More About
Mirek & Leah
Mirek Trejtnar
Mirek is a graduate of the renowned MFA program for puppetry design at the Prague Theatre Academy. Expert woodcarver, his work can be found in London's Victoria & Albert Museum. He has designed puppets for numerous companies including the Forman Brothers Theatre. He started his puppet career in the 1980s at the Jiři Trnka Stop Motion Studio in Prague, working on internationally acclaimed films (including Jiri Barta's The Pied Piper). In 1990 he started the KID company producing toys, puppets, furniture and sculpture. His award-winning designs skirt the boundry between whimsical and surreal and have been exhibited at festivals and galleries around the world. He has taught at the Prague Theatre Academy, St. Martin's College (UK), New York University (Tisch Singapore), Aukland University (NZ), Macao and Hong Kong, UNIMA festivals and other workshops around the world. In 2014 he made the animated documentary film "What to Tell the Kids" about the fall of Communism which was aired at the the 25th anniversary celebration of the Velvet Revolution.
In 2024, he published the book Puppet Technology, Part 1: All About String and Wire Marionettes.
You can see some his work here.
Leah Gaffen
Leah is an American who has lived in the Czech Republic since 1992.
She coordinates the cultural aspect of the workshops, making sure that our students see the best Czech puppet performances and exhibitions while they are here.
In 2006 she co-founded Class Acts, a nonprofit organization for children that runs cultural projects and started Story Theatre, an English-language children's theatre group that won the top prize at the Czech National Children's Theatre in 2019. She also started the Let's Write Creative Writing contest and runs a story-telling program at the local library. She studied English at Yale College where she was a member of the Yale Children's Theatre and completed an MA in drama education at the Prague Theatre Academy (DAMU). She also coordinates cultural immersion programs and a theatre club at New York University Prague.
