Patricia O’Donovan is an independent artist, performer, scholar, researcher, teacher, and writer working at the intersection of visual theatre, drawing, papercutting, and science. Born in Argentina, she lives and works in Jerusalem, Israel.

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She holds a PhD in Biology from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, is a graduate of the School for Visual Theatre in Jerusalem, and holds a Postgraduate Certificate in Theater Arts from the University of California, Santa Cruz. She has also trained with painters, puppeteers, and theatre directors including Noe Nojechowiz and Cristina Santander, both Argentine artists; Eric Bass of Sandglass Theater; the Augustin and Amoros Shadow Theatre company; Agnès Limbos of La Gare Centrale, dedicated to Object Theatre; Drak Theatre; and Kathy Foley and Undang Sumarna in wayang golek.

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She has worked professionally in Puppet Theatre for over forty years as a creator, designer, director, and performer, creating dozens of works, many of them co-productions with the Train Theater Jerusalem (Ha Karon). Following the success of Der Lichtstrahl, a puppet work about Louis Braille’s life and invention (Nekudat Or in Hebrew), at the Augenblick Mal! Festival in Berlin in 1997, the work toured in Germany and France, where, under the title Louis, l’Enfant de la Nuit, it has been performed more than 3,000 times. The work, which remains part of the Train Theater’s repertoire, has been performed in theatres and at national and international festivals in sixteen countries: France, Germany, Austria, Spain, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Italy, Portugal, Ireland, Switzerland, Mexico, Brazil, Canada, India, and Israel. O’Donovan has performed the work in five languages: Spanish, Hebrew, English, French, and German.

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Over two decades, she created, wrote, and directed Science Theatre designed to communicate scientific subjects related to exhibitions at the Bloomfield Science Museum in Jerusalem. She also was the artistic director of the Children and Family Concert Series of the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra, under the musical direction of Rashi Levaot, using drama to introduce children to music. Her diverse body of work in puppet and visual theatre includes two solo works based on writings by Heinrich von Kleist: The Earthquake in Chile (2016) and On the Theater of the Marionettes (2017).

She has taught for more than two decades at leading academic and cultural institutions in Jerusalem, including the School for Visual Theatre, the Train Theater, the Hebrew University Theatre Department, the David Yellin, Efrata  and Emuna Academic Colleges, and the Dvora Tsafrir School of Puppetry, as well as through private workshops and individual tutoring.

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She currently continues to write, teach, and direct as well as perform her recent work combining co-speech gestures, storytelling, and papercuts based on Franz Kafka’s text The Vulture (Der Geier). She is also developing new work based on a second text by Kafka and one by Jorge Luis Borges.

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For Full CV click here