Dani Keil

Dani Keil

Dani Keil spent six years as an urban high school English and theatre teacher before returning to her first love--theatre. She is now a graduate theatre studies student at Illinois State University. In the summer of 2008 she studied giant puppetry construction and procession in the Alps of Italy under Alex Kahn and Sophia Michahelles, the founders of Processional Arts Workshop. Upon returning to the States, Bradley University hired Dani as a guest artist to design and construct puppets for their original adaptation of The Oresteia. Drawing upon her summer experience, she modified processional puppets for the stage and created characters ranging from three feet to fourteen feet high. Dani’s other puppet performances include the design and construction of the Hitler puppet for Schweyk in the Second World War presented as part of a colleague’s class project, a shadow puppet show at Normal, Illinois’ Children’s Museum annual Halloween Boo Bash, and “Teardrop,” an imagery-based adult piece set to original music. Currently, Dani is writing her thesis, “Puppet Efficacy in a Multi-Cultural Procession: The Morinesio Puppet Workshop.” Her future goal is to study at the Cotsen Center for Puppetry and the Arts at California Institute of the Arts.