Marina Tsaplina is a Russian-born disability artist, health humanities scholar, and disability advocate. Through puppetry animation, poetic scholarship and writing, she creates participatory spaces to help awaken the deep connections between land, body, mind, imagination and healing. She co-founded and was the Lead Artist of the Reimagine Medicine program at Duke University which was the first program in the country to have robust embodied artistic practice as a central component in medical training. She was a Kienle Scholar in the Medical Humanities at the Penn State College of Medicine, and is an associate of Duke's Health Humanities Lab.

Between 2014 - 2020, she developed and performed three solo disability arts puppetry shows including:
1) The Invisible Elephant Project (2016 - 2019), a meditative solo puppetry performance that explored the capacity for loss when living with illness, how suppressed historic memory shapes the body, and played with ambiguity, emptiness and the able-bodied gaze.
2) Illness Revelations and the Bodies of History/Medicine/Us (2019), which explored the eugenics impulse in our culture, and in ourselves. This was developed during a residency at Duke University and had a soft-premiere at the Disability in the Disciplines conference.

She is currently in the early-phase development of a new ambitious interactive public performance called, "the dream of the disappearance of all disease" which will culminate in a 10-day self-generating performance cycle in collaboration with the broader disability arts community.

*please note that my artist website (www.bodypoems.care) is under development, so I included an alternate link.