Puppeteers Sarah Kriegler and Jacob Williams Named 2025 Frank Van Straten Fellows

Award-winning directors, puppeteers, writers and co-artistic directors Sarah Kriegler and Jacob Williams have been awarded the 2025 Frank Van Straten Fellowship through their company Lemony S Puppet Theatre. Their aim is to uncover the hidden stories of the puppets and puppetry objects from the Australian Performing Arts Collection and develop a new puppetry work for family audiences called THINGS HAVE A LIFE OF THEIR OWN.

“We are excited to look at the puppets from the Australian Performing Arts Collection up close and uncover their stories. Each one of these puppets holds a story of not only who made and operated it, but the story for which it was originally created to perform. We’re excited to delve into these stories and see if we can construct a contemporary work based on the history of the collection,” said Kriegler.

Arts Centre Melbourne Research Coordinator Claudia Funder said Williams and Kriegler's work would help shine a light on the craft of puppetry and Australia’s experts in the field.

“Sarah and Jacob will introduce new people to puppet history, and it is an opportunity to focus on a family audience too. Despite these puppets being more well known, we didn’t collect them for their fame! As a group, the puppets have not had much focus or research, so it’s quite a different sort of Fellowship to those we’ve had so far. It will be creating and learning from physical objects rather than archived documents,” said Funder.

The Fellowship will begin by engaging with the Collection to uncover the hidden puppet stories it holds asking key questions like: What is the context? What style of puppet are they? What are the stories behind the puppet? What was the play or TV show the puppet originated from? What do these stories say to a contemporary audience?

“There is a mixture of puppetry styles for theatre and television with some dating back to the early 1900s. This is an extraordinarily exciting collection for a puppet company such as Lemony S Puppet Theatre; what sits in the Collection has underpinned our own practise as we are nothing without those artists who carved the way for us to do what we do,” said Kriegler.

Kriegler and Williams are thrilled to take on this Fellowship and be in the company of such iconic and historic puppets. They acknowledge that the Frank Van Straten Fellowship allows them the time and resources to explore, dream, think and research.

“All Fellowships are deeply important as they offer two things that can be extremely hard to find in the arts – time and money – a critical component to the betterment of our puppetry practice,” said Kriegler.
 

Puppetry is one of the oldest forms of storytelling and entertainment dating back over 3,000 years spanning cultures and continents. From Punch and Judy (UK) to Pinocchio (Italy) and Kermit the Frog (USA), puppetry continues to evolve through digital mediums, film, and live performance, keeping its ancient spirit alive in new forms of storytelling.
 

Lemony S Puppet Theatre is a small, Melbourne-based award-winning independent theatre company with a big reputation. They make work for adult and family audiences. With puppet theatre at the core of their work, Lemony S Puppet Theatre use puppetry to disarm the audience and go deep to the core of what it is to be human – to attach meaning to symbols and signs, to empathise and access the innate human ability to “suspend one’s disbelief”. They are committed to extending the form of puppetry beyond what is expected and constantly re-invent the practice, develop new styles and performance techniques.
 

Over the past five years, the Frank Van Straten Fellowship has seen incredible outcomes from esteemed creatives and researchers highlighting stories from the diverse and rich history of performing arts in Australia.  Past recipients include Ali McGregor (2024) exploring the life and career of actress Nellie Stewart, Dr Amaara Raheem with C.O.R.R.U.P.T.E.D II (2023), Angela Bailey (2022) with The GLAD Project, Cathy Pryor (2021) with Rare Flowers and Golden Butterflies: Stories of women and magic from the Australian Performing Arts Collection and inaugural Fellow Dr Kate Rice (2020) with Performing the Past.
 

The Fellowship honours the memory of the late Frank Van Straten AM who played a pivotal role in the establishment of the Australian Performing Arts Collection in the late 1970s and was the founding director and first archivist of what was then the Performing Arts Museum in the 1980s. He was a celebrated performing arts historian, published author, consultant, radio presenter, and throughout his career, graciously served on many boards, committees and panels across the arts and cultural sector. The Frank Van Straten Fellowship is made possible by the generous contribution of The Van Straten and Turley Foundation.

Arts Centre Melbourne has been the proud custodian of the Australian Performing Arts Collection through five decades of collecting, and it now holds over 850,000 items. With such a diverse and vast Collection, there are literally thousands of stories waiting to be told. The aim is to not just share these objects in contemporary ways, but to unlock the nation’s rich and diverse performing arts history through to today, and to inspire and engage whole new generations of audiences.

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