Felice Amato

Faculty Associate
Assistant Professor, School of Visual Arts
famato@bu.edu

Education

BA, University of Minnesota; MFA, University of Wisconsin-Madison; PhD, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Biography

An artist, scholar, and educator, Felice Amato has a particular passion for puppetry, masks, and object performance, which brings the body and the element of time into the visual arts and serves to cross boundaries between arts disciplines.

Amato taught K-12 art and Spanish (and art in Spanish) in the Minnesota public schools for almost 20 years before returning to school to pursue an MFA and subsequent PhD in art from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. For the latter, she focused primarily on women’s 20th century engagement with puppets and dolls as a context for her own work. Amato has performed in a variety of venues including the Ballard Institute at U-CONN and Open Eye Figure Theater in Minneapolis.

She has received numerous awards for her artistic work including a Jerome Foundation Grant and two Minnesota State Arts Board Grants. She has published in Puppetry International and the Journal of Mother Studies and presented at the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts, the National Art Educators Association, and Puppeteers of America. She was chosen as an emerging artist for the Eugene O’Neill Center’s National Puppetry Conference in 2018, where she created a piece based on Simone de Beauvoir’s 1949 work, The Second Sex.

As a result, using puppets and objects to explore the abstract and theoretical has become a focus for her research and teaching at Boston University, where she is an assistant professor of art education. Amato collaborated on a Cross-College challenge course with Anna Panszczyk of the Writing Center called “Thinking through Puppets and Performing Objects,” in which non-arts majors develop work that explores how puppets (in the broadest sense) can help students think through and communicate abstract and theoretical concepts. As part of the class, the undergraduate participants are coaching a group of doctoral students to create 3-minute puppet “slam” pieces to be performed in Spring of 2019. Amato was named the Provost’s Faculty Arts Fellow for 2019 after developing and facilitating a residency with puppeteer Tarish Pipkins that crossed BU schools and colleges and engaged the broader community. She is currently working with the Arts/Lab@MedCampus to develop a puppetry project for pediatrics.