 by Drew Dir, Sarah Fornace, Ben Kauffman, Julia Miller, and Kyle Vegter. Manual Cinema combines handmade shadow puppetry, cinematic techniques, and innovative sound and music to create immersive visual stories for stage and screen. Using vintage overhead projectors, multiple screens, puppets, actors, live feed cameras, multi-channel sound design, and a live music ensemble, Manual Cinema transforms the experience of attending the cinema and imbues it with liveness, ingenuity, and theatricality. Manual Cinema’s work has been featured at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (NYC), The Tehran International Puppet Festival (Iran), La Monnaie-De Munt (Brussels), The Kennedy Center (Washington, D.C.), The Kimmel Center (Philadelphia), the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and elsewhere around the world.

Sponsored by: ABC 27